Matthew Watson And Daniel Thomas Freeman - Catch Me Daddy - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack - CD

Deluxe first pressing in heavy duty digi pack with foil stamping.

"The crystal in men's heads / Blackened and fell to pieces / The valleys went out / The moorlands broke loose" – from Ted Hughes "Heptonstall Old Church"

So begins Catch Me Daddy, the award-winning feature film* from the Wolfe brothers, underscored by the beautiful and bleak wind-ravaged music from Matthew Watson (a.k.a. Matthew Wolfe) and Daniel Thomas Freeman (whose debut album The Beauty of Doubting Yourself was described by Norman Records as "a profoundly moving piece of music").

Set in the desperate small-town areas and unrelenting West Yorkshire Moors, the film follows Laila, a British Pakistani girl, and her Scottish drifter boyfriend, Aaron, in their attempts to escape her violently protective family. A relentless fever dream, as the Wolfe brothers subvert genre with a sense of poetic realism. Esteemed cinematographer Robbie Ryan (Fish Tank, Wuthering Heights) brings a haunted beauty to the landscapes and faces.

Due for release in the UK on February 27th 2015, the film has already garnered praise at the Cannes Directors' Fortnight and the London Film Festival from Dazed & Confused ("one of the most exciting British debuts for years"), the Guardian ("John Ford on the Yorkshire moors ... a fierce and boldly questioning drama") and The Hollywood Reporter ("gripping, highly charged").

Taking inspiration from such classics as the Popul Vuh score to Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Carmine and Francis Ford Coppala's Apocalypse Now soundtrack and the opening moments of High Plains Drifter combined with the influence of Swans, Tim Hecker and English Tudor choral music, Catch Me Daddy almost exclusively uses a deliberately limited instrumental palette of piano, percussion and oscillators twisted, gnarled and ghosted beyond recognition to realize the sound of the biting moorland wind as it hammers against metal doors and rusted corrugated roofs, sings in the lonely high tension wires and distant choirs howl into the swirling darkness.

The score was envisioned to gradually impart an increasingly mythic quality as the story progresses, a sense of something greater beyond the grey concrete and desperate cash-in-hand jobs where the iron heather, limestone cliffs and turbulent skies surrounding the battered dwellings re-frame this tiny human story into the epic dimensions experienced by the fleeing couple.

Blackened Crystal fades in the dread as whining oscillators circle above the heavy clouds blanketing the car parks and heathland alike. Then the amalgamated cues A Walk Up Eldon Street/Hunting Through a Locked Door/Falcon (For Jay Ali)/Burning Fields III juxtapose the submerged epileptic machine judders of small-town existence against the promise of endless skies just out of reach: primitive gong rhythms and rusted piano clanks wrestle with cymbal chords, piano frame choirs and electric violin drones. Dobrudden continually jump cuts between staggering bass, throbbing pain tones, distorted running polyrhythms and shifting internal drones before the jagged tension finally breaks and utter panic sets in.

Descent From the Bridge in the next reel tracks the hunters stalking street by street, enormous bass caverns bloom under the sodium lights as bloodshot eyes try to penetrate the municipal gloom. By The Moorland Broke Loose the remnants of humanity are fighting against each other, wolves howl in the near-distance, torches search, find and chase their prey as Paleolithic rock impotently crashes and rages around them. The bitter ice-rain squalls ...On Calderdale Ridge wash hope down to its rawest form, ending with the initial core of the entire score: the lamenting roar of two wounded souls being torn apart by events way beyond their control. Then Leave This Place paints a sole moment of battered but undaunted tenderness with snatches of beauty half-heard and half-remembered through the Winter gales, before Waiting For the Brake Lights quickly drowns it out with its piston rhythms careering downhill. And then we are left at the feet of Monument I as wind-choirs hail the blank stare of disbelief at cruelty unleashed.

The film ends with the headache tones of High Tension Wires cross-fading into the slow motion scream of the title track from Daniel's next solo album The Infinite and the Unknowable (Excerpt II) - (due late Spring 2015). And yet, even as the last bass gongs mark the seconds passing like hours, a glimmer of the human spirit is left as an obscure corner of England is forever marked by something like mercy.

The album is completed by a further 7 unused themes selected and re-worked from the 5 hours of music written for the film. Monkey Puzzle and Burning Fields I narrate the original beauty and innocence of Laila and Conor's dream, whereas Gorse Wind is forever lost in the moorland blackness. The oscillators and ghosts of Under the Sodium Lights and Doubt lead into the monumental distortion slabs and requiem of Codeine Fuzz before, finally, Heath Land Siren issues its rusted animal warning across the rain-sodden hills.

FILM INFORMATION
Catch Me Daddy is a film by Daniel Wolfe and Matthew Wolfe and is an EMU FILMS production supported by Film4, BFI, Lipsync, Screen Yorkshire and Studio Canal.

AWARDS
Selected for the Cannes Directors' Fortnight 2014 (France) and nominated for the Camera D'Or. Winner of Most Promising Newcomer (actor Sameena Jabeen Ahmed) and nominated for 4 other awards in the British Independent Film Awards. Winner of Best British Newcomer (Sameena) at the BFI London Film Festival 2014 (UK) and nominated for the Graham Sutherland First Feature Award and Best British Newcomer (writers/directors Daniel and Matthew Wolfe).

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