Em 2016 vi Tindersticks pela primeira vez no Tivoli. Mesmo sendo um projecto icónico da música internacional, ainda assim me surpreendi com a intensidade demonstrada em palco. A banda não tem estado parada e Staples compôs recentemente para o filme “High Life”. Dessa composição resultou “Willow” em que é o próprio protagonista do filme, Robert Pattinson, quem dá voz ao tema. Ainda não vi o filme, mas depois deste tema e deste vídeo fiquei certamente com vontade de o ver. Para além da composição magistral e misteriosa, o que também me surpreendeu foi a voz de Robert Pattinson (entendam que a minha geração conheceu-o com o filme Twilight) com o seu tom maduro e envolvente. “Willow” é assim um tema que facilmente se ouve de forma repetida.

Em relação a High Life, Stuart S. Staples declara:

Most of the music for High Life was made before the filming. The conversation with Claire started maybe as far back as 2012. There were many ideas I wanted to explore and I appreciated the foresight of Claire and the producers in offering me support and encouragement to do this. As well as work with usual collaborators Dan McKinna, Neil Fraser and Earl Harvin, this afforded me purely experimental recording sessions with David Coulter, Thomas Bloch, David Okumu, Julian Siegel, Seb Rochford and the BBC singers. Several long sketches / pieces were created from these sessions that the eventual score was formed from or informed by.

I approached High Life with the simple idea of creating a sort of random music, existing in a void –like the constellations themselves –a framework that was always hidden from the musician and that they had only minimal or no information to play or react to as we recorded. The first piece completed was ‘The Yellow light’ for the early Claire Denis / Olafur Eliasson collaborative short film ‘Contact’ (2014). For this, each instrument / part was played into silence with arbitrary start points creating random movements and relationships when brought together. This theme / way of working runs through the entire making of the score for High life. Musicians generally worked ‘in the darkness’.

For ‘the void’ itself a series of hums and drones were created in the studio -various instruments played, or feeding back, or with their notes Sello taped down, to make the studio space resonate in different keys. These stereo recordings were alive, working and changing within themselves –this approach was informed by my experiences creating the sound installation ‘Ypres’ at the In Flanders Fields WW1 museum in Belgium and the adventure of making this 12th century hall vibrate and resonate with its evolving orchestral score.

And then there was ‘Willow’. a seed of a song shared by myself and Dan Mckinna that eventually grew to be the conclusion of the High life with Robert Pattinson, the lead actor, singing the song in character to his daughter Willow, a theme that runs through the film.

For the flashback sequences on earth I spent many consecutive nights recording in the rain waiting for the right intensity of heavy drops falling from the guttering of my studio onto the carefully positioned paella pans below.

I felt the score should be intimate and hypnotic. Music made of hands and breath-acoustic instruments, electric guitars, fingertips.

Seja como for, temos equipa vencedora. Ora vejam o vídeo. 

Willow, where are you hiding now?

Willow, where are you hiding now?

In the dappled light, deep in the trees

The spiders and the centipedes

Crawl across your hands, across your knees

Willow, do you walk across the sand?

Willow, do the waves crash and fall?

And their fingers tickle at your feet

And pull a little as they retreat

Do you feel the rushing forward

Though you’re standing still?

Willow, are we rushing forward, are we standing still?

Willow, are we rushing forward, are we standing still?

Willow, do you crouch among the rooftops

Listening to the city wheezing?

And your dreams they stretch beyond the clouds

‘Past the moon, into the stars

Do you feel the rushing forward

Though you’re standing still?

Willow, are we rushing forward, are we standing still?

Willow, does this love hold a destination?

Willow, do you feel the wind run through your hair?

Willow, do you feel the sun upon your back?

A lovers hand?

A breath

An abyss

Stuart A. Staples 2017