The grief-stained fingers of Dutch composer Rindert Lammers press against cinema’s fourth wall with delicate precision on his debut single.
This ambient neo-classical offering doesn’t merely soundtrack emotion—it excavates it from between the frames of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s ‘Shoplifters‘, specifically the beach scene that left Lammers forever changed. Joseph Shabason’s saxophone weaves through the composition like a gentle current, carrying listeners toward an emotional shoreline that feels both foreign and deeply familiar.
What elevates Lammers’ work beyond mere tribute is how it transmutes personal catastrophe into universal comfort. Having found refuge in darkened cinemas following the devastating loss of three friends, his music honours cinema’s power to heal without resorting to sentimentality. The track stands as the cornerstone of hi debut album, Western Vinyl —a meditation on gratitude that transforms borrowed Japanese visual language into something authentically European, creating a shared vocabulary for expressing the inexpressible. Here, ambient music isn’t background but foreground, demanding the same attentive gaze we offer to film’s most arresting moments.
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