The Weeping Demon

Music Video

About the Work

My electroacoustic soundtrack for The Weeping Demon is a composite of three hauntologically interconnected soundscapes, each of which meditates on and reimagines a different group of publicly available instrumental samples. This ultimately creates a highly processed orchestra of revenant performers, ensnared within seemingly infinite loops and aiding the nightmarish narrative of the film. Dreams’ conceptual resonance with hauntology and the absence of non-diegetic audio make Kurosawa’s vignettes a perfect choice to (re)score. The Weeping Demon tells a post-apocalyptic story of pain and (un)death through the eponymous zombie, a pharmakon. The conventional linear flow of time in the first soundscape has been overturned to a point where strings sound like aerophones, with their timbre warped by the radiation of the nuclear wasteland. By haunting the conversation between demon and man with overblown woodwinds and echoes of bird recordings, I wanted to make a profound connection with the element of air – implied both by the wind-borne dispersal of a dandelion’s seed and by the breath sounds that propel the dialogue, at once denoting vitality and signifying decay. As the demons weep in anguish towards the end of the film, the brass instruments create a microtonal mass of spatialized torment masquerading as a swarm of flies, which feast on corpses at the lake of blood.

Performance History