David speaks at the Big Sound Conference at 4pm Thursday and 1pm Friday, both at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, and plays as Black Lung at Mutant Disko on Saturday at the Jubilee Hotel.
Australian Electronic music pioneer David Thrussell has been one of the guiding lights of the underground music scene for many years now. Prolific in his work, he has released numerous albums under a number of guises. Black Lung, Snog and Soma are all pseudonym, as well as working under his real name also. Roughly speaking Black Lung is the nasty industrial side, Snog is a more rock metal fusion and Soma is an excursion into slower otherworldly soundscapes. All his work has a very distinct feel to it, which has set David apart from many other artists and rewarded him with a devoted legion of fans.
His most recent work is the soundtrack for top new Australian film The Hard Word. A bit of a soundtrack buff (he owns about 300 of the 500 or so Ennio Morricone albums out there), he was rather excited at the prospect of creating sound for images, as he explained recently.
“This is my second feature film score, my first was for a short film last year called Angst. Very different to the Hard Word, it’s a far more electronic score. The Hard Word is much more in the classic film score vein, which I’m a big fan of and have a vast collection of 50’s and 60’s film scores and I listen to them a lot. So I’m really into it, it’s great fun.”
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“I started work (on the Hard Word) in November last year, and I had a meeting with the producer, and they showed me a rough cut of the film. I really liked parts of it, it’s a comic film in a lot of ways, but with a dark gritty edge to it. It features dysfunctional relationships, corrupt cops and shady deals, which is all great fun to watch at the movies. It does it in a distinctly Australian way, it’s not trying to be a Tarantino, Lock Stock or anything like that. It’s quite a unique beast. I watched the film and came away with this 70’s exploitation vibe going on, which is quite a compliment from me, I really dig that style of music. This is good, I thought, we can really go to town here and do some classic style film score in that vein.”
“I watched it and then put it away for a while, because I didn’t want to be a slave to the visuals. I wanted to write actual pieces of music which could stand on their own. It needed to be connected, but it also had to be able to stand on it’s own two feet as a solid piece of music. Serious tracks, that were able to be listened to as a whole song. And when that was done we got a little sneaky and edited them to the film.”
So is the soundtrack album snippets, or whole tracks?
“That’s what’s featured in the movie, with some of them edited together to make a bit more sense outside the context of the film. We put a far bit of work into the soundtrack album, so it stands as a work of music by itself and is not just an accessory to the film.”
“That’s how the whole process worked best for me. We were trying to write about certain characters in the film, certain scenes, emotions, actions etc. Not always about the visuals, though there certainly is parts of the film where you can’t separate the visuals from the music, like the chase scene. The music for that was completely written about that scene. But the core to these basic elements of the music was written not watching the film, and in some ways it’s a fairly complicated process. And it worked out well, as in the end the directors loved it.”
David is coming back to Brisbane this weekend, to speak at the Big Sound Qmusic lecture program on Thursday and Friday, as well as playing as Black Lung at the Jubilee on Saturday night.
“I’m going to be speaking about music, and the future of the music industry in general. It’s a very interesting little topic. The music industry really creates it’s own little prophecy and legends. This whole Internet piracy thing about at the moment, it’s really funny. Why can they cry about it when they created it in the first place. How can you cry about it? Hahaha suck shit I say. For years they’ve been denying people access to the music that they wanted, you’ve been not paying artists, you’ve been ripping people off and now your getting ripped off back. Again I laugh, and say suck shit to the music industry. Now people are ripping you off, and that’s pretty much my attitude.”
“I’m often their at these presentations with a whole lot of lawyers and record company reps, maintaining that they support the artists and then I come in and say I’m the artist, you’ve never supported me before, your full of shit. In the music industry it is the exception to the rule when the musicians actually get paid. At all. A lot of musicians just don’t get paid at all. And that’s the way it works and that’s how that industry makes so much money. It extorts people, and a lot of people in the industry will admit to it behind closed doors, but never to the public. We couldn’t have that.”
