Nick Carlisle ARPchives LIVE!

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"'Häxan - A Soundtrack', the first solo album from Nick Carlisle (Peepholes / Bamboo / Katy and Nick / Lean Logic) is released midnight 25.11.22. The album contains highlights of a 1hr 45min score Nick was commissioned to write for the 100th anniversary edition of Häxan (dir. Benjamin Christensen) by QFT Belfast, part of the UK-Wide BFI In Dreams Are Monsters season of horror films. Nick is set to perform the complete score at a live screening of Häxan at Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast on the 24th November, tickets on sale from https://queensfilmtheatre.com.

Nick wrote, performed & produced the album mainly on an array of old analogue synths and a Mellotron. Sarah Rosamond (Ghostlore of Britain) guests on the album, playing harp and adding vocals to 'The Scourge'. 'Maria The Weaver' was co-written with Katy Cotterell ( of Nick’s project "Katy And Nick").

Nick: 'The film is an essay on the history of witchcraft and is set mostly in 15th Century Northern Europe so the music (very!) loosely reflects that. I bought a Sami drum and some bells, and I multitracked myself playing some out of tune flute. However the last chapter of the film is set in the contemporaneous 1920s where Christensen compares how women are treated, for better or worse, for ‘hysteria’ via psychoanalysis, when 500 years before they would have been accused of and tortured for being a witch. The last two tracks on the album, “The Sleepwalker” & "The Thieving Daughter” therefore are set apart as they belong to that more ‘present’ section of the film, and they’re piano based as opposed to vaguely medieval sounding. Anyway there is no real comfort from the present as even now 100 yrs after the 1920s we’re as knee deep in idiotic conspiracies as ever.'"