HÄXAN | TRS101
This soundtrack to the cult 1926 silent Swedish film, HÄXAN, is from a live recording at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival in 2010. It’s an appropriately moody and mysterious blend of real instrumentation (piano, violin, organ, glockenspiel, musical saw) and electronic treatments. Perfectly suited to this dark and twisted film, it will transport you to the magic and madness of the Medieval witch hunts.
Matti Bye – Piano and live electronics
Laura Naukkarinen (Lau Nau) – Voice and electronics
Lotta Johansson – Violin, electric violin and musical saw
Kristian Holmgren – Pumporgan
As usual this release comes in two distinct physical forms.
The 52 over-the-top limited edition versions come in well worn and distressed 80 year old Russian film cans, all with the original Cyrillic labelling and hand markings on them. The fronts are embellished with hand typed, cursive titles. The back has a hi-res printed image from the film itself. Inside the lid is a mirrored surface layered with silhouetted and circular hi-res prints of stills from the film revealing a fiery red surface underneath. Filling the box are circles cut from original, double sided, 150 year old hand written Catholic mass sheet music, alongside a hand printed, burnt, stamped and distressed credits insert, and a bloodied “malleus maleficarum”, or “hammer of witches”, in the form of modified vintage parts from a grand piano. A small clockmakers glass vial contains a blend of witchy herbs and tiny clock parts. The CD is nestled within, in a hand stamped windowed envelope with symbolic stampings on it.
There is also a dramatic, 4 panel digipak CD version in an edition of 100 copies.
The release will ship starting mid April 2022.
Matti Bye Ensemble
The Matti Bye Ensemble is an orchestra that plays music for silent movie performances, both precomposed scores and improvised music, on traditional instruments as well as modern—using prerecorded tapes, sound effects, rare instruments (like the saw or the mellotron)—to be able to create both melody and atmosphere to match the shifting moods of the screen performance.
The ensemble’s music—described by film critic Leonard Maltin as suiting the film “to a T”—has captivated audiences around the world, at cinemas, film festivals, cinematheques, museums, universities, film archives—from San Francisco and New York, and Paris to Dublin, Sodankylä and Tromsö.
They have performed at events as diverse as the Silent Film Festival in San Francisco, the Bergman Festival on Fårö, in the Baltic Ocean, at the Cinemarctic FF at Svalbard in the middle of the Polar Sea, at the Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, Italy, and at the To Save and Project festival at the MoMa in New York City.
Equally at home with the classics of the Swedish Golden Age of Cinema—such as The Phantom Carriage, Terje Vigen, Häxan, and Saga of Gösta Berling—and the classics of the international silent cinema—notably and recently Pandora’s Box, Greed, Metropolis, and Nosferatu—the Matti Bye Ensemble will stop at nothing to explore the endless possibilities of silent film accompaniment.
