Justin
Horror Music comes in all forms and language is not a barrier here, check out some of the creepy beats from Rædsel Fra Månekatten.
Daam’s fourth album has an unusual backstory. A few years ago, I was sitting next to a researcher from the Faroe Islands at a research meeting. They instantly claimed that they knew nothing at all about music after learning that I was a musician, but that they had recently made an unusual discovery at the museum where they worked, a box of reel to reel recordings labelled merely with the words ‘Terror of the Mooncat’…
Three years of painstaking research later, DAAM is proud to present the until now lost soundtrack to Faroean televisions first and only foray into late night horror programming, Warren ‘Kaninen’ Rasmussen’s ‘Raedsel Fra Manekatten’. Warren ‘Kaninen’ Rasmussen (b. 1973) began his career as the in-house editor for National Faroen television broadcaster, Sjónvarp Føroya. In 1983 he was commissioned to compose the score for the channels first late-night television drama, ‘Rædsel fra månekatten’, a horror series with a cast drawn from the islands long-standing day-time soap opera, ’Streymoy’.
‘Rædsel…’ was cancelled after only two episodes, and may have enjoyed a cult following in the Home Video boom of the late 80’s (a fate that befell numerous other short-lived Nordic dramas of the time), were it not for the Tinganes fire of 1987. The fire destroyed the warehouse in which many of Sjónvarp Føroya’s master tapes were stored, and for many years ‘Rædsel Fra Månekatten’ was considered lost. However, in 2017 the Listasavn Føroya gallery, whilst organising a temporary exhibition to celebrate Faroean culture, unearthed a box of fire-damaged reels containing the series’ original soundtrack. Though partially destroyed, painstaking reconstruction over the last 3 years has allowed us to recover over 30 minutes of original cues from the series, available now for the first time on DAAM. With much of the original material significantly damaged, Daniel Alexander Hignell-Tully (Distant Animals) has restored the spirit of Rasmussen’s composition, working with the composer to add in some more contemporary production methods where the original stems have not survived.
Rasmussen’s score weaves classic 80’s synthesis with his early training as an avant-garde composer (his mother, Freja Rasmussen, nee Møller, was a notable presence at Darmstadt). At times humorous, at times desolate, the work pre-empts many of the compositional traits that would find favour within experimental electronic composition over the next thirty years.
The soundtrack is released on cassette with a full-color art-print, alongside a magazine documenting photographs from the original television series and linear notes on the soundtracks extraordinary journey by the projects original researcher, Dr. Rógvi Jacobsen.
Find out more and listen to the demo track at https://difficultartandmusic.bandcamp.com/album/r-dsel-fra-m-nekatten
