THE BUNNY GAME ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK
Cassette. Rising Beast Recordings

Opening up with with blasting, riffing metal, this soundtrack sets out its stall immediately – there will be no easy listening here. Structured into two sides totalling 58 minutes, this is not a collection of individual tracks in the conventional sense, but rather an intense soundscape from director Adam Rehmeier that moves from harsh electronics to unsettling ambient moments. As such, it has a real conceptual sense to it and an atmosphere of dread and darkness.

The music runs from brutal industrial noise, through rhythmic electro and brutal metal to keyboard drone, making it reminiscent of the more interesting parts of harsh noise recordings by acts as varied as SPK, Whitehouse or Merzbow, while the human sounds – screams, deranged laughter, indescribable sounds of madness – add a nightmarish quality to the music. It's a remarkably impressive mix that has a strange beauty underlying the intensity. The mix of sounds and levels of extremity add to the the complexity and feeling of light and dark that the music creates.

If you have seen The Bunny Game, then it's likely that these varying degrees of shade will be reminders of the movie. If, like me, you have yet to catch up with the film, then the soundtrack is possibly even more impressive – freed from pre-determined visuals, you'll find the music creating its own images in your mind. The combination of electronic sounds and vocally created horrors is genuinely evocative and unnerving, and the overwhelming atmosphere that this recording creates is a skin-crawlingly unsettling one.

The version I'm reviewing is from a digital file – the commercial copies are on cassette tape, so the inevitable tape hiss that accompanies the format will add another element to the music. A pain in the ass on most recordings, the background ambience of tape has often added its own analogue element to experimental recordings, and I suspect that will be the case here too. Industrial music has long been a strange mix of technology and biology, old school and new school, and this is very much the case here. Popping this in a tape deck should result in something quite special.

I could see this providing the soundscape to those fetish clubs that have not succumbed to the chemical lure of dated dance music – or perhaps more private, intimate BDSM sessions (consensual, of course!). I would love to hear this thundering out at a club (or better yet, performed live). But I suspect the best way to enjoy this is played loud, in the dark, alone.

DAVID FLINT

http://www.risingbeast.bigcartel.com/product/the-bunny-game-original-soundtrack-cassette

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