Litmus / Glass Love - Litmus / Glass Love (Original Soundtrack) - VINYL LP

Vinyl LP pressing. As part Anthology Recordings' Surf Archive series, we celebrate the soundtracks to Andrew Kidman's classic 1996 film Litmus alongside his 2006 follow up Glass Love. Litmus, Andrew Kidman's first avant-garde surf film, served as a soulful reaction to the pop-punk progression that dominated the InchalternativeInch mainstream. With the film's visceral and cerebral moodiness, folksy soundtrack, and meditative spirit, critics swooned over surf misfits like Wayne Lynch, Derek Hynd, Tom Curren, and Joel Fitzgerald. Despite the acclaim, the film was not much of a commercial success at the time. The aura of Litmus' soundtrack, however, has found it's cultish corner in the surf world.

The result of Stephin Meritt's prolific songwriting. 69 love songs offered as threee volumes or a Limited Edition 3-CD Box Set. After making records for his other bands the past few years (The 6th, Future Bible Heroes, and the Gothic Arches), Merrit gathered friends and bandmates to complete some of his most ambitious and diverse compositions to date.

In Peter Strickland's Flux Gourmet, a dysfunctional group of performance artists undertake a month-long residency at an institute devoted to culinary disciplines. Food is interrogated for it's sonic potential as the group mic-up, amplify, distort and transform what they cook in front of an audience. The noise that the characters in the film itself make is driven by food blenders, overflowing cauldrons of gurgling soup and sizzling frying pans (courtesy of The Sonic Catering Band), yet the music that soundtracks the culinary capers is engorged with aching melodies and wordless, airy vocals. Contributors include Cavern Of Anti-Matter, Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost of A Hawk And A Hacksaw and Trost's band, Roj (formerly of Broadcast), and Nurse With Wound. Flux Gourmet is presented in a rich 2xLP package with an ornate, colorful design and Strickland's detailed liner notes. Image, color, light and sound are integrated and heightened to delirious levels of hyperreality, much like Strickland's past works, Berberian Sound Studio and In Fabric. Flux Gourmet very much alludes to his past as a member of The Sonic Catering Band, which he founded back in 1996. The band split on several occasions and got back together to create new pieces for the soundtrack, concocting strange sonic morsels and treating recipes as if they were scores. The lines between what is on the screen and what is on the soundtrack are blurred, with the band (mostly) using the exact same equipment (which they loaned to the production) and recipes as in the film. However, for all the conceptual rigour on display, the music on the Flux Gourmet is ultimately in pursuit of catharsis, as one character concedes. The power of music and / or noise to purge and cleanse it's makers (and hopefully, listeners) of their ills and woes.