Nordmann creates a score for 1950s cultfilm 'Dementia'

The Ghent-based quartet Nordmann has spent the past few years developing their own, powerful instrumental sound with drums, bass, guitar, and saxophone. The score they wrote for the cult film Dementia/Daughter of Horror aligns perfectly with their dark sound, but there are also significant differences.

Cinematic suggestion
"It is often said that our music is cinematic," bassist Dries Geusens says. "That is because there are no vocals or lyrics. We have to compensate for that in one way or another by adding atmosphere or contrast. If we were to produce anything visual to go with our music, we'd be forcing our listeners to see what we want and there would be no more suggestion. We aim to avoid that." Before he went to study jazz at the conservatory in Ghent (where he met the other group members), Geusens actually studied at the Brussels film school RITCS. "But we are all interested in film."

Functionally expressive
"When you write music for a film, you can either opt to be super contrarian, or you can give the film exactly what it needs," Devoldere says. "We consciously evoked the atmosphere that the scenes needed, without being too experimental. The rather sinister, dark atmosphere of the graveyard scene was a real treat for us." Geusens also refers to a chase scene for which they wrote a heavy, repetitive groove: "It is all very expressive and functional." And "thus very different from what you would hear at a normal Nordmann concert," Lauret concludes.

Frigid darkness
"We don't write happy music – the atmosphere is reminiscent of film noir," Geusens tells us. "We often also hear the adjective Lynchian," drummer (and keyboard player) Elias Devoldere says. He calls Nordmann's sound frigid: "We like to bring things to the boil without them boiling over. But these days we prefer restrained tension to explosions." It is a natural evolution for the band that won silver at Humo's Rock Rally in 2014 and released the album Alarm! in 2015. Geusens: "We still focused more on the apotheosis then, but we let our music spin out more now."

Jazzy compositions
The band members do emphasise that this film soundtrack is a distinct project from their new album, which will be released in the autumn. "The jazzy compositions match the film's atmosphere, while the new record will be more (kraut)rock-oriented," guitarist Edmund Lauret says. "In that sense, the score is closer to our early days, when we still composed more than we improvised," Geusens says. "We trust each other more now, so it is easier just to let things take their own course. Someone suggests a few notes, and we're off on a long, multi-layered trip."

Dementia/Daughter of Horror
The invitation to write a score came from the Ghent concert venue De Bijloke, which organised a festival on the theme of fear last year. The suggestion of using Dementia/Daughter of Horror (1955) came from colleague Peter Vermeersch from Flat Earth Society. This B-movie by the American director John Parker was a flop initially, but it is now a cult classic. "The story is actually so bad that it is funny," Dries Geusens says. "But we felt as though its dark atmosphere and the absurdity of the plot suited us quite well."

The film focuses on the unstable moods of a young woman who goes through an insane night(mare) in a city. Between her dream and reality, Nordmann composed a jazzy score along classical lines. "We often use the same melody whenever a particular character appears, but adapt it slightly each time," Geusens explains. "We wrote the music scene by scene, almost even beat by beat, and then synchronised it to the film."

According to Edmund Lauret, the soundtrack follows the tempo of the film, which initially murmurs along, reaches a first zenith during a deadly graveyard scene, and then crescendos again near the end. "In contrast to vintage Nordmann material, which is usually much more abstract, in the film everything becomes very explicit."

> Nordmann plays Dementia. 22/03, 20.15, Flagey, Elsene