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Hilotrons
Theme from a Lonely Cinema (download track)
(independent) - 2021
Michael Panontin
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"This song is inspired by the works of Henry Mancini, Riz Ortolani, Ennio Morricone and the Ventures."
Mike Dubue's description of his latest track ought to perk up the ears of music aficionados everywhere. Under the Hilotrons moniker, Dubue and his revolving cast of musicians have come a long way since their days as a quirky rock/ska/dance hybrid. Those who can recall the Ottawa group's earlier recordings, especially their 2008 Polaris shortlisted album Happymatic, will be pleasantly surprised at the group's turn down more cinematic avenues.
That change of direction started when they scored Fritz Lang's Metropolis for the 2009 opening of the Mayfair Theatre in Ottawa. From there it was on to other early twentieth-century films including Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and even George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (with the 1968 horror classic cleverly reimagined and rescored as a silent film).
'Theme from a Lonely Cinema', the third track in a recent trilogy, serves its cinematic masters well. It was composed, performed and mixed entirely by Dubue at Studio Cimetiere in Quyon, QC and is unsurprisingly rife with the sort of sweeping arrangements and epic instrumentation that typified the soundtracks of the sixties and seventies.
Dubue outlined the recording process to CM. "When tracking this song in my church studio, I used the ceiling microphones and plate reverb to set the sound stage for the song, which provide the dense and murky wall of textures and underwater-like yelps," he explained. "I wanted to capture the feeling of 'anxiety with no resolve' by alluding to a simple motif that stretches out into too many evolving complexities, when every bridge just leads back to the beginning."
Fans of the above-mentioned composers, and even those few who can still remember Paul Aucoin's Hylozoists, would do well to check out Dubue's recent uploads (including his whacked-out redo of Morricone's 'Nadine' from the little-known 1973 flick Le Serpent).
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