Album Notes

When composer John Turner first began working on the score for Sam Zalutsky’s thriller, You Belong To Me, little did he know that the extraordinary string band Ethel would be part of the mix. While on Myspace one afternoon, John came across Ethel’s webpage. As he read about the group he realized he had worked with two of the four members of Ethel on one of his short films several years prior. In that time, Ethel had become one of the hottest, hippest string quartets around. He contacted them on a whim, hoping they would remember him. As it turned out, they did remember him and in a few short weeks Ethel was on board to play the string parts for the score.

After some preliminary musical sketches, John realized, with Ethel’s great musicianship, that if all the elements came together, he would have a really special film score on his hands. The cues began to come alive as John wove elements of classic horror/suspense musical elements with ambient, electronic soundscapes. Inspired by the scores of Bernard Herrmann and Christopher Komeda, John experimented with combining intense, rhythmic musical cells against a backdrop of new synthesized sonorities. All of the elements began to meld and the results from track to track were ethereal, driving, and nail biting musical journeys.

From the ambient, minimalist opening credits to the chilling vibes echoing in “Once Inside” when Jeffrey first finds himself in Gladys’s apartment, each track enhances the action on screen and holds its own musically. The tracks get darker with “Prisoner” and “Finding Michael” and accelerate into the climax of imprisonment to the basement with “Into the Basement”.

From there, the attempted escape scene “Jeffrey Escapes” continues the drive and then drops back to the sickly sweet lullaby “Stuart’s Jealousy”. The action then goes from bad to worse as the music builds to the climax of the film through to “Death and Freedom”. The end credits track is a true minimalist gem as a variation of the opening credits theme that crescendos into a romantic vision of the future.