Archive (2020)

Archive was a project that came to me totally out of the blue.  One day as I was picking up my daughter from school I was approached by a friend of the director Gavin Rothery, who mentioned he had a script and asked if I would like to read it.  I did just that the same evening, and was blown away.

My favourite projects are the ones where the story leads me into new musical areas, and exploring the world of ARCHIVE, a movie where technology and humanity meet in a near future Kyoto, proved to be a brilliant challenge.  I’d been looking for the opportunity to create a largely electronic score for the first time in a long while and the story of George Almore, his secretive AI project and the mysterious Archive let me do just that, burying myself in a darkened studio filled with strange boxes towards the end of 2019.  The music follows the developments in George’s work as it progresses, and as he gets closer to achieving his hopes and dreams it was a lot fo fun to blur the lines between the electronic and organic, trying to find the sound of his creations.  From the moment I read writer / director Gavin Rothery’s ambitious script I wanted to be involved, and throughout the process he proved to be a great collaborator and true supporter of music.   The score combines a lot of synth work, alongside vocoders and fretless e-bowed guitar playing, alongside the great cello playing of my regular collaborator Will Schofield, (who I first met on Gravity.).