The wheeze of artist/ musician/ producers creating soundtrack-style music for a film that only ever existed in their heads has developed to the point over recent years that some marketing campaigns have presented said ‘films’ as real, long-lost cinematic masterpieces and gone to great lengths to develop elaborate backstories and ‘lost footage’ to include in videos and the like. Whatitdo Archive’s The Black Stone Affair springs to mind – they didn’t create a soundtrack you understand, they merely ‘re-discovered’ it. A little googling around however about, say, the director, soon reveals a lemon and you have to applaud the obsessive level of detail that has gone not just into the music but into practically willing the ‘film’ the music is for into existence. The campaign for new single Swimming Pool by Bamboos main man Lance Ferguson isn’t pretending that he discovered a long-lost soundtrack for equally long-lost 1981 French film L’Ocean De Toi by ‘enigmatic’ director Leroi Alarie. They’re fully up-front about the fact that Alarie (or should I say ‘Alarie’) asked (or perhaps that should be ‘asked’) Ferguson to create a new soundtrack because he disliked the original one for the unreleased ‘film.’ And no-one would dispute that the languid, synth-drenched and guitar-led, 80s library music jazz-funk of Swimming Pool hits the spot. However, you could spend a long time searching online for news of the film, director or star Kate Louise Laurent Montagne and find no mentions unless in conjunction with the single. Studio or perhaps distributor Cinema Nova does exist however and operates out of…Ferguson’s home base of Melbourne. Well, I never.
(Out now on Pacific Theatre)
