Words by Anton Spice

Kevin Richard Martin is a producer whose thirty-year career has strained at the physical and psychological edges of sound. As The Bug, he makes guttural bass music, collaborating with some of the loudest musicians on the planet. With King Midas Sound alongside poet Roger Robinson, he errs towards silence, composing glacial soundscapes that plumb the depths of damaged psyches. Now also recording under his own name, 2019 album Sirens addressed the trauma that surrounded the birth of his first child. A few months later, he performed it on an ambient bill to an audience laid out on mattresses, like a room full of corpses shuddering under the duress of the tectonic sub-bass. The promoter was disconcerted: “It wasn’t really ambient,” he told Martin afterward.

Back in 1994, Martin curated a compilation called Isolationism, which has taken on new meaning in the last year. In the liner notes, he described it as “dropping inwards instead of reaching out, this compilation's furtive music sounds as paranoic as it does panoramic.” It’s a phrase that could just as easily describe Eduard Artemiev’s soundtrack to the 1972 Andrei Tarkovsky classic Solaris, where sound and melody are used sparingly to devastating effect.

Martin’s latest project, Return to Solaris, is a rescore of that iconic soundtrack, which he performed live with the film at Vooruit Arts Centre in Gent in October 2020 and is now releasing in its own right. Solaris has long fascinated Martin precisely because it has more to do with psychological states of mind than it does planets. “Ambient music is the ultimate science fiction soundtrack,” he says, over video call. “It’s about soundscaping your internal environments and your shifting reactions to a world that’s constantly changing.”

It’s safe to say that the world has changed more radically in the last eighteen months than Martin could possibly have anticipated. With just hours to go before lockdowns swept mainland Europe in early 2020, he moved his young family from Berlin to Brussels in what felt like the last van out of Germany. “It was like witnessing the dystopian movies I'd been brought up on,” he recalls.

Arriving in what was a largely unfamiliar city, he lived without curtains for months, orientating himself not in relation to the surrounding neighbourhood, but to the four walls of his new home. As tour dates evaporated like morning dew, Martin was forced to reckon with a seismic shift in perspective.

There was really only one option. Martin set up his new studio, which he affectionately calls ‘The Lab’, and started making music. “Working on composition non-stop has become magnetic,” he says, producing, among other things, a five-volume series called Frequencies for Leaving Earth under the Kevin Richard Martin moniker developed as an outlet for his most introspective electronic music. Roger Robinson jokes that Martin has made more records in the last twelve months than the preceding twelve years.

“It was just a case of doing what I know, which is to make music as a spiritual quest to keep sane,” Martin continues, with a flash of humour that colors much of what he says. Relaxed and engaging, you get the sense that he is more fascinated than repelled by the horrors and absurdities of modern life. Fitting then that his first commission dealt so intensely with memory, displacement, and the baffling contradictions of the human mind.

With two screens positioned above an array of analogue synthesisers, Space Echos, and a Russian-made Pulsar-23 drum machine, Martin immersed himself in the world of Solaris, “watching it again and again and again,” until he began to empathise closely with Tarkovsky’s protagonist, Kris Kelvin. He describes the feeling as “alienated, distanced and strange” as the troubled psychologist, whose mission to the Solaris space station is thrown into confusion by the hallucinatory appearance of his deceased ex-wife, Hari.

Although most associated with the bass weight of The Bug - a project which he lovingly calls “my animal state” - much of Martin’s sound has been informed by film composition. The 1995 Techno Animal LP Re-Entry with Justin Broadrick was conceived in part as soundtracks to imagined films. Tapping The Conversation, his first album as The Bug two years later was a raw and twisted re-score of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, and recent work with King Midas Sound - notably 2019’s Solitude - has erred towards cinematic narrative.

As such, Martin cites Bernard Herrmann’s use of melody, pace, and tension as a formative influence, alongside more contemporary composers of the uncanny, like Angelo Badalamenti and Mica Levi. When it comes to Artemiev’s original score, however, he is a little more ambivalent: “the surprising thing,” he says, “is just how little of it there is.”

