By Travis Johnson
First released in 1971, George Lucas’s THX 1138 sees a young(ish) Robert Duvall railing against a bleak, oppressive future where the population is kept in place by a strict regimen of mind-controlling drugs and a ruthless robot police force. It’s a good match for the music of Asian Dub Foundation, who for years have combined experimental, genre-hopping techno sounds with an astute, cynical political awareness. And so it came to pass that the two came together, with ADF debuting their live soundtrack to the film at the Brooklyn Festival in 2014.
This was not their first such undertaking, as guitar slinger, Steve Chandra “Chandrasonic” Savale, explains. “Back in 2000 we did a live sound to La Haine, the French film,” he says, referring to Mathieu Kassovitz’s searing 1995 crime drama. “We actually did a tour of it in Australia back in 2004. So we’re kind of old hands at it. Then we did another one, The Battle of Algiers, which we were asked to do but we at first refused, because we didn’t want to go up against an Ennio Morricone soundtrack. Then we were persuaded to do it and it turned out to be a joy.”
But still the question remains, why THX 1138, a film which already has a pretty cracking soundtrack by the jazz great Lalo Schifrin?
“Because there is something great about working with a fantastic soundtrack,” Savale says. “It’s actually a great thing to be able to play along to it. But I think the reason we actually did it is, you can’t just do a live soundtrack to any old film, you know? There has to be quite a lot of criteria for us specifically and generally to work technically. If you’ve got a soundtrack that is very full and underlies a lot of the film you wouldn’t be able to do it, unless you sort of took the original soundtrack out, which is a) difficult to do but getting easier, and b) you could make the case, well, you’ve taken away what might be a key element of the film.”
Schifrin’s original score, which Savale takes pains to point out is “pretty fabulous”, fulfilled at least the first part of the remit, with it’s experimental futuristic soundscape leaving plenty of room for ADF to work. “It’s quite a minimalistic and discordant one, and there’s a lot of space in the film. There’s not actually much dialogue, but there is a lot of noise, a lot of interesting digital blips, and a lot of voices that are fed through distortions and radio transmitters.”
He also admits that the subject matter certainly appealed. “I’m a huge fan, and in fact a lot of the band are huge fans of, dystopian literature and science fiction generally, and that’s one of the most radical, out there dystopias that was attempted in that era of cinema.”
The actual process of composition saw the band fusing new work with earlier tracks. “The first thing you do is nail down the tempo of the scene, literally the beats per minute of the scene, and you run on instinct on that – it’s really obvious when something works and something doesn’t. It’s a great feeling when it really does work. And the interesting thing is some stuff that you’ve written beforehand, before you even knew that you were doing this, ends up working.”
As an example, he cites ‘Cyberabad’, from the 2003 Asian Dub Foundation album, Enemy of the Enemy, a song about “… a technologically glittering future Indian city, and of course that fitted beautifully into the more mechanical robot assembly scenes in THX. So you can actually – as a lot of composers do – use previously composed stuff, to see if it works. It’s a joy, actually, especially when you see how well it works.”
George Lucas’ THX 1138 Live Scored by Asian Dub Foundation takes place at the Sydney Opera House on Saturday, November 5. For tickets and info, head to the Graphic website.
