Hannah Holland on scoring Bruce LaBruce’s Pasolini remake: “Bruce wanted the sex scenes to be scored with techno.”
Soundtrack spans experimental imaginings and floorfilling techno
Hannah Holland is a clubland legend, playing a key role in the club scene of London (and beyond) since the turn of the millenium with residencies at parties such as Trailer Trash, Adonis, Glastonbury’s NYC Downlow and her marathon sets at Berlin’s Panorama Bar.
After falling for Kraftwerk, Grace Jones and Talking Heads – having found them in her parents’ record collection – Holland’s sound fuses electro, techno and more UK-slanted sounds from the drum & bass and bass scenes. Now she’s soundtracked for Bruce LaBruce’s new film, The Visitor with an eclectic mix of “cerebral soundscapes and pulsating dancefloor anthems,” a bold score for an equally bold film.
Written and directed by Bruce LaBruce, The Visitor sees the legendary filmmaker and photographer continue his decades-long creative journey with a transgressive reimagining of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 classic Teorema, set against the dystopian backdrop of a paranoid, xenophobic post-Brexit London. Washed ashore from the sea in a suitcase, a mysterious refugee disrupts the lives of a privileged white family, leading them through a series of explicit and transformative encounters. The film, which features performance artist Bishop Black amid a series of explicit, hardcore sex scenes, premiered at the 2024 Berlinale Film Festival and is presented by A/POLITICAL.
Hi and thanks for your time…. First of all, can you tell us where you are right now, and what kind of day you’re having… Been anywhere already or going anywhere interesting later?
I’m having a coffee at my studio desk, I find writing is best for me in the morning, which is when I seem to have a lot of mental energy. I’ve just taken my dog to the park, later I’m chilling and prepping music for Adonis tomorrow, which I’m really looking forward to, I’ve got a nice three hour set, I love to get into the journey of the longer set times and taking people on a real ride.
You’ve scored Bruce LaBruce’s new film, The Visitor. Tell us how that came about, first of all.
So a good friend of mine Kurtis Lincoln, is a performer and plays a role in the film, he told me about the project when we were working on some music together and I was like ‘ STOP – you’re working with Bruce LaBruce, the ICON’ They were then looking for a composer and Kurtis suggested me, and it went from there. I’ve known about Bruce since the 90s, when I watched his famous movie Hustler White, he’s a radical queer art porn legend.
It must be quite different to the very spontaneous, in-the-moment vibe of club sets… Did it take a bit of adjusting…
Funnily enough I find it quite similar to DJing, in that I digest the atmosphere of the scene and decide how to score it, going a lot on feeling, in the same way I would ‘feel’ a room and decide which direction to take a dj set. The music can be wildly different, soundscapes, very abstract, sometimes more structured tracks, but somehow the skill of instinctly knowing, what I think is right, is the same. The director will have various references of music vibe and I will interpret and find a sound palette for the film. I’ve been producing music and making music for about 30 years now, since I was about 13, so I have a lot of experience to draw from.
What’s the film like? And how did you approach making the soundtrack? Is it a case of sitting in a dark room with a massive screen dissecting it, frame-by-frame?
The film is a reimagining of the Pasolini film Theorem, set in modern day London. Bruce is an artist that uses porn as his medium, so yeah the film is a radical and surreal with fully unsimulated sex scenes, it’s wild. Bruce expressed the film would be “wall to wall music” with the techno driving the sex scenes, and he wanted to riff on the Morricone’s original score for Theorem, a discordant minimal strings piece for the main sound of the rest of the film. With that in mind, I made my own version playing through my synths and modern techniques to come up with The Visitor theme. Once we had established a vibe and a sound palette, I created loads of demo cues taking inspiration from the reference tracks. It is then a process of back and forth with different scenes, as the movie is being edited. It’s a very exciting period and I find the collaboration between director, editor and composer really special as you see the film take form with sound and editing.
Were there any favourite soundtracks that you had in the bag already that you used for reference or inspiration?
We firstly spoke about having the main theme riff on Ennio Morricone’s original score for Theorem, which set the tone for this avant garde, discordant modern electronic vibe, with a hint of 70s sci fi. Bruce wanted the sex scenes to be scored with techno, so we used mostly existing tracks for that, and then the rest of the was a mixture soundscapes, ambient pieces, inspired by composers like The Day Of The Locust by John Barry, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) Soundtrack by Denny Zeitlin, The Thing, John Carpenter and some Italian composers, like Bruno Nicolai. Director Bruce is a total film encyclopedia, so it was great to learn about soundtracks and composers I’d never heard of.
You’ve got two labels – Batty Bass and Native City. Why two and what the difference between them?
Batty Bass was started in 2008 born from the club night of the same name, we started because we were making music for the club that everyone loved and no labels was interested in us, so it made sense to give a platform to ourselves and our crew. Native City came about a few years later with DJ friend and BB resident Deboa, we shared a love of really groove laden music coming out of Berlin, the kind that would power you through a day dancing next to the river at Bar 25, mixed with the sexy bass of the London sound. Both are not active anymore but it was an amazing experience running both for about ten years and am really proud of the output and artists we worked with, The Carry Nation, Josh Caffe, myself all had our first ever releases on the label.
And what are you up to musically at the moment? What are you hearing that’s inspiring you? Any live/DJ/remix action we should know about and also anything coming on your labels?
Musically i’m working on my next artist album, and I’m creating a film with director Lydia Garnett to go with it. Josh Caffe and I have a project called Sistrix, we had an EP out recently on Shall Not Fade and also a track on The Carry Nation’s Nervous comp, which is brilliant. There’s also great stuff coming out on their Major Records label, where myself and Joy Joseph have a collaboration called Post Hypnotic Signal, a follow up to our She’s Giving Cray tune on Super Rhythm Trax. There’s so much good music being produced at the moment, producers that I’m loving right now are Faff, X Club, Confidential Recipe to name a few plus revisiting Der Dritte Raum a lot this summer too. You can catch me at Houghton Festival, Green Man, Another Story, Body Movements and Adonis over the rest of the summer. And a very special remix for a certain pop icon, not sure i can talk about it yet, but its been doing the damage in the clubs! Watch this space!
Pre-order Hannah Holland’s The Visitor soundtrack on double vinyl by clicking here