Interview: Gamburtsevs

Gamburtsevs is the brainchild of Jonathan Horner and Daniel Allen, with whom you might be familiar with from the excellent Middlesbrough-based band Nel Unlit. Gamburtsevs is a short film which speaks to a labour of love – shot, written, directed, acted in and edited by the duo. It explores the majesty of nature through stark, bleak visuals and powerful, emotive rock music, filmed in locations as eclectic as The Lake District, Whitby, Brighton, The Westgarth Social Club, and the soundtrack was recorded by Horner and Allen in an old telephone repeater station on Shap Fell in Cumbria. 

As deliberate and as direct as this process sounds, Allen tells me that: “the project came from a small collection of instrumentals that had sat dormant for years, the tracks were largely unfinished but it was always called Gamburtsevs, with a one-line story to hold it together. It wasn’t until Jon heard the music and started to flesh out the story that the project started to morph into first an album, then a film. It just kept growing and even when ideas were beyond our means, they stayed on the table and we eventually found a way to do most of them.”

The resourcefulness of the project is somewhat staggering, Horner and Allen were very aware of the material limitations the scope of their ambition presented, and bent the landscapes and locations to the needs of the film. Dan tells me that “As we didn’t have the budget to actually go to Svalbard, we had to use what we had access to. Jon had stayed in Shap Fell Bothy once before and suggested it as a place for us to record the film’s music. From that point on it became spiritually tied to the project and during recording, we realised it could also be the location for the main character’s living space. The bothy is surrounded by quite barren, open land which can be hard to place geographically if you don’t know it well, so it seemed like a good place to film.”

Gamburtsevs is a beautifully impressionistic piece, anchored by the protagonist’s sense of physical and spiritual isolation. He arrives at the vault with a strong sense of duty and is on a mission to save the world. However, as the film progresses, prolonged detachment from others leads him to question everything. Without other people around him for support and guidance, he becomes disorientated in time, self, morality and spirituality.

Having submitted the film to various festivals with a good modicum of success, Horner and Allen are set on facilitating screenings of the film in February before an online release in March. The soundtrack is now available on LP through Ack! Ack! Ack! Records.