Music For Motion Pictures

Having called an indefinite hiatus on Lack of Afro following Love Dealer – his most recent release for a project that has carried him through the best part of two decades – Adam Gibbons returns to the place it all began. Music For Motion Pictures is Gibbons’ second album under his own name, arriving five years on from 2021’s The Last Bastion, and it finds him leaning further into a cinematic obsession that predates his releases as Lack of Afro. Before the funk, soul, disco (and much more) of his musical alter-ego took hold, Gibbons aspired to be a film composer, growing up on the scores of John Barry, John Williams, Thomas Newman and, more recently, David Holmes, Daniel Pemberton and Ludwig Göransson. 

“The material I put out under my own name is designed to scratch the itch I’ve always had of writing music to picture,” says Gibbons. “A film composer was what I wanted to be – I was obsessed with it for a number of years. I actually thought the Lack of Afro material would be a side project or even a distraction. It ended up being the other way around.” 

Where The Last Bastion scored a film that has never existed, Music For Motion Pictures takes a different route. It isn’t tied to any picture at all, but plays like one anyway - charting a real relationship track by track. “It’s a soundtrack to a period of time that happened in my life,” Gibbons explains. “It’s not a film – we didn’t record any visuals of what happened – but it’s a musical journal, an audio diary if you will. Each track relates to certain events that happened in & around a relationship I had.”