The Octopus Project wanted ‘the weirder, the better’ for their ‘Sasquatch Sunset’ score

“We feel really comfortable taking risks with them and they’re always a game for just the weirder, the better,” declares Yvonne Lambert of The Octopus Project about collaborating on their score for “Sasquatch Sunset” with the film’s adventurous directors. For our recent webchat with the trio, fellow band member Toto Miranda adds, “they went into it wanting to do a more documentary style approach to the whole thing and have it be a little bit more removed, but then as they got into it, they found themselves drawn into the characters and the setting and wanting it to feel weightier and more epic. So we started with some lighter themes and then as it went on, it got pulled into a heavier and heavier place and a more epic place.” Watch our video interview with Lambert, Miranda and the third member of the group Josh Lambert above.

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“Sasquatch Sunset” is directed by David Zellner and Nathan Zellner, written by David Zellner, and stars Emmy nominee Riley Keough, Oscar nominee Jesse Eisenberg, Christophe Zajac-Denek, and Nathan Zellner. The quirky drama follows a year in the life of a unique family of four nomadic Sasquatch in the wilderness of Northern California. They spend their days exploring, foraging, and performing rituals where they drum with branches in hopes of getting a response from other Sasquatch.

The film is an audacious, provocative, funny and often moving fairy tale about the day-to-day lives of a family of mythical creatures. It presented the trio with a unique challenge — do they approach the music by leaning into the film’s more absurdist elements or do they focus on the wild, natural setting of the film? Josh Lambert suggests that they did both, by taking field recordings and sampling, such as “playing a saxophone or a drum or something, and then pitch it down, slow it down,” he explains. “There was one piece we sent in with initial sketches that was just the sound of these ceramic mugs knocking into each other, but slowed down several octaves. And they really responded to that and felt like that really said something about the world they were making. And so from that point, we started slowing everything down and doing lots of very stretched out, pitched down versions of things we’ve recorded,” he says, with Josh Lambert adding that “it really worked because it was about sasquatches. We were thinking, what would sasquatch music be like, as ridiculous as that sounds coming out of my mouth. It would be slower and kind of human, but not really exactly,” he smiles.

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