Waxwork Records has made a name for themselves with gorgeous vinyl releases of brilliant cult film soundtracks. Their newest exciting addition to the roster is a perfectly trippy vinyl pressing of Colin Stetson’s eerie OST for Richard Stanley’s uniquely strange and beautiful H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, Color Out of Space.
Waxwork Records
For those who haven’t read the H.P. Lovecraft’s classic story Color Out of Space, check out this blurb from Kyle Anderson’s brilliant review. “The Gardner family have recently moved into an old farmhouse in the middle of the woods, an hour away from any kind of civilization…Two things shake up their quiet, if fractious life. The first is the appearance of a hydrologist (Elliot Knight) who is checking on the area’s suspicious aquifer and water table. He and Lavinia make eyes at each other, but that’s not that hard for the Gardners to handle. What they can’t quite deal with is the second shake-up: a glowing meteorite that crashes into their front lawn. It affects each of them differently, with Nathan complaining of a hideous odor while Jack and Lavinia hear high-pitched noises. The meteorite begins to seep into the Earth, causing colorful plant and animal life to grow. It gets inside the water, warping and shaping everyone in increasingly macabre and grotesque ways.”
You can learn more about composer Colin Stetson and his process in this excerpt from the official press release. “A highly-coveted collaborator to Bon Iver, Arcade Fire, Tom Waits, LCD Soundsystem, The National and more, Stetson brings with him an expansive body of work that includes both genre-defying, avant-jazz records as well as critically-acclaimed original scores for major film, television and game titles (Ari Aster’s Hereditary). Of the soundtrack, Stetson says: ‘The question posed initially when conceiving of this score was what exactly is the sonic representation of a cosmic alien color that does not exist in this terrestrial reality? I began trying to answer that by layering the sounds of coral reefs, processing that cacophony and finding the order revealed through harmonic generation of these hyperdensities, and then continued to chase that same concept of ‘transfiguring the natural’ down every path and application I could see. Turns out it’s somewhere between magenta and hot pink :)'”
The film itself is a magenta-hued masterpiece of horror and in an interview with our very own Kyle Anderson, Color Out of Space’s director Richard Stanley explained the challenges of bringing such a strange story to life. “The challenge of Color Out of Space is to try to hint at something which is beyond the spectrum of human perception,” Stanley explained. “Which I think comes with the title, so one is automatically flung into a situation of trying to create onscreen, both with the light and sound, a sense that the audience is being pushed to their very limits. And I think since Lovecraft’s time, we understand that process a lot better than we might have done say in 1926.”
You can pre-order your very own copy of the surreal soundtrack from Waxwork Records right here! And if you want more Color Out of Space goodness check out our exclusive clip right here.