News Soundtrack: Xeno & Oaklander

Xeno & Oaklander are currently touring their latest album ‘Sets & Lights’ in Europe. As such, we asked the band to tell us a little bit about their other favourite film ingredient, music. Here the duo give us a guide to their top eight soundtracks of all time.

Michael Garrison - Runaway
A new age synth anthem with wonderfully anaemic drum machine.

Theme to ‘la nuit des traquees’ directed by Jean Rollin
Haunted female vocal ballad lala-ing to scenes of damsels in sheer robes wandering around alienated modern architecture, railroad tracks, aqueducts and vacant roads.

John Costello - Halloween Suite
A masterful reworking of John Carpenter’s Halloween, released on a k7 entitled ‘Half Life’. The cassette is focused on this one theme.

Les Joyaux de la Princesse - La Retardee
A track by French band Les Joyaux de la Princesse from the album ‘Exposition Internationale’. Haunted piano and extracts from French speeches, with ambient crackle and hiss.

‘Wo Bist Du’ as taken from A Face Of Another
A song in Japanese surrealist film Face Of Another directed by Teshi Gahara, in which a man has his face surgically replaced by the face of another after an unfortunate industrial accident. The scene is set in a German beer hall in Tokyo, called The Munich in the 1960s, where fashionable Japanese youths and international punters drink German beer and listen to a stoic Japanese chanteuse who sings a sad love song. The nationality displacement and the surprising allusion to Japan’s questionable past through this German song illustrate well the main character’s alienation and paranoia. The ‘face’ in this case is maybe the visualisation of Post-war Japanese malaise, and this song embodies this lingering spectre.

Enzo Kreft’s - The Dark
A minimal electronics tracks centered on a bassline and a DR 55 drum machine.

Trisomie 21 - At This Time Of Writing.
This instrumental on the album ‘Plays The Pictures’ is a very short and elegant collage of lone piano notes and whispery sounds.

Mihaly Vig - Lassú Tánc
A last dance sequence from the film Damnation directed by hungarian film maker Béla Tarr. A melancholic yet hopeful waltz in which sadness alternates with promise.

Xeno & Oaklander’s new album ‘Sets & Lights’ is out now via Wierd Records.