White Lunar

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have been creating music together for more than fifteen years, with The Bad Seeds, Grinderman and The Dirty Three. More recently, they have collaborated on soundtracks for such films as The Proposition (2005) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007). White Lunar contains music they composed from the aforementioned films, along with a selection of their cinematic scores, including rare and previously unavailable material.

Cave and Ellis’ first soundtrack together was Australian director John Hillcoat’s 2005 quasi-Western, The Proposition (for which Cave also wrote the screenplay). The following year, the pair received a commission to compose the music for a film by another Australian director, Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. By the time Dominik’s film came out, Hillcoat had begun his adaptation of The Road (Cormac McCarthy’s novel of a father and son’s trek across a vast wasteland in the aftermath of global catastrophe); once again Cave and Ellis were invited to create music for the film. With The Road as yet unreleased, this album offers a rare opportunity for a sneak preview of the soundtrack.

All three movies, with their epic landscapes and acutely incised psychology, find a correlative sweep and depth in the scores that Cave and Ellis have devised for them, and a poignancy that imbues the films with a timeless aura; the music from this triumvirate is on Disc 1 of the 2 CD set. In addition to these large-scale efforts, Cave and Ellis have also contributed a resonant musical dimension to a pair of lesser known, but striking documentaries, represented on Disc 2.

Disk 1

1. Song For Jesse
2. Moving On
3. What Must Be Done
4. Song For Rob
5. Happy Land
6. The Proposition No. 1
7. Road To Banyon
8. The Rider No. 2
9. Martha’s Dream
10. Gun Thing
11. The Rider Song
12. The Road
13. The Mother
14. The Father
15. The Beach
16. The Journey
17. The Boy

Disk 2

1. Srey Leak
2. Me Nea
3. Rom
4. Halo
5. Zanstra
6. Black Silk (Suture)
7. Brain Retractor
8. Dandy Brain Cannula
9. Rat’s Tooth Forceps
10. Kerrison’s Punch
11. Micro Sucker
12. Window
13. Daedalus
14. Magma
15. Cheata
16. Sorya Market