Karl Bartos

Narrative film music and sound design for Robert Wiene 's classic 1920 psychological thriller. Digitally restored in 4K by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Foundation. Musician and writer Karl Bartos has long been admirer of Weimar-era culture. During his time in Kraftwerk , he helped create the stunning track Metropolis , directly inspired by a band viewing of the classic 1927 Fritz Lang film of the same name. The original orchestral music composed for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by Giuseppe Becce had long been lost and in 2005, after watching the film, Bartos imagined what it would be like to create an entirely new one in the 21st Century in his home studios in Hamburg. Now with crystal clear images, digitally restored by the Friedrich-Wilhelm Murnau-Foundation, the film is visually the best quality it has ever been, and now, with Bartos' soundtrack, there is impressive sound to go with the haunting vision. For the task, Bartos ransacked his own library of musical compositions, recreating pieces he had written as a young classical musician in his pre-Kraftwerk days whilst creating new sounds, melodies and textures. The intention was not simply to write a film score per se. This was to be an immersive listening experience with special sound effects to match the action as the listener enters the film as both spectator and participant. A creaking door, footsteps on gravel, the turning of pages in a ledger, a half-heard fragment of dialogue are seamlessly synchronized to the action on screen. The listener can hear melodies that lie within the tradition of the Baroque Age of Bach , the early Romanticism of Mozart , the dissonance of Schoenberg , the unsettling metric play of Stravinsky and the harshly dramatic repetitions of Philip Glass . From outside of the classical tradition there is the folklorist bricolage of the fairground barrel organ tempered playfully by some psychedelic backwards musique concrete along with some melodies which would not have been out of place on a Kraftwerk album from the classic era. All the time the listener is on a journey, sounds move in and out, music weaves and entwines, the soundscape is immersive and intoxicatingly rich.