Bedroom Community releases new music from one of the label’s founding members, Nico Muhly — his score for the Japanese film Gift Of Fire. The release sees Nico team up with Nadia Sirota, a long-time collaborator. Mixed and mastered by Valgeir Sigurdsson at Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavik, this is the first release to bring so many of the original circle of label collaborators together in a long while.
The score also receives a CD release for the Japanese retail market, to go alongside the cinematic release of the film. We will have an extremely limited amount available on our bandcamp.
‘When Hiroshi Kurosaki asked me to write the score for his extraordinary film Gift of Fire , he made it clear that he was looking for something more than a soundtrack. He was drawn to concert music, longer than a typical film cue, and music with an emotional intensity commensurate with the difficult and provocative themes the movie explores. I immediately called one of my oldest collaborators, the violist Nadia Sirota, and decided to build the score as a suite of chamber music centered on Nadia, me, and percussionist Justin Peters at the heart of the sound. Rather than assigning an instrument to each of the three main characters in the movie, I wrote music which weaves their stories together, sometimes gently and sometimes violently. My longtime collaborator Fritz Myers recorded the instruments in New York very closely, so the grain of the instrument and imperfections in sound are themselves part of the content of the music. These pieces are supported by and sometimes antagonized by electronic sounds with which I’ve been working since my earliest collaborations with Valgeir Sigurðsson, who mixed and mastered this album’ - Nico Muhly