John Murphy: "Sunshine"

Danny Boyle’s sci-fi saga Sunshine was given a strangely stifled reception upon its limited release last year. Sure, it wasn’t without its flaws, but it certainly raised some interesting questions about fanaticism and man’s understanding of sacrifice. Moreover, it was a deep feast for the senses—-none so much as aural, as all parties privy to a Surround Sound screening would gladly attest. As soon as the film had landed, audiences were quickly smitten by John Murphy’s rousing soundtrack, widely regarded as being able to outlive the impact of the movie itself. However, in one of Hollywood’s blackest ironies, the simultaneous release of the latest LP from Underworld—who collaborated on the recording with Murphy—meant that the planned release of a soundtrack CD was put firmly on pause. Not wanting to put a dent in the projected turnover of their new album, Underworld called in the lawyers and the score was sent to the icehouse, entombed in red tape and destined to live only as a myth.

One year and much legal wrangling later, Murphy’s seen fit to take the law into his own hands. In a last-ditch attempt to get his output to the fans—who so far have had to make do with glitch-ridden extracts ripped from the DVD—he’s burnt off 100 copies of his would-be soundtrack and sent it to a treble-figured few. Of the twenty collected tracks on the autographed CD-R, it’s the recurring titular suite that’s the one everyone’s going potty about. Already being groomed as the new “Requiem For A Tower” (trailer count to date: Cloverfield, Fringe, a Timberland commercial, and Christiano Ronaldo: The Story So Far), the piece is little more than a looping chord formula of i-VI6-III64-VI, a musical Fibonacci Sequence that targets multiple receptors in the brain causing endorphins to gush like an iPod version of the Videodrome signal. However, it’s Murphy’s work on the background detail that cements the track as such an utterly esoteric movement: digital rotors engage, pianos quiver, and guitars combust at all the right moments, tightening your spine like a rail of uncut coke.

When you think of the sheer ease at which Fox could have marketed this CD, you can’t help but wonder who’s really had the last laugh here, especially now that it’s been leaked into public domain by one of the select hundred (not guilty). Nevertheless, compositions this emotive can be used for more than just propelling Cillian Murphy into infinity, and, as one ardent commenter posted on YouTube: “This music gives me superpowers!”