composed in 2000 by adrian shephard and vicki bennett (people like us) http://www.peoplelikeus.org/
experimental soundtrack for The Seashell and the Clergyman (French: La Coquille et le clergyman).

Considered by many to be the first surrealist film. It was directed by Germaine Dulac, from an original scenario by Antonin Artaud, and premiered in Paris on 9 February 1928. The film follows the erotic hallucinations of a priest lusting after the wife of a general.

“The Seashell and the Clergyman penetrates the skin of material reality and plunges the viewer into an unstable landscape where the image cannot be trusted. Remarkably, Artaud not only subverts the physical, surface image, but also its interconnection with other images. The result is a complex, multi-layered film, so semiotically unstable that images dissolve into one another both visually and ‘semantically’, truly investing in film’s ability to act upon the subconscious.

The British Board of Film Censors famously reported that the film was “Apparently meaningless” but “If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable”[2].

Artaud allegedly loathed the resulting film, shouting back at the screen during the premiere and calling director Dulac “a cow”.

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composed by Testcard in 1998 as a soundtrack for the 1928 version of The Fall of the House of Usher by Jean Epstein. First premiered at the legendary brighton cinematheque…

artists : adrian shephard and matt grey

Nosferatu
Eine Symphonie des Grauens
1922 F.W.Murnau Germany 84 mins 16mm
Soundtrack from TESTCARD.composed 2004

Warning : please understand that we cannot be responsible for any events that may occur as a result of downloading and listening to this material, all of which was compiled soley using sounds from haunted spaces. Should you experience any unusual occurances please email us at testcard@rocketmail.com with details or consult an experienced exorcist

Electronic voice phenomena (EVP) were first discovered by the Swedish artist Friedrich Jürgenson in 1959. Jürgenson was recording birdsong using a reel-to-reel tape recorder. When he replayed the tapes, he heard faint but intelligible voices in the background, even though there was no-one else in the vicinity when the recordings were made. By repeating the procedure, Jürgenson found that the voice recordings could be reliably replicated. These phenomena were subsequently investigated by the German parapsychologist Hans Bender and by the Latvian psychologist Konstantin Raudive.

Taking their inspiration from Jürgenson’s work,In this first in a series of EVP experiments testcard have composed the soundtrack to Nosferatu using a sound pool of samples taken directly from haunted locations in Paris,London, Brighton and the Internet.
This is a new genre of cinema from the pioneers of misconstructionism testcard in collaboration with spirits from beyond the grave….