After a friend introduced me to Haiku Salut back in 2015 I have been captivated by their music ever since. I admire their ability to work with acoustic and digital in a variety of projects whether it’s a live show with little adornment, performing their crowd pleasing ‘Lamp Show’ (which has music triggering an array of household lighting) or creating and performing a brand new soundtrack to Buster Keaton’s The General. The songs that make up The Lost Score were originally performed as a live score for the 1930 German silent film People on Sunday commissioned by Birmingham’s Flatpack Film Festival. Haiku Salut’s trio of Gemma Barkerwood, Sophie Barkerwood, and Louise Croft were asked to collaborate with Melbourne-born, London-based pianist Meg Morley on the project. This album was a chance to take the 2-hour live show into the studio “distilling over two hours of recordings into a focused, cohesive album“.
Though the trio had never met Morley before they slowly forged a working relationship that was a “deeply intuitive partnership, conducted initially long-distance and shaped by trust, shared curiosity and an open-minded creative approach”. The project took several years to come to fruition not helped by the not-inconsiderable matters of a pandemic, new children, different continents, and, according to the press release, mime school!
People On Sunday (German title: Menschen am Sonntag) was directed by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer from a script by Billy Wilder. It is set in a time before Hitler came to power and Wilder left for America where he ended writing and/or directing films such as Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity, and Sunset Boulevard. The film is an amazing time capsule of pre-fascist Berlin and conveys glorious summer weather despite being in black and white. It follows the romantic entanglements of the main characters, notable for being amateurs playing themselves e.g. a wine seller, taxi driver and record shop worker. It starts at Bahnhof Zoo train station and featuring the boating lakes of Nikolassee and Wannsee. Sophie Barkerwood of Haiku Salut says, “There were some elements of the film that we agreed we wanted to musically undermine. The way the men treated the women felt uncomfortable viewing it through a modern lens and we used the score to communicate some of the more sinister elements.”
The music is remarkable for how it conveys the move from city to park, from the bustle to the bucolic. Tracks like ‘Meine Beste Freundin’ shimmer with summer heat and lazy afternoons spent basking at the side of the water. Meg Morley’s piano is threaded throughout the album, sometimes evoking the gentle ripples of water on the boating lake or, as with ‘Faces’, expresses the constant movement of a busy metropolitan city where an endless stream of people rush past you.
Haiku Salut have an incredible gift of making their rotating acoustic and electronic motifs compelling. There are subtle shifts that nudge the repetition into myriad expressions, like the musical equivalent of a kaleidoscope. On ‘Carousel’, they swarm around the piano like starlings recreated as arpeggios, whereas on ‘What Happened Next’ they can slow time down with delicious synthesiser bends that open a portal allowing acoustic piano to drift in and play call and response with the electronic sounds.
From the passing of ideas back and forth to the distillation of the music from the original performance Haiku Salut and Meg Morley have created a modern cinematic feel without losing sight of the source material. Like the film, the music has a perfect narrative arc from the optimism of a sunny Sunday away from work through to the end of the day and the melancholy of a Monday looming. There is true joy in the symbiosis of Haiku Salut’s perfect balance of the electronic with the acoustic, coupled with the jazz and classical elegance of Meg Morley’s piano playing. I envy anyone who saw the live show but whether you tee up the film and play the album or just listen to the album on its own you will find so much to love in the experience.
Haiku Salut: Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram | YouTube
Meg Morley: Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram | YouTube
Released by Lo Recordings: Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
Review by Paul F Cook
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