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CD
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IMPREC 424CD
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"The crystal in men's heads / Blackened and fell to pieces. / The valleys went out. / The moorlands broke loose" --from "Heptonstall Old Church" by Ted Hughes. So begins Catch Me Daddy (2014), the award-winning feature film directed by Daniel Wolfe and written by Wolfe and his brother Matthew. The film's score consists of beautiful and bleak wind-ravaged music from Matthew Watson (aka Matthew Wolfe) and Daniel Thomas Freeman (whose 2011 debut album The Beauty of Doubting Yourself Norman Records described as "a profoundly moving piece of music... highly recommended"). Set in the desperate and unrelenting West Yorkshire moors, the film follows Laila, a British Pakistani girl, and her Scottish drifter boyfriend, Aaron, in their attempts to escape Laila's violently protective family. The film was screened as part of the Directors' Fortnight section of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival; star Sameena Jabeen Ahmed was named Best British Newcomer at the 2014 London Film Festival; and Ahmed was named Most Promising Newcomer at the 2014 British Independent Film Awards, where she was also nominated for Best Actress, the film was nominated for Best Achievement in Production, cinematographer Robbie Ryan was nominated for Best Technical Achievement, and the Wolfe brothers were nominated for The Douglas Hickox Award. Taking inspiration from such classics as Popul Vuh's score to Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Carmine and Francis Ford Coppala's Apocalypse Now (1979) soundtrack, and the opening moments of High Plains Drifter (1973), combined with the influence of Swans, Tim Hecker, and English Tudor-period choral music, Watson and Wolfe's score uses a deliberately limited instrumental palette of piano, percussion, and oscillators, twisted, gnarled, and ghosted beyond recognition to realize the sound of the biting moorland wind as it hammers against metal doors and rusted corrugated roofs and sings in lonely high tension wires and as distant choirs howl into the swirling darkness. The album is completed by a further seven unused themes selected and re-worked from the five hours of music written for the film. "Monkey Puzzle" and "Burning Fields I" narrate the original beauty and innocence of Laila and Aaron's dream, whereas "Gorse Wind" is forever lost in the moorland blackness. The oscillators and ghosts of "Under the Sodium Lights" and "Doubt" lead into the monumental distortion slabs and requiem of "Codeine Fuzz" before, finally, "Heath Land Siren" issues its rusted animal warning across the rain-sodden hills.
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