INTERKOSMOS The Soundtrack
$20.00 ppd
The music for Jim Finn's "shoe-string sci-fi" was created by Jim Becker and Colleen Burke with additional drum parts by Jim White and additional vocals by Jiha Lee. Besides writing and touring with his band Califone, Jim Becker most recently has toured with the bands Freakwater and the Dirty Three. As well as playing piano in the band We Ragazzi, Colleen Burke recently toured with Smog and is currently collaborating with filmmaker Eve Sussman to develop a musical film in Miami. Jiha Lee has sang and played flute with Bright Eyes and The Good Life. Dirty Three drummer Jim White has toured and recorded with Cat Power, Nick Cave, Will Oldham and recently played percussion on the score of Nick Cave's film The Proposition. The limited of run of 500 180g pink vinyl is hugged by a cleverly crafted jacket designed by Dexterity Press.

- from the SHRUG RECORDS website



from Jigsaw Lounge 2006 Rotterdam Film Festival coverage:

INTERKOSMOS [7/10]
Though possibly too cutesy and insubstantial for some tastes, Interkosmos - a skilfully-executed faux-documentary about a 1970s Communist plan to colonise Ganymede and Titan - is an impressively idiosyncratic and strikingly confident debut from writer/director/producer/star Jim Finn.
   Its arrival on the film-festival scene is well-timed, coming soon after Russian Alexey Fedorchenko's 72-minute mini-epic First on the Moon. This cinematic 'space race' is all the more amusing as neither director was apparently aware of the "rival" project (future double-bill pairings, and perhaps even a joint DVD release, seem strongly indicated.)
   Like Fedorchenko, Finn's film is at heart a romance (between two of the space-explorers, played here by Finn and Nandini Khaund) which builds to a tragic/enigmatic conclusion. Around this central story Finn assembles a range of 'archive' footage in which we follow the 'interkosmonauts' as they go through their basic training; hear extracts from their in-flight conversations; see a charming Clangers-ish stop-motion animation from 'contemporary' GDR TV ("The Little Space Pig"); while a German-accented 'expert' (Ruediger Van Den Boom) narrates pseudo-scientific explanations of how the colonies would form "a secret archive of Communism in space" in the event of a capitalism-triggered "global inferno."
   Despite the fundamentally serious nature of the stuff Finn is satirising, Interkosmos is a whimsical, fluffily endearing affair: parts works brilliantly (the 'Trolley Song' gag and its 'kindergarten of boneless children' coda mark a particular highlight,), most works OK, and a small amount falls flat (an over-extended, sub-Busby-Berkeley sequence involving two sets of Communist hockey-players.)
   The tone is of genial goofiness, executed with a light elan and a unified, restrained visual aesthetic, that is very hard to dislike. And the eclectic score - by Jim Becker and Colleen Burke - is so evocative and perfectly-judged it deserves a CD release of its own: this is the best krautrock-spaceopera soundtrack that Can never wrote. And while the main 'action' ends at the 62 minute mark, remaining seated throughout the jokily over-extended 'exit music' is a pleasure, not a chore.

Neil Young
12th February, 2006