MP3 Jon Sorensen - Jon Sorensen´s WITCH Symphony

Orchestral, Celtic and Symphonic Soundtrack composed by Jon Sorensen for his 17th Century Scotland Feature Film project WITCH. Dedicated to Michael Kamen. With the Krause Chamber Orchestra and Choir. Lead Gaelic voices Jon Sorensen and Mhorag McGlennie.

5 MP3 Songs in this album (47:26) !
Related styles: NEW AGE: Celtic New Age, CLASSICAL: Film Music



Details:
"I want to let you know that I'm enjoying every second of your fab WITCH music. Brilliant, spine-tingling as always".

"The WITCH is truly amazing. One word. WOW. You're quite something. Gorgeous, stirring, evocative".

"Congratulations Jon for these brilliant compositions and your talent I'm sure will be transfered to your next film!".

"The most original, sensual and incredibly talented electronica artist and film composer to emerge from anywhere in the last five years" (Sight and Sound).

Jon Sorensen: "I wrote and developed the story of WITCH in late 1999, and co-wrote an initial draft of the screenplay with British playwright Eric Pringle. It deals with true events surrounding the last "witch" to be burned at the stake in 17th Century Scotland. Think of THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF meets BRAVEHEART meets HIGHLANDER and you've some idea of the flavour. But that really does'nt even come close. It's very singular in tone. The screenplay was then specifically invited to the Sundance Film Festival in 2000 where it attracted marked Hollywood interest. Blame it on me that you never saw the movie. I refused point-blank to alter or re-write certain elements in the story. This was a first for me. Hollywood is quite rightly a collaborative scripting process. It's a tried and tested system that works laudably in most circumstances and one must be prepared to accommodate that in rewrites or film-making. But not with this screenplay or one of its' nature. It really stands in a genre of its' own. It was later lined up to be made on a very modest budget in the U.K. with a highly respectable cast and crack technical crew, but I then elected to make ALIEN BLOOD, a more accessible project to me at that time and had to be set in 1999 on the eve of the new "millennium", and itself another "feminist" piece strangely enough. Amongst others, an Australian production company then wanted to buy the screenplay to showcase in a period fantasy television series they were doing but again I could'nt part with the script. The atmosphere and the dynamics of the story deal with personal sacrifice and the hounding of natural beauty and natural wisdom through fear and prejudice against a background of mythology and mysticism and war. It is also a very feminine and feminist piece. This symphony of music gives a flavour of the feature film yet to be made in a manner that will yet do it justice, if I am ever allowed to do so. It is dedicated to Michael Kamen. It is also dedicated to the eternal human spirit and to my Scottish highlander and Viking forefathers. In a sense this project has come full circle, since, in common with many of my film projects, the screenplay was inspired by a chance piece of music, "The Confession Of Isobel Gowdie", by the Scottish composer James MacMillan. I hope you enjoy it".

Jon Sorensen, March 2009.


Jon Sorensen was born and raised in the Scottish Highlands. As a teenager he saw the films "STAR WARS" and, more significantly, "CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND". He hitch-hiked from Scotland to London and was hired in the visual effects department of the original "ALIEN" where he worked alongside Ridley Scott on the miniatures and "alien FX" whilst living and sleeping in the studio dressing-room famously used by Christopher Lee in the "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" movies made by Hammer Films. "ALIEN" won the Oscar for best visual effects, and Sorensen was finally persuaded to move his sleeping bag out of the studio and he went on to work on other films such as "THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK", "SUPERMAN 2", "THE TIME BANDITS", "EXCALIBUR", "OUTLAND", "MOONRAKER", and both "DRAGONSLAYER" and "THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS" for Disney. He also worked alongside the late Jim Henson on the epic middle-earth feature film "THE DARK CRYSTAL". Sorensen had by now set his sleeping bag up on the back lot of Elstree Studios amongst the giant toadstools and alien plant-life constructed for that Henson film. At about this time, he caught sight of two "bio-pics" made by Brit director Ken Russell about the "romantic" poets Wordsworth and Coleridge shot in the English Lake District. So he moved there himself and made two movies as Writer-Producer-Director. These were "A RETURN TO LOVE" (1997) for television and the David Lynch/X-Files/New Age sci-fi feature "ALIEN BLOOD" (2000). The U.S. Distributor's ad-line for the latter was "The Truth Is Out There...Way Out There!" Moving sideways from his camera/visual effects expertise, Sorensen immersed himself in the Sound Design and music supervision for these films which led directly to his becoming a prolific composer of music in his own right. His compositions are filmically linked to the listener, designed to take you on a "cinematic" trip with every new track. Atmospheric, mythical, ambient, techno-tribal and full of "plot twists", they display Sorensen's ongoing passion for music and film and an all-important "sense of wonder". He continues to maintain contacts in the Hollywood and European film communities, writes screenplays, and still develops and makes films when not making music. He is currently preparing his short "fantasy" screenplay "Bid Time Return" for production in 2009.


He has been shooting material worldwide and composing music for a personal "ambient feature film" called "Seeker" since 2006. New Orleans and LA based Voodoo films report, " The material is incredible but he simply refuses to finish it!" Sorensen: "It's an organic thing".



Bits and pieces of Sorensen also appear in some of the above mentioned feature films. His were the "alien hands" who held Yaphet Kotto's head whilst his head was being shattered in Ridley Scott's "Alien", and his was the "giant's foot" coming down on the roof of a shoreline "troll's house" in Terry Gilliam's "Time Bandits". He also appears briefly in his own "Alien Blood" as a man-in-black footsoldier being machine-gunned off a wall by the female alien mother at the film's shoot-out climax.


Since late 2006, Sorensen has completed an incredible 14 finished albums of original music. After only two months of featuring his music on the redoubtable "social" networking site MySpace he signed his first non-exclusive record contract in January of 2007. His albums have included "Rendlesham Forest", "This Island Earth", "Alien Soldier", "Rubicon", "2012", "The Quatermass Experiment" "The Banned Tapes" and "Andromeda". In that time, his music has been used in over 70 independent U.S. and European films and in television commercials in France, Italy, Greece, Eastern Europe, Australia, Germany, The Netherlands and the United States.







"You are a true modern artist and it's just amazing the amount of music you've been able to produce". (Scott Benzie, Film Composer, UK).