Coast musician Damien Lane scores two Screen Music Award nominations

Cambewarra’s Damien Lane has been nominated twice in the short film section of the Screen Music Awards.

Also up for an award, though not in Lane’s category, is Nick Cave – so it’s a bit of a big deal.

“To me they seem quite important,” Lane said of the nominations.

“I’m yet to experience whatever changes it might effect. In terms of industry recognition it’s fantastic for me. One of the people I’m up against against, he scored Priscilla Queen of the Desert, so that’s pretty much top level.”

The works Lane scored were 1919, a film about a soldier with amnesia, and dance film  Emergence.

The first film is what Lane described as “experimental”.

“It’s about a returned soldier from World War I who comes back with amnesia and people are trying to find whose family he belonged to,” Lane said.

“That was filmed up in Camden and it was a really evocative film that screened on ABC last month.”

Emergence was a film where he wrote the music afterwards, though it was meant to look like he wrote it before the dance was filmed.

“That’s about 10 minutes of continuous music and I took that on because it seemed like a very exciting challenge,” he said.

“It was quite tricky to do. It was choreographed and danced to no music and then later edited to all these pieces of classical music and then I had to come in and write music that made it look like it had been danced to it in the first place.

“It was an exercise in trying to bend and twist the music into something that sounded natural. It was quite full-on really.”

Lane has what he thinks may be a different approach to most screen composers – he often argues for less music rather than more.

”I don’t like the music to be too manipulative or spoon-feeding people,” he said.

“Music can do a really wonderful thing in terms of being subtext. I just prefer to work that way rather than going ‘well, this is a sad scene, so here’s the strings’.

“Instead I’d like to have music that’s suggesting something a little bit more abstract than just confirming what you can already see.”