Mogwai, 'Ether'

Last year, Mogwai recorded a soundtrack for the BBC documentary Atomic, Living In Dread And Promise, from their Storyville series. This previously unknown information comes to us via COS, along with the news that they reworked that soundtrack, and are releasing it as a new album called Atomic, out April 1st from Rock Action Records / Temporary Residence. Here’s the opening track, Ether. The synopsis for the BBC documentary, presumably a key inspiration for Atomic, is as follows: Seventy years ago this month, the bombing of Hiroshima showed the appalling destructive power of the atomic bomb. Mark Cousins’s bold documentary looks at death in the atomic age, but life too. Using only archive film and a new musical score by the band Mogwai, the film shows us an impressionistic kaleidoscope of our nuclear times – protest marches, Cold War sabre-rattling, Chernobyl and Fukishima – but also the sublime beauty of the atomic world, and how x-rays and MRI scans have improved human lives. The nuclear age has been a nightmare, but dreamlike too. Atomic Tracklist: 01. Ether 02. SCRAM 03. Bitterness Centrifuge 04. U-235 05. Pripyat 06. Weak Force 07. Little Boy 08. Are You A Dancer? 09. Tzar 10. Fat Man You can hear U-235 here as well.