Listen to Shane Carruth’s Original Ambient Soundtrack for Upstream Color

Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Festival, where it received a number of positive reviews. The film will be released on Blu-ray/DVD and iTunes on May 7, but if you need to have some sort of experience with the film before then, you can listen to Shane Carruth’s original soundtrack right now. (And you can spend some time obsessing over the song titles and what they might imply about the film’s storyline.)

(The soundtrack is no longer streaming.)

As you might imagine, given titles like “Leaves Expanded May Be Prevailing Blue Mixed with Yellow of the Sand” and “The Finest Qualities of Our Nature Like the Bloom On Fruits Can Be Preserved”, Carruth’s ambient pieces are highly impressionistic, and move between being lovely and evocative, and rather creepy and disturbing. (And sometimes, a combination of all of the above.)

Highlights include the ominous, M83-esque “As If It Would Have a Universal and Memorable Ending” (which can be heard in the second half of Upstream Color’s trailer), the diaphanous “The Rays Which Stream Through The Shutter Will Be No Longer Remembered When the Shutter Is Wholly Removed”, and the gentle “A Sullen Rush and Roar” (which closes the soundtrack on a contemplative note). Fans of M83, Stars of the Lid, and Vidna Obmana will find much to bliss out to here.

The Upstream Color soundtrack can be purchased from iTunes and a vinyl+MP3 release is available from the film’s store.