Thursday 24 January 2013

Bomber goes techno ....


Len Deighton's 1971 war thriller Bomber is emerging as one of the reguarly discussed 'unfilmed books'. This blog covered the news that there is a legitimate effort to put into production a film of the book, although this trail has gone rather cold. In addition, various web wanderings have turned up treatments of the book by individuals who are inspired by the film and want to interpret it creatively.

One such is Simon Heartfield. He has written an album of ambient/techno music inspired by the film, "Schrage Musik"is the result - it is the name given to the weapon used by German night fighters to attack RAF bombers, and is featured in the book. Simon takes up the story on his own blog:
"The album has a bit of a back story. The first piece of music I wrote called Schrage Musik; it was the opening track on his Venom and Eternity album in 2010. It was inspired by the 1994 BBC Radio production of the legendary Len Deighton's novel Bomber published in 1970, which told the story in real-time of an RAF Lancaster bomber crew and the inhabitants of the fictional German village of Altgarten, which is accidentally mistaken for the real target.
Shortly after it was released I was contacted by the author of the Len Deighton Companion, Edward Milward-Oliver who was writing a piece about the novel as it was being considered for the Lost Man Booker prize.
More intriguing than this was the news that finance was being sought for a film version of Bomber and Edward kindly passed on my details and my track to the producers with the hope that I might possibly be involved in some way. Interestingly, according to Edward, Len Deighton had said that he envisaged that a big screen version might have an electronic based soundtrack as the novel deals with the technology that is used by both the RAF and the Luftwaffe air defence system. Although the plans for a film version have not come to fruition I felt that I would still like to do something so I produced a soundtrack comprised of nine pieces inspired by the novel and radio version (which has not music of its own) which was released in 2011."
Also produced was an imagined film title sequence complete with cast and credits which can be seen online. Indeed, I had already stumbled upon Simon's soundtrack and opening titles sequence before.

The full album is available as a free download via Bandcamp from Monday 21st January.

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