Solaris is Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s novel, set aboard a space station orbiting an ocean planet that seems to give physical form to the crew’s memories. It won the Special Grand Prix of the Jury at Cannes that year, and its soundtrack was the first collaboration between Tarkovsky and the composer Eduard Artemyev.
Artemyev set Bach’s chorale prelude Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ against electronic textures generated on the ANS, the photoelectronic synthesiser devised in Moscow by Evgeny Murzin, on which sound was produced from marks scratched into a blackened glass plate. The result is less a score than a climate: sustained tones, spectral washes, delays suggesting the length of the journey and long stretches where emptiness itself becomes audible. In the weightless sequence aboard the station the Bach returns, now carried on a shimmering electronic sustain with a new counterpoint above it, a fusion of liturgical music and machine drone that still sounds strange today.