Shinjuku Thief’s WINTER ORBIT provides an evocative ambient soundtrack for the Australian feature film. Composer Darrin Verhagen’s trademark lush symphonic darkness smoulders again in his most stoic and bleakly subtle score to date. Like the journey of 2020, the tracks slide from subdued ambience through uncertainty to brooding, thick immersion – a sense of being trapped in the dark with no way out. This murky journey of quiet desperation becomes an emotional primer for the closing moments as the score opens up into its sublime resolution.

About the film

Recently screened at the 77th Venice Film Festival and acquired by the Venice Biennale ASAC archive, WINTER ORBIT is a slow cinema monument to the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown from Australian artist Shaun Wilson who positioned models into poses located in German medieval paintings from the Black Plague-era to recontextualise new spaces, both in terms of a ‘memory’ of the former and invite questions as to the meta-validity of memory versus the post-sustainability of simulacra.

Scored by Shinjuku Thief, the WINTER ORBITsoundtrack is a rich sonic journey, crossing multiple boundaries from dark ambience to bold and powerful drama.

Artist bio

Shinjuku Thief is the recording project of Australian musician and soundtrack composer Darrin Verhagen. Whilst releases have varied in style — from gothic orchestral, tribal ambient, through to more industrial genres and noise — all are united by an intensely cinematic richness. The heyday for Shinjuku Thief and Darrin’s Dorobo record label, was the fertile period from 1992-2006, though Verhagen never stopped creating music. In Australia, he composes for contemporary dance, mainstage and experimental theatre, television idents, live productions, film and, as part of the (((20hz))) collective, has developed a series of immersive fine art installations. In Australia, his soundtrack for BOYS IN THE TREES was nominated for both AACTA and Film Critics Circle awards. Darrin is currently the Associate Professor of soundtrack in the RMIT University Digital Media program where he researches sound in multisensory environments.