Stuart A. Staples - Music for High Life (A Film by Claire Denis)

Soundtracks without a visual reference point can make for uncomfortable listening. Some because you can’t conjure an accurate sound picture, and others because there’s a strong visceral aspect to the music which brings images to mind, sometimes quite disturbing ones. Without a map of the territory that the movie provides, there’s a strange and unsettling lack of resolution.

Listening to Stuart A Staples new soundtrack for the filmmaker, Claire Denis’s High Life, his eighth, is such an experience. ‘System Report’, for instance, is a piece of music that sounds like it might be intended to be literally a health check for the movie’s storyline, a space mission where death row prisoners are ‘recycled’ so as to serve a scientific cause, to find new sources of energy in the outer galaxies. This is an impression of course, as I haven’t seen the film, but the sibylline wonders of the music evoke a sense that this is an excursion to the unknown. Which of course it is.

Those looking for vocals should know that with the exception of the restrained monologue and space balladry of ‘Willow’, these are mostly electronic compositions with a wretched heart. There are vague allusions to terrestrial life, like the sounds of a Vietnamese light festival on ‘River Flashback’, the distant screeches of industrial braking on ‘Bad Genes’, or the playful though edgy facsimile of a child’s keyboard toy on ‘Grow Baby Grow’. For the most part though, things never stay in synchronicity for long, jumping between minimalism and peaceful melancholy, and abrupt punctuations of noise, no more troubling than on the ominously titled ‘Rape of Boyse’ where percussion and saxophone combine to especially deleterious effect before trailing off no doubt after the malevolent deed has finished.

On the final track ‘Black Hole’ the electronic piano sounds like Deodata false starting over and over again on Also Sprach Zarathustra.

There is however no free or even wondrous ride through space for these unfortunate convicts.