Album Review: The Moomins [OST] by Graeme Miller

T he children's TV series The Moomins, broadcast in the late 70s and early 80s, is as strange and charming as the Tove Jansson stories on which it is based. The stop-motion animation may have been made in Poland, but its wonky soundtrack was composed and recorded by a couple of post-punk theatre performers from Leeds. Accordingly, a maverick DIY feel pervades.

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Like many kids' shows of its era, The Moomins was occult, dark, curious and druggy - but really quite alarmingly so. Among the new age flutes and naive Casio keys on this never-before-released sountrack are dark wave basslines and paranoid vocal chants that, in the dark, would freak you the fuck out. Worldly lullabies such as 'Woodland Band' and sci-fi passages such as 'Most Unusual' wouldn't sound out of place on an experimental NTS radio show, while 'Midwinter Rites' is the sound of a hellish bad trip.

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Crikey, here's a flashback to the 80s. Leeds postpunkers Miller and Shill created this experimental soundtrack in 1982 with seemingly just a Wasp synth and ocarina to hand, and although micro-melody whimsy is at its heart, there's a Tangs/Radiophonic Workshop slant that gives tracks such as Midwinter Rites a spooky Kill List/Children Of The Stones edge_._ .

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