Review: Asian Dub Foundation, Colston Hall

It’s become trendy in recent years to incessantly bash Star Wars behemoth George Lucas over his lamentable prequel trilogy. But it’s perhaps easy to forget the relative high note with which his career started: 1971’s low-budget, Orwellian dystopian tale THX 1138. A confident piece of imaginative storytelling starring Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasence, it also showcases another of the filmmaker’s undeniable strengths: his ability to elicit outstanding film music from his chosen composer.

Six years before John Williams threw back to the Golden Era of Hollywood with A New Hope and helped redefine the orchestral film score, it was Mission: Impossible and Dirty Harry musician Lalo Schifrin who established a distinctive soundscape for THX 1138. One of the most innovative and eccentric sci-fi soundtracks in the history of the medium, Schifrin’s music blends ecclesiastical choral textures with a haunting alto flute love theme and various pop music source instrumentals to capture the futuristic facets of Lucas’ film universe.

It’s a score British band Asian Dub Foundation reworked from the inside out in their performance at Bristol’s Colston Hall, which continues its hugely impressive run of soundtrack and score-related shows. The group has past form in this area, having re-scored Ennio Morricone’s score to landmark 1966 documentary The Battle of Algiers. Fittingly enough given their genre-splicing blend of dubstep, reggae, punk and bhangra, the group’s style meshed well with Schifrin’s avant-garde score, one that itself blurs the lines between music and sound design (crafted in the movie by Apocalypse Now’s Walter Murch).

Playing live to a projection of the movie itself, Asian Dub Foundation brought out a limited but striking ensemble accompanied by their characteristic drum and bass undercurrent. Mirroring the narrative of the movie, the interaction of the instruments was initially spasmodic and fractured, flitting between founding member Steve Chandra Savale’s (aka Chandrasonic) evocative electric guitar, drums and bass, although the real star of the show was Nathan Lee’s breath-defying ‘fluteboxing’ (the act of humming and breathing into the instrument at the same time to create a unique, staccato sound). As the film went on, the music started to cohere into longer and more memorable suites, mirroring Duvall’s desire to escape from the system.

Even as the more urgent, crescendo-laden tones threatened to drown out the nuances of the scenes that Schifrin’s comparatively discreet score complimented so well, the cumulative effect was surprisingly positive. The impact of the harsh musical textures ultimately helped reinforce the dystopian brutalist themes of Lucas’ story, contrasted with which were the faithful, haunting tones of the flute-based love theme for Duvall’s title character and Maggie McOmie’s LUH. And even if Asian Dub’s guitar-laden finale couldn’t hope to match Schifrin’s memorably haunting take on Bach’s The Passion, it did make for an invigorating and intriguing twist. It may not have been the original, but the spirit of both Lucas and Schifrin was alive and well.