Fall On Your Sword get serious with the score to Another Earth. By Shaun Brady
Judged solely by their YouTube page, Fall On Your Sword might be easy to write off as little more than a mildly clever pair of musicians with access to editing software. Amusing enough to pass a little downtime in the office, their videos tend to target fairly low-hanging fruit—pop culture punching bags like David Hasselhoff (“Powerless Man,” a mash-up of backstory-narrating openings to ’70s/’80s TV series) and William Shatner (“Shatner on the Mount,” remixing an infamous interview detailing the sexier side of his mountain-climbing escapades in Star Trek V). Hell, the name of their YouTube channel is “fallonyoursword69,” indicating a sniggering, junior high sense of humor.
A wholly different side of the Brooklyn-based duo is revealed on their debut CD, however, the soundtrack to director Mike Cahill’s Sundance award-winning debut feature,Another Earth.
Cahill’s film involves the life-changing collision of two people on the night that a parallel Earth is spotted in the night sky. While that cosmic intrusion into the everyday hangs over the entire film (quite literally), Cahill focuses more on the idea of second chances, how an alternate existence offers a chance for redemption. FOYS’ score is a blend of classically influenced piano and strings commingled with electronic drones and pulsing techno, which perfectly captures—even divorced from the images it was composed to accompany—the film’s blend of human drama, philosophical meditations and sci-fi otherworldliness.
“Mike wanted us to focus on the emotional aspects of the story, always with a vague science fiction element to it,” explains Will Bates, one-half of the FOYS team. “We were just tipping our hat to the sci-fi without making it into a synth-laden tech score.”
Cahill heard those elements in another piece the duo had recorded for an art installation. “It was beautiful,” the director recalls. “The sound was this organic, raw, electronic/classical pulasting, and somehow it encapsulated both the cold crispness of the science and the textured warmth of the human story. It was the perfect sonic feeling for the film.”
While he gave them a generous amount of freedom, Cahill says that he could trust the composers based on the level of communication they all shared. “We had this crazy synchronicity. We were speaking the same language even though one was the language of music and one was the language of story. Their choices were intuitive and thoughtful and not obvious, which I loved. I think they’re geniuses.”
Bates, whose résumé includes stints as a film composer and a saxophonist for the likes of Roy Ayers, Paul McCartney and Marc Almond, formed Fall On Your Sword in 2008 with Philip Mossman, who scored Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight and Ocean’s Eleven alongside David Holmes, and spent five years as a member of LCD Soundsystem (recently rejoining the band for its final performances). The pair of British expats focused on the marriage of music and visuals, creating their viral videos and performing live against a backdrop of collaged footage.
They quickly segued into the advertising realm, winning major awards for a commercial for Australian shoe company Nomis and scoring spots for VH1 and the stop-motion Danny Trejo Machete ad for Lipton Brisk Iced Tea (“and then I wash my hands”). Since cutting the ribbon on their Williamsburg studio a year and a half ago, they’ve taken the leap into feature films, beginning with Kitao Sakurai’s Aardvark, about a jiujitsu-fighting blind man. There are already three more films in the can to follow Another Earth.
Their soundtrack album expands on the cues from the film, which Mossman describes as “possibly the most fun I’ve ever had in the studio. It was great once all the work was done to just revisit it and stretch it out. We just let it go wild, stepped outside of the movie, and watched it grow beyond what that was and become a record in its own right.”
Of deciding on a sound palette for each particular project, Bates confesses that he and Mossman share an “unhealthy addiction to collecting old analog bits and pieces. There’s a store in the East Village that we go to, this crazy old man who sells weird instruments. We sometimes just go in there and pick an instrument that will be the basis of the score. We just did one that was more or less entirely done with a Suzuki Omnichord. But every project is different.”
Despite the demands of shaping the music to the demands of film directors or corporate clients, Bates and Mossman insist that FOYS maintain an identity born of their conjoined sensibilities. Perhaps that’s best expressed in the puckish sense of humor, evident from videos where Michael Caine’s icy stare causes Meg Ryan’s When Harry Met Sally diner orgasm to the over-the-top operatic melodrama of a teaser for RuPaul’s Drag Race, and even to the dubstep inflections in their otherwise straight-faced Another Earth score.
“I feel like Fall On Your Sword has evolved over the last year or so into a very unique individual sound that is the sum of both of our skills,” says Bates. “We’re both doing work that we wouldn’t be doing individually. I, for one, find myself being a little bit braver than I would be if I was on my own. We really push each other to explore and experiment.”
