8. Eduard ArtemievSolaris Original Soundtrack

I was taken to see 2001: A Space Odyssey when it first came out, and as a little boy, I didn’t really understand it. Maybe I didn’t understand it in later years either [laughs] but I loved it. I love the use of the sounds and the music. And another film that I saw – I didn’t see at the cinema, but I saw it on television a few years after that – was Solaris. I consider Solaris and 2001 the two greatest science fiction films, and in later years I revisited the soundtrack of the former because I’d been doing a lot of electronic soundtrack work myself with the Radio Cinéola soundtracks that I do.

And what was interesting about this was his use of the ANS synthesiser, which was an instrument created by a Russian inventor, Yevgeny Murzin, and the technology used in this synthesizer was very different to the Moogs or Buchlas. It was only later on that I found out that he’d used very unusual electronic instruments to create the sound, and I just loved the sound of it. At the start of this film, I think it’s a Bach piece and that is quite beautiful, and again, I love that juxtaposition with space and the period music, as Kubrick had used with Strauss in 2001…, but it’s more the electronic music in Solaris that I love. I just found that it matched the images so beautifully.