Following his Crazylegs releases, Ess B and the silky smooth Nivea, Sega Bodega has returned to his cinephile roots with a follow up to 2015’s Soundtrack Series mixtape that resurrected the music of A Clockwork Orange and Akira. You’ll likely already know he’s something of a cinema buff, with a killer monthly NTS shows dedicated to film scores real and reimagined, and his three-part Studio Ghibli special pretty much the only thing that got us through the start of 2017.
The nine tracks on SS (2017), out tomorrow, are original compositions not just inspired by classic cinema but meticulously re-scored to the individual film trailers. The mixtape opens with the twisted Requiem featuring longtime collaborator Shygirl, with whom Sega B runs his NUXXE label alongside Rihanna’s Fenty-soundtracking Parisian producer Coucou Chloe. The futuristic freak-out of Aliens leads into a melodic Japanese-tinged Ghost before descending into Begotten, in all of its laptop mic feedback glory (listen out for Shygirl laughing). Next up is Stalker, as weird as the movie itself and Pi, full of repurposed sounds from a previous mystery film project.
American History X’s string-heavy score is industrialised the fuck up on X, with distorted sounds as messed up as the storyline, while Dogtooth is disturbingly upbeat. Last but by no means least, Tree of Life’s epic journey through love and loss is all of that and more bundled into two minutes and thirty eight seconds of pure emotion. SS (2017) is intense, ambitious and totally awesome. Here’s hoping music supervisors don’t sleep on it!
We called on Sega Bodega to talk us through this exclusive stream of the mixtape, track by track.
Requiem ft. Shygirl
“Each track starts from a different place; some don’t exist until I put the silent trailer into Logic and I start the music from scratch, some are chords/melodies that I’ve been trying to put to use and hadn’t found the right place for. This was an old chord progression that I would watch with the trailer and knew I had to work it in somehow. I watched this movie every. single. night as a teenager — I was absolutely obsessed.”
Aliens
“This was completely inspired by the film. It was extremely satisfying to make as it’s really all I want from club music also; nasty strings and nasty drums. The trailer version and the mixtape version have very different pacing — the trailer version came first and when I had that finished combination of sounds I knew I wanted to give it this more steady, sexy approach for the mixtape (sexy imo anyway). I also rinsed this film as a kid.”
Ghost
“Going back into the movie and finding the right bits of dialogue for this trailer took a long time, as I don’t speak Japanese. I also wanted to make sure the gun scenes were matched perfectly to the trailer, but in the movie there’s massive overdub of music so I couldn’t take that and I had to get my own gunshots, which, again, took time. There’s a clear Interstellar 5555 bite with the opening scene, but I don’t care. Of the whole mixtape this is the one I go back to the most. The melody was extremely fun to write.”
Begotten
“When you open Logic and turn the laptop mic on, if you turn it up loud enough it will start to feedback off itself. I’d always wanted to use that in a track and with the quality and style of the Begotten trailer it just seemed to match up perfectly. This was a lot of fun also, cause there’s no dialogue so it’s not as tedious as the rest of them are. I basically just got to write a tune and the trailer told me where to play around. You can hear Shygirl laughing in this. She’s very patient with me when I do things like make her listen to feedback all day.”
Stalker
“One of those ones where I can just go erratic and cut things to every single scene and it’ll just seem to work. I wanted the mixtape version to be a bit more steady, not sure why. Don’t know if I’d rather have just left the trailer version on it, but oh well.”
Pi
“I worked with a guy called Adham Faramawy last year on a 9-minute track to accompany a short he had made, in among that were the sounds used in Pi. I really liked it so kinda had to revisit it for this mixtape.”
X
“ American History X has sooooo much string in the film. The whole movie is basically just strings. You’ll see that I missed out some bits of dialogue from the trailer ‘cause in the film the music is so loud that it just made it impossible to use — it would have just clashed massively with the music I made for it. This is a formula I kind of do a lot lately — just heavy on the strings and heavy on the drums. Trying to be Mike Skinner. That’s me singing at the end.”
Dogtooth
“This one was fun. There’s a bit in the trailer where every scene syncs up to the bars in the music for about 15 seconds; it was completely unplanned but it reminded me of why I love doing these trailers, ‘cause you’ll just see things freakishly match up by accident. Weirdly rewarding.”
Tree of Life
“I did this series in 2015 with a bunch of other trailers, and directly after releasing that I made this Tree of Life one. I had no intentions of making another series but then making this trailer was the thing that made me be like, ‘Okay, do more.’ This took a loooong time though. The track is slowly speeding up and down so that it can flow with the trailer. The only rule this series has is that I can’t edit the original trailer to be cut to the music I make; the music has to fit to how the original trailer was made. Otherwise, what’s the point?”