Sharp FM 009: Tornado Wallace for Greenstone & Tarnac Sans
Tornado Wallace is a Berlin-based producer, DJ, and musician whose genre-spanning dance sets and studio releases are loosely defined by their generous ambience and cinematic immersiveness. Appropriately, every song here is pulled from a Letterboxd lover’s delight of international films made between the late 80s and the early 2000s. Sensual trip hop lamentations and shoegazing walls of guitar find common ground here, and when’s the last time you heard Faye Wong and U2 in the same mix?
Tornado Wallace is a Berlin-based producer, DJ, and musician whose genre-spanning dance sets and studio releases are loosely defined by their generous ambience and cinematic immersiveness. Appropriately, every song here is pulled from a Letterboxd lover’s delight of international films made between the late 80s and the early 2000s. Sensual trip hop lamentations and shoegazing walls of guitar find common ground here, and when’s the last time you heard Faye Wong and U2 in the same mix?
Hot off a new release, we’re all lucky that he found the time to make us a mix. We were inspired to create a trailer and poster for the “soundtrack” of an imaginary film called Summer Solstice. The trailer and graphics star Connor Davenport's Greenstone Italic and Marc Rouault's Tarnac Sans. Set together, they're a handsome pair. The dusty pollen yellow of the typography laid over the eye-cum-sunset gives the trailer a filmic texture that recalls both moody film noir and Rohmerian summer desire.
“It contains only music used in films from 1987-2001," says Tornado Wallace, aka Lewie Day. "Chungking Express, Lost Highway, Opera, Perfect Blue, Trainspotting, Leon: The Professional, Fallen Angels, Cruel Intentions, Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, Cool World, Strange Days, Ghost In The Shell. I think that's it. Perhaps there's some commonality there."
(Notably, Lewie forgot to mention what might be the deepest U2 cut of all time: "Alex Descends Into Hell for a Bottle of Milk" from 1991, which is the only released song from the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of A Clockwork Orange.)
"I wanted to conceptualise this mix in this way as movies have really been resonating with my songwriting at the moment, and I wanted to celebrate particular films that have been extra inspirational for that process.”
This mix pulls from nostalgia half a step ahead of the zeitgeist. Between the late 80s and early 2000s, the world went digital, and the aesthetics of music, film, and design went through particular evolutions that have become relevant again today. One need only look at the raver silhouettes in downtown New York and post-Pandemic Web 1.0 aesthetics online to see the convergence here. If time is a circle, this soundtrack navigates you pleasantly in an upward spiral.
TRACKLIST
1. Frankie Chan Fan-Kei & Roel A. Garcia - Second Killing
2. Barry Adamson - Hollywood Sunset
3. Tricky - Overcome
4. Kruder & Dorfmeister - Original Bedroom Rockers
5. Primal Scream - Trainspotting
6. Pure - Greedy
7. Bill Wyman & Terry Taylor - Black Notes
8. Kenji Kawai - Nightstalker
9. Masahiro Ikumi - Virtua Mama
10. Laurie Anderson - Speak My Language
11. Frankie Chan Fan-Kei & Roel A. Garcia - Seusuous Forest
12. Björk - Venus As A Boy
13. Lori Carson & Graeme Revell - Fall In The Light
14. Kristen Barry - Ordinary Life
15. The Smashing Pumpkins - Eye
16. U2 - Alex Descends Into Hell For A Bottle Of Milk / Korova 1
17. Faye Wong - Bluebeard
18. Brian Eno - Deep Blue Day