Time Out film critic, Tom Huddleston declares: “If you’re a movie fan you’ll certainly know his music: Simon Boswell is one of the UK’s finest living soundtrack composers.”
Air-Eel’s Composer Simon Boswell has been closely involved in launching Ramsgate’s first International Film Festival. The focus of the festival is to present new works and encourage the younger local audiences to watch and appreciate independent cinema. The festival is partnered with a number of companies including Orbit and Shepherd Neame and will be presenting world feature films including Indian ‘Bridge’, and Japanese ‘Tatara Samauri’, as well as shorts such as French ‘A Space in Time’, ‘Je Suis Mobile’, Irish ‘This is My Son’, and Turkish ‘To the Sea’. Simon originally began his film composition career scoring for horror and fantasy Italian giallo films such as ‘Phenomena’ directed by Dario Argento, in which he combined electronic elements with orchestral instruments. Since then, Simon’s work has featured in films by some of independent cinema’s incredible mavericks such as Danny Boyle ‘Shallow Grave’, Alejandro Jodorowsky ‘Santa Sangre’, Michael Hoffman ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Alex de la Iglesias ‘Perdita Durango’ and Richard Stanley ‘Hardware’ and ‘Dust Devil’.
Running from Friday 24th – Sunday 26th March 2017, seminars from industry professionals will also feature across the weekend. Simon will be giving a talk on Saturday about the importance of music in film, demonstrating this through setting three of his unique compositions to a speech by Tony Blair.
Simon’s Band ‘The And’ are set to play a concert this Saturday 25th March at the Ramsgate Music Hall which promises to be an immersive, psychedelic, filmic journey. The set contains specially created new versions of his music accompanied by startling videos remixed from the many films he has scored. The show also features filmed vocal performances by legends Dario Argento, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Richard Stanley and Iggy Pop whose contributions are integrated, seamlessly, into the performance as virtual band members.
A few words from Simon: “I have reworked many of my film compositions, especially the early Italian exploitation movies that have electronic scores, into new versions that I find exciting and more relevant to our present times. At the same time, I have re-edited memorable extracts and images from some of the movies – such as ‘Shallow Grave’, ‘Hackers’ and ‘Demons’ – into a more dynamic and mind assaulting visual attack on the audience, including specially filmed performances of some of the directors involved – Alejandro Jodorowsky, Richard Stanley, Dario Argento. If I had to describe the show, I would say it’s The Velvet Underground meets early Floyd, conducted by Bernard Hermann (composer of all Hitchcock’s music) – on acid.”
Air-Edel are delighted to be representing Simon. He has a number of exciting projects in the pipeline including a short titled ‘Nasty’, written and directed by Paul Chart, with whom Simon first collaborated in 1997 for his award-winning feature film ‘American Perfekt’. Last year Simon composed the score for horror feature ‘Johnny Frank Garrett’s Last Word’ directed by Simon Rumley and starring Sean Patrick Flanery. Prior to this Simon co-composed the multi award-winning Sci-fi comedy drama ‘Flytrap’, directed by Stephen David Brooks, which is being shown at the festival this weekend.