The Owners: 'We were immersed in the movie - it was traumatising'

Spending two weeks in an isolated barn on Dartmoor watching scenes from a horror movie isn't the type of work that would appeal to everyone, is it?

Even less so when it also involves trying to make the most terrifying noises possible come out of the instruments around you.

But, while the band Never Not Nothing have had support from Annie Mac on Radio 1 and worked on tracks with Idles and The Prodigy, they'd never scored a Hollywood movie before.

So when they were asked to make the music for The Owners, starring Maisie Williams, they knew they had to do something a bit different.

In The Owners, Jake Curran and Maisie Williams play two robbers who target an old country house. Unfortunately for them, it turns into a "brutal and bloody nightmare"

"We like to do a thing we call method music, where we try and put ourselves in the most extreme environment possible," Space, from the band, tells Radio 1 Newsbeat.

"The whole movie is set in a house in the middle of nowhere, and since we only had two and a half weeks to get the soundtrack done, we went away to our own house in the middle of nowhere.

"We had string players come and visit for the odd day, but mostly it was just the two of us and we'd work eight in the morning until two in the morning every single day.

"We wrote most of it to picture, so we had the movie playing all the time. We just got lost in it."

The experience was, apparently, "nicely traumatising" - and that's a pretty fitting description for the soundtrack they ended up with, too.

Think distorted strings, white noise and huge, pounding, drum hits.

"We recorded everything super close, and you could hear the bow on the strings and stuff," Space explains, "and then we chucked it on a tape player and messed around with it.

"So, in a human and very physical way, it was badly played - and we ended up with loads of weird random effects that you couldn't get from programming something into a computer."

You'd have thought that, after playing Arya in Game of Thrones, Maisie Williams was done with traumatic storylines

A full length horror movie is a long way from what Never Not Nothing are known for.

Whether it's their own music, or the two Idles albums they produced, most of the stuff they've worked on so far has been "short form songs with verses and choruses".

But, Space says, it was "liberating" to go beyond that.

"It was great to develop ideas slowly and sometimes be more textural, other times more melodic - it kind of allowed us to be more extreme."

There were some downsides, though.

"I think the producers were a little bit scared because we're a band and they weren't sure if we could actually do it," Space says.

"So we had to we had to jump through a few hoops to get the job but once we showed what we could do they were really excited."

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