I've always wanted to perform an improvised soundtrack to a film and last December, I done just that.

Häxan, a 1922 Swedish-Danish documentary about witchcraft, has long been a personal favourite. In its original form, it was two hours in length with dialogue boards. In 1968 a version with William Burroughs narrating was released. This was subtitled 'A History of Witchcraft'. I decided to use this shorter cut of the film.

Next, I asked Jonathan Sharp (The Heartwood Institute) and Joe Hiscoke (Holiday, Ponyland) to perform alongside me.

We had one soundcheck and decided to not prepare anything in advance.

The soundtrack was recorded, in front of the film and audience, on December the 14th and is presented here in full. - Stephen Benson.

Oh the foolishness of the brave, a live improvised recording, in front of an audience to boot, no remit, no sound script and no discussion of how or where this was to go, instead just blind faith that your collaborators are reading from the same page as you. Oh and did we not mention, all this set to a screening of ‘Haxan’.

Recorded at the Warwick Bazaar last month, the players, Stephen Benson, Joe Hiscoke (Holiday, Ponyland) and Jonathan Sharp (the Heartwood Institute), here masquerading under the collective identity the Wasted Lakes took to the stage for ‘Häxan – Witchcraft Through The Ages’.

Dispersed across a continuous spell that’s split for digestive ease here in five parts, the trio set about establishing a deeply taut and tense sound frame that’s often solemn, sinister and graven with an ever deepening edginess that suggests first and foremost, that you’re losing touch with reality. Acutely tailored with a minimalist sparse, these harrowed and hollowed sonic spectres effectively assume a spectral shaping around the ghosting apparitions of the filmic imagery, at once sombre and chilled they weave a continuously morphing and mutating tapestry, in some respects it’s not so dissimilar atmosphere wise to Mount Vernon Art Lab’s ‘Séance at Hobs Lane’ set from nigh on two decades ago in so much as its unerring ability to evoke a feeling of paranoid alien displacement (none more so better encountered than on ‘Haxan Part IV’ wherein all manner psychotropic happenings and the bleeding of illusions and realities cross pollute). There’s no doubt that ‘Haxan’ overall, treads the forbidden landscapes located on the outer edges of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop universe, emulsified in darkness and shadow, the chamber electronic gloom attaching to ‘Haxan’ is disquieting not for its horror effects or want to pin you behind the sofa in a state of foreboding haunt, but rather more the way in which it truly isolates you, leaving you abandoned in the decaying and unravelling psyche manifestation it has created, its confused and warping disconnect steering alarmingly towards a Delia-nic occult-ish odyssey into the oblivion which as it happens, by ‘Haxan Part III’ you are pretty much lost to." - review by Mark Barton, January 2019.