The Octopus Project Tapped A Grunting Riley Keough & Singing Plants When Scoring ‘Sasquatch Sunset’ – Sound & Screen Film

After a live performance of the song “The Creatures of Nature” from Sasquatch Sunset at Deadline’s Sound & Screen event, the film’s composers, risk-taking band The Octopus Project, revealed that they also recorded a version relayed entirely in bigfoot grunts recorded by the film’s leading lady, actress Riley Keough, who sang English language lyrics for the song.

The film from the quirky, adventurous directing duo the Zellner Bros. (David and Nathan Zellner), features Keough and Jesse Eisenberg as members of a roaming, dwindling tribe of sasquatches marked the latest collaboration between the siblings and the band, who’ve worked together on numerous projects. Both filmmakers and composers thrive on raising the out-there bar on one another, resulting in the alternate grunt track.

When [Keough] recorded the vocals for this, they also did some ADR for her grunts – and there’s no dialogue in the film whatsoever, so it’s just grunting. And so when they sent us the tracks of her vocals, they also sent all of the grunting,” revealed Josh Lambert on stage with his bandmates Toto Miranda and Yvonne Lambert (who’s also Josh’s wife).

“And we thought it was a great idea to make a grunt version, a grunt variation just for fun,” Yvonne added. “And we sent it to David and he sent it to Riley and she loved it!”

“I think it’s on the end of the album on streaming, so it’s streamable,” said Josh.

But Elvis Presley’s grunting granddaughter isn’t even the most outrageous contributor to the score. “We went up to the Redwoods right before they shot and just recorded as much stuff as we could, just audio,” said Josh. “We also had this little plant box, it’s like a mini biosonification device that takes the electrical impulses from plants and animals.”

“We were hooking it up to ferns and mushrooms and redwoods,” explained Yvonne.

“I just gives us this crazy array of sound of mid data that we can assign a key, assign sounds to it and we can practice that,” Josh said. “We take the data from what the plant was telling us they want it to be in the song.”

The Octopus Project and Zellner Bros. share a long, symbiotic history together, well before the group provided the score for the sibling’s 2018 film Damsel. “We scored many of their early shorts and in return they would make music videos for our rock band,” said Yvonne. “And so we just started trading ideas from the beginning.

“One of my favorite things working with the Zellner Bros. is they’re always up for, like. ‘The weirder the better,’” added Josh. “There was one part when we were working on [Sasquatch Sunset] – maybe my favorite part of working on the film – where David said, ‘I challenge you to make this weirder.’ That’s just like a dream come true. That’s what I wanted to hear. And we did our best.”

Check back Monday for the panel video.