Syd March is an employee at a clinic that sells injections of live viruses harvested from sick celebrities to obsessed fans. Biological communion - for a price. Syd also supplies illegal samples of these viruses to piracy groups, smuggling them from the clinic in his own body. When he becomes infected with the disease that kills super sensation Hannah Geist, Syd becomes a target for collectors and rabid fans. He must unravel the mystery surrounding her death before he suffers the same fate...

E.C. Woodley's score for Antiviral won't be to everyone's taste. If you haven't seen the movie, or understand the thinking behind how the score was composed, it will sound, on the whole, like a collection of rather bland atmospheric background tracks. However, this is by design, as it's supposed to be an extension of the protagonist, Syd March, rather than an entity in its own right. The result being that the music is used as an extension of March to gain an added look inside his mind as he navigates the mind field of his career choices and the fateful consequences.

Woodley uses a modular analogue synthesizer combined with voice and other acoustic elements to suggest March's state of mind. It's an incredibly powerful concept and works surprisingly well. Having said that, if you're in the dark about the reasoning behind the composer's direction you could be left disappointed by what you hear.

This makes it a hard album to review, as technically it's a faultless score which does exactly what it sets out to achieve - putting you in the mind set of the movie's main character. But listened to in isolation, it's not an easy album to digest.

7

Darren Rea