Russian composer Oleg Karpachev here with his soundtrack music for the Soviet movie Sputnik (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR308CD), a cinematic enterprise released in 2020. Karpachev is not a fellow you’ll find in the company of electronica or ambient artistes as such, but he has had a successful career composing scores for movies and TV, including one called Chernobyl: Abyss, which elects to make a hero out of one of the firefighters at this historical disaster.
I never saw Sputnik (directed by Egor Abramenko) and I’m not sure that I care to, since it sounds like a rather dismal pastiche of successful previous Hollywood flicks in the same areas – science-fiction, body horror, apocalyptic dystopias, that sort of thing. Even the story’s premise – astronaut returns from space harbouring an unwelcome organism in his suit or body – sounds very familiar, resembling not just Alien (1979) but the earlier Quatermass Experiment from 1955. Oleg Karpachev’s music score here is competent enough, and conveys a suitably sombre register, but he lacks a gift for a memorable theme or melodic hook, and most of the cues stay in the same boring harmonic range, full of different shades of grey. Though the composer tries hard to set an other-worldly mood or summon strange atmospheres, in the end he seems to lack the imagination to make a truly striking sequence, or even produce a single unusual sound from his many synths and machines.
Too often it feels like a cut-price version of a Hollywood soundtrack, striving to create the same kind of jolts for the viewer with string stabs and heavy percussion, such as blights most of the movies in the Marvel Comics Universe series. I guess I’m hoping for something more bleak, more minimal, and – well – more Russian, in line with the purported themes of the Sputnik movie. (15/01/2024)