Rob Jabbaz’ The Sadness made a whole lot of noise on the festival circuit with its brutal take on the darkest and most sadistic side of humanity through the lens of something akin to a zombie virus outbreak. The story follows two young lover as an aggressively virulent form of rabies spreads across the city, they try to reconnect amongst the chaos and escape the hell they find themselves trapped within, all whilst evading scores of contaminated violent deviants.
Beneath the bodily fluids that drip from the screen, TZECHAR’s electronic score cuts through, utilizing a combination of modern production techniques infected with classic synth sounds and traditional Chinese instrumentation, offering up a soundtrack “that is a compelling contemplative journey, akin to Tangerine Dream tinged with melancholy and an aggressive edge; a fever dream in aural form.”
We have an exclusive look at TZECHAR’s music video for “Tis Freedom” from the official soundtrack. TZECHAR describes the track as, “A subversion of the Taiwanese film trope of having a romantic ballad as the end credits song and lead music single that is used to promote the film, and manifests as a strange, avant-garde track meditating on the film’s underlying themes of self-control, with no discernible pop structure in three disparate movements incorporating instruments used in the film’s original soundtrack that we also composed.”
Ship to Shore PhonoCo. is releasing the original motion picture soundtrack to Rob Jabbaz’ gory splatterfest, now streaming on all major platforms. A limited edition vinyl will also be available for pre-order Spring 2023 at shiptoshoremedia.com
The “Tis Freedom” music video is simultaneously beautiful and strange, mixing mediums in a way that makes the viewer feel as though they are losing their footing a little, it throws the audience off-kilter.
“For the music video, we decided to take this very serious song for a very serious film and make a completely ridiculous video in a multitude of visual styles, interpreting the lyrics into a journey of our central character Piichu contemplating the existential implications of freedom,” TZECHAR explains. “Made in collaboration with our art collective Nonform, using a variety of AI-assisted techniques including Disco Diffusion, VQGAN, and Ebsynth to imagine worlds, while also featuring spaces inspired by human-generated chaos such as the infamous Minecraft anarchy server 2b2t.”
Take a look at the official video for TZECHAR’s “Tis Freedom” below.
Stream the soundtrack on Spotify, Apple Music, and Bandcamp and pre-order the limited-edition vinyl at shiptoshoremedia.com For more brutal apocalyptic goodness, check out our exclusive interview with director Rob Jabbaz, and check out The Sadness now streaming on Shudder.
