“Amaury Laurent Bernier is great at including details to enhance and emphasise the importance of the story he is telling through his music.”
Self-taught artist Amaury Laurent Bernier has been combining his prime passions of music and cinema for many years now, and this year he is providing music for upcoming Afro Dutch film ‘Totem’, a soundtrack including twenty four songs all possessing a different quality to them.
The soundtrack makes a grand entrance with ‘Mane May Ama’, abundant in elaborate instrumentals. It begins a little quieter before blossoming into a stately melody. Soon after we have ‘Overture (the pool)’, initially a mysterious sounding track that then rises with a sense of optimism. With a fast tempo, the song progressively gets more complex in its instruments.
On ‘The encounter’, at first each sound feels like a footstep, and then the tone shifts so that the instrumental gets increasingly powerful, followed by an impermanent silence that guides the rest of the song. ‘Release The Dogs’ is a heart pounding melody, that lowers its volume to make way for a delicate interlude. Such sounds gradually reintroduce the intensity the melody once held, before we hear violins galore.
Bernier described the ‘freedom to move between different genres’ in his career as ‘very liberating’, and that he’s passionate by ‘how a powerful manipulation the music can have on, and affect a film’.
The ultimate piano piece ‘Everything is gonna be okay’ is a mellifluous exhibition of raindrop-like notes, pulling us listeners at the heartstrings. While we don’t know at this moment of time what will be going on in this scene of ‘TOTEM’, we can definitely get a grasp of what emotions might be portrayed.
To bring the film to a close we have ‘I am AMA’, where Bernier reverts back to the sounds we heard in ‘Mane May Ama’, showcasing some strategic repetition. Here I get the feeling there is foreshadowing or even confirmation of a new found hope or identity.
You can listen to the soundtrack here:
