Phantom Limb’s soundtrack imprint Geist im Kino continues with the launch of new series Imaginal Soundtracking, in which contemporary musicians are invited to re-score existing film pieces. 

Designed to reframe overlooked or forgotten works of cinema and to offer a new artistic challenge to the contributing musicians, Imaginal Soundtracking acts as a dialogue between the creative minds at play. The first release in the series sees a quartet of highly inventive, wildly varying takes on award-winning animation There Will Come Soft Rains, created in 1984 by Uzbek filmmaker Nazim Tulyakhodzayev. The film is based on a short story of the same name by Ray Bradbury, itself a reference to a 1918 work by US poet Sara Teasdale, which foretells the danger of mankind’s extinction by war, predating many such fears by some decades.

Characteristic of Soviet filmmaking of the time, Tulyakhodzayev’s adaptation is abstracted by layers of allegory and interpretive meaning, rendering it bizarre, sometimes lysergic, but nonetheless arrestingly powerful. The story - hauntingly relevant today - portrays a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland in which no human survivors remain, and the preciousness of life is a heartbreaking memory. A bird, desperate and exhausted, accidentally triggers the future technology and sets off a chain reaction of destruction and despair.

Though musicians Masaaki Yoshida (aka anchorsong), Lakker, Rully Shabara (of Indonesian experimentalists Senyawa) and Dylan Henner all began with the same source material, their respective new soundtracks are strikingly different.