Jim O'Rourke

Jim O’Rourke’s process – sourcing resonant sounds to be enmeshed together into a music that supersedes their resident parts – makes a fitting soundtrack for Kyle Armstrong’s “prairie gothic” tale of down-on-the-farm horror way up north in Canada.

His minimalist score inhabits the wide open, big sky landscape, flowing into suddenly-deep (and opaque) emotional waters, then panning out to a chilly omniscient remove.

Described as a “slow-burn prairie gothic drama” set in the farmland of Canada’s Alberta province, and starring Paul Sparks, Susan Kent, Landon Liboiron, Nicholas Campbell, Will Oldham and Bruce Dern, Hands That Bind is a spellbinding trip to the existential bone of rural working life in North America. As conflict rises over hard-worked patches of land to provide a mere and mean existence, a desperate air settles in, as a series of mysterious, often supernatural occurrences rock the small community. O’Rourke’s vaporous, serpentine musical backdrops and atmospheres reflect the obsessions and distractions of the film’s principles; moods of all sorts seen or otherwise implied. Additionally, the music highlights cinematographer Michael Robert McLaughlin’s closely observed accounting of the farmers’ environment, as well as the striking widescreen images of the big sky country with unnerving flair

RIYL: Ambient, new age, mod comp