Cellist, composer and electronic music producer, Oliver Coates’ score for Aftersun, directed by Charlotte Wells and starring Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio. Pressed on light blue coloured vinyl and housed in a deluxe spined sleeve with double-sided printed insert and download card, the single-LP record release is coming this summer! A limited advance pre-order is available now for US customers via the Lakeshore Records webshop. Pre-order the cream vinyl variant via Invada Records for UK and Rest of the World customers. Details below.
“Composer Oliver Coates weaves his way in and out of the film’s emotional labyrinth” – The Guardian
“Oliver Coates’ brilliant score helps create that dreamy feeling of sound washing over you.” – The Quietus
“Music by Oliver Coates is astutely judged, restrained in its emotion” – Screen Daily
““Coates grasps the elusion in their relationship, and opts for unobstructive production that lilts about the movie’s edges instead of pounding their way into the frame.” – The Playlist
“Oliver Coates, an experimental composer and cellist with a growing resume of film soundtracks, is responsible for its piercing score” – The Fader
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Retail: US $29.98 (Blue) / £22.99 (Cream)
Pre-order Now: [Invada Records][Lakeshore Webshop]
The score, lighter and more delicate than Oliver Coates’ previously released music, functions as shadows or half-glimpses, a glowing form of ambient music which adds emotional colour to the cinematography.
Aftersun features ‘One Without’, the much talked about piece of music used in the final scene and credits – the one that audiences have been known to sit in silence through the credits for. ‘One Without’ was made away from the film after the composer’s first meeting with Charlotte Wells, the director. On it, the strings are reversed and sped up a little,
Each harmony has the next chord bleeding into it because of the reversed tails. The string vibrato is slightly unreal because the playback is faster and Coates explains that the “whole score is derived from the music within this final piece.”
The film is a poetic meditation and gradual emotional arc towards the presence of absence, of another story not revealed. It is the light of the camera work, the physical gait of the actors and the music which come together in a climatic resolution.
Coates’ score stands for memory within the film, a growing awareness that the film might be a memory trawl to try and make sense of trauma. The score makes the film feel like it is starting to become self-aware, like a film within a film.
Over time the score develops and helps the viewer move beyond the naturalistic and the diegetic. It is made of simple elements, old synths, reversed and slowed down strings. These, the composer explains “gradually reveal the sluggishness in Calum’s (Paul Mescal) demeanour, suggesting something hanging over him.”
A24 presents Academy Award-nominated and BAFTA-winning film, Aftersun, available now on Digital!
I’m so excited for this! I love Oliver Coates’ work and this score will be perfect for a summer movie!