The Dark Horror of a Fictional Soundtrack – Maujud

 

Adit Bujbunen Al Buse - Maujud OST

Have you ever downloaded music from countries whose language you don’t understand? If you’re a regular on AudioStylites then be prepared for this to happen to you often. And pleasantly.

Here’s a gem from Indonesian graphic designer and sound designer Adit Bujbunen Al Buse. The EP is a 9-track, 27-minute soundtrack to a fictional horror film entitled Maujud. In it, he juxtaposes rock and swing jazz with industrial white noise, spitting sounds, musique concrete, distorted guitar riffs, spoken word, mechanical reverberations and even snippets of bossa nova guitar. On several tracks he collaborates with 4 other artists elsewhere in the world.

The overall effect, rather than being a disunified mess, is actually a united body of downtempo and sound art that would be perfect for a horror movie. Or simply a sleepless night of fevered dreams.

Track by Track

Track 3 “Gothesque and the Pond of Thousand Sad Faces” is a lazy downtempo track mixing female spoken word samples with a creepy drum track and a simple piano melody. Nightmare sequence? Poetry while under a trance? Theme music for serial killers? All of the above.

Track 6 is nothing but a male vocal chant over a drone and effects.

Track 9, “Eulogi Arsenikum,” is composed by Cholil and remixed by Adit Bujbunen Al Buse. The plucked guitar motif moves forward on a downtempo drum pattern laced with audio samples from news and TV programs.

Track 5 “Unfinished Business” is my favorite with its swing jazz feel and excellent bass guitar solo (probably by collaborator and director Danif Pradana).

Links
Download the entire EP on a single zip file. [38 MB]

Release page on Internet Archive.

Adit Bujbunen Al Buse on MySpace.

Netlabel YesNo on Internet Archive.

Joe Frawley’s mystery in “Ritual Research”

Joe Frawley – Ritual Research [ca195]

Mystery is sublime. It won’t hit you in the face but will rather sneak up on you while working at the cubicle and make you exclaim in surprise at the depth of the universe gaping at you from out of your headphones. Joe Frawley’s “Ritual Research” is such a release. The composer and musician makes an audio quilt from his piano, various vocal and music samples, repeating pizzicato string motifs, and lots of effects (primarily reverb and delay). The tracks are both ambient and textural sound art. Even in its abstraction, there is some form of melody. Even in its lack of direction, there is a point that the artist is giving us.

Taken in its entirety, Ritual Research is a unified release that must be listened to as one unit, because it is made up of the same elements and adds up to only one message anyway: that there are worlds beyond your reach, often attainable only through art. This is one research output that has definitely produced noteworthy results.

6 MP3s encoded at 320 kbps 44.1 kHz stereo.

Download details:
Download all files in one zip. (53 MB)
Download page on netlabel Clinical Archives.

Joe Frawley’s bio on his Artist Page.