When Tarkovsky first put the project to Artemiev, there was to be no original score at all. An obstinate purist, Tarkovsky felt that the film should be able to express itself fully without relying on emotive musical cues. Speaking in an interview decades later, Artemiev recalled that the director “needed a person to orchestrate the sounds of nature… a composer’s ear and a composer’s hand to organise the sounds surrounding us according to the laws of music.”

Artemiev was unimpressed, ultimately convincing Tarkovsky that the subtle use of an orchestra could enhance the natural environment he craved. “That’s how we slowly created a special musical language,” Artemiev continued. “The clusters of soft sounds emerge, almost inaudible, sometimes overlapping. The viewer may not even notice them.”

In that sense, the sound design in Solaris is insidious. It creeps up on you and fills each scene like vapour. It familiarises and alienates. Artemiev used J.S. Bach’s ‘Chorale Prelude in F-Minor’ - treated with the now-defunct light-sensitive ANS Synthesizer - to suggest the pastoral world the film’s characters are slowly drifting away from. Already well on his way, the ill-fated Gibarian attached strips of paper to the ventilation fan in his room to create the sonic illusion of rustling leaves.

Artemiev goes on to describe his original vision as a “mass of sound, coming from nowhere, and disappearing into nowhere,” and much of Martin’s re-score has a similar quality. The sound drifts into focus from a distance, playing with your sense of perception, pooling at your ankles until, all of a sudden, you are standing neck-high in a fog of noise.

“Whether it be the opening credits, which is just water flowing through a forest, or whether it be the planet's magnetic pull, it was really important for me to create this constant tension of ebb and flow,” Martin explains.

Working methodically through the film, he established a central theme and built from there. On the title track ‘Solaris’, it is possible to hear this in the vast sheets of sound which puncture the static hum. “What I sought to do was echo the way this lushness is contrasted with a grating quality.”

As Kris becomes increasingly entangled in his vision of Hari, what he hears and how he feels become less distinct. Trickling water and bleeping machinery gives way to deep, penetrating drones, and what we think of as the score could just as well be the blood rushing to his head. The overall effect is to blur the line between the environment as real or perceived, which in turn is one of the film’s central themes. Vertiginous, paranoid, claustrophobic, the sound reaches, as both Kris Kelvin and Kevin Martin do, for something human to bring it back to earth.

“Some people would focus on the dystopian, nihilistic horror at the core of the film,” Martin says.“But for me, it’s actually a very serious love story, and that was very central to how I composed it. There would be a feeling of sensuality, and a hint of warmth, not just clanking industrial noise.”

Hearing Martin talk of his devotion to his wife and two toddlers in the wake of Sirens, it’s clear he has a reverent tenderness for human connection. The track ‘Hari’ is one of the few moments where human voices are used, albeit through a heavily treated Mellotron choir. Like Kris, Martin is guilty of what Solarist Snaut despises most. He has turned “a scientific problem into a common love story.”

Instinctively wary of sentiment, Martin prefers suggesting moods rather than evoking them. As he has done throughout this career, he finds balance by reaching for extremes. “I knew that there were two parts of the film that I would use trademark physicality and intensity of sound,” he explains.

The first is the tunnels scene - an extended drive through a recurring sequence of Tokyo underpasses. The second, of course, is the finale. As the camera pans out revealing Kris at home, adrift on the ocean of Solaris, “it should feel like a rocket taking off in your brain.”

When the score was eventually performed in front of an audience, Martin made sure its impact would reverberate long into the night. The volume was underplayed until the final scene before the sub-bass really kicked in. “People were telling me afterwards that it was insane,” he says gleefully. “They could feel their sides being battered and heavily massaged.” Sound as exorcism, sound as adrenaline. An animal state. It was intense, but it wasn’t really ambient.

Now settled in his new home, with curtains, and a sense of the local neighbourhood, Martin feels a little more grounded. “Somehow all of our consciousness has been altered by the last year,” he muses. Having his family close has been profound. “We didn’t realise how bad things could get.”

And yet, looking out of the window at the empty streets, not as familiar as they should be, he is still occasionally troubled by a sense of disorientation. “It’s a bit like that final zoom in Solaris,” he smiles, “where you are just like, ‘what the fuck, where am I?’"

Return to Solaris is out now.