Andrew Wasylyk & Tommy Perman - House With A Curse Andrew Wasylyk & Tommy Perman

Scottish composers, Andrew Wasylyk and Tommy Perman announce new collaborative soundtrack album, House With A Curse.

Following the success of their Scottish Album of the Year Award-nominated Ash Grey and the Gull Glides On, Wasylyk and Perman were commissioned by Dundee Contemporary Arts' Dundead Film Festival to create a brand-new score for Rupert Julian's 1925 masterpiece, The Phantom of the Opera.

Starring Lon Chaney in one of his most influential and notorious performances as Erik the Phantom, the film is filled with opulent costumes, extravagant sets, hundreds of extras and dazzling early use of Technicolor. It remains widely regarded as a landmark of the horror genre and cinema's silent era.

Written, recorded and mixed in less than three months, Andrew and Tommy reinterpret this significant cultural moment with dexterity and invention. Their score engages candidly with the film's portrayal of disability and otherness, bringing a contemporary lens to one of Hollywood’s most enduring stories.

The composition process was rooted in the film itself. Wasylyk sketching melodic ideas at the piano with projections of the Paris Opera House tragedy unfolding, flickering onto the wall of his studio in Dundee. Meanwhile Perman made a series of experimental percussive recordings at home, focusing on the materials observed on screen: the heavy stonework of the opera house; the wood of the elaborate stage sets; the fabric of costumes, curtains and upholstery; the glass of chandeliers and poison bottles; the metalwork of the Phantom's underground lair. The resulting textures form the rhythmic and sonic foundation of the record.

Framing choral voice, piano, synthesiser, drum machine, nylon acoustic guitar and Mellotron through a distorted, haunting delivery, the arrangements work in dichotomies: expansive yet claustrophobic; linear yet crooked; hypnotic and achingly beautiful. The score never concedes to traditional expectations of the horror soundtrack.

Take Callers Have Departed, shifting from heavily processed operatic voices and foreboding techno, to plucked guitar and gliding Farfisa synthesiser. Or Strangler's Noose Coils Quick, leading the listener deeper into the secret subterranean chambers beneath Parisian streets. Here, a scuttling drum machine and piano patterns honour the fateful plight of Raoul and Ledoux as they attempt to rescue Christine. Elsewhere, fear and surrender unfurl among the distorted synth bass of Empty Promise Open Palm, as a beguiling motif steadily encourages the edges of the rhythm into a dark, fatal cadence.

House With A Curse is a distillation of the duo’s exchange between past and present. Expansive, instinctive and entirely of their own. A befitting alternative veil for one of the period's most quintessential horror spectacles. Lower your masks, for beyond the mirror lies the door to love.