“There’s a religiosity to techno”: Bruce LaBruce in conversation with Hannah Holland

A new, sexually charged film from the underground queer filmmaker is soundtracked by the London-based DJ and Adonis resident. With the full score for The Visitor set to be released as a standalone record next month, the pair go deep on transgressive art, the enduring subversiveness of techno, and Brat.

In the opening scenes of revered queer filmmaker, artist and writer Bruce LaBruce’s newest film The Visitor (which premiered at the Berlinale in February), a lone suitcase on a nondescript London street slowly unzips from the inside. Against a backdrop of pulsing synths and crackling electricity samples, an arm reaches out and actor and burlesque artist Bishop Black emerges, standing naked from head to toe. 

This is our introduction to the titular character of The Visitor – an unexplained but presumed migrant, who goes on to work as a housekeeper in a clinical new build lived in by a wealthy family, before seducing and having sex with each member. Loosely adapted from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 surrealist psychological drama Teorema – released as Theorem in English – it’s a provocative watch that breaks down binaries between feature films and pornography, with backing sounds provided by London-based producer and long-running LGBTQ+ party Adonis resident DJ Hannah Holland. 

Having used composer Ennio Morricone’s discordant score for Teorema as a starting point, Holland’s soundtrack weaves dancefloor fodder alongside orchestral sounds and ethereal beatless tracks, veering from atmospheric to playful to thrilling and frenetic. Set to be released as a 21-track double LP on 20 September, it’s an engaging, if disorientating standalone listen. But experienced alongside the visuals of the film, Holland’s dark techno and electro comes alive as a narrative device.

As the unnamed character moves around the home and seduces each member of the household in succession, disquieting ambient noise morphs into propulsive thuds, moving the film away from its storyline moments into intense segments of porn. There’s unfiltered, often challenging to watch kink from scat to edgeplay, and with lights that flash on-screen layered over booming kickdrums – a visual 180 from the stark light of the house’s communal spaces – it’s easy to imagine many of the scenes taking place in a dark corner of a Berlin fetish club. Driving the pace of both The Visitor’s most physical moments and its wider plot, Holland’s score guides us through its abrupt changes in mood and aesthetic, setting a different tone for each frame and controlling an ever-shifting build and release of tension throughout.

Reflecting on their work together on the film, LaBruce and Holland discuss transgressive art, translating charged on-screen atmospheres into sound, and the enduring subversiveness of techno.

Bruce, when did you first become aware of Hannah’s music?

Bruce LaBruce: I’ve been aware of Hannah peripherally for quite a while, through people like Peaches and Planningtorock. But it wasn’t until [actor who plays The Son] Kurtis Lincoln suggested I get in touch with her. I thoroughly investigated her music and that was the lightbulb moment – “this would be perfect”.

Hannah Holland: That was about a year ago.

B: It was after we’d shot the original first week of shooting in London, which was in April 2023. I drew Hannah’s attention to Teorema. That was the starting point because my movie The Visitor is kind of a reimagining of Pasolini’s film, but I wanted to transpose it onto more modern queer sensibility. The styles of music couldn’t be more different, but they both give the movies a feeling of discordance. How would you describe it, Hannah?

H: We did a bit of a test. We spoke about the main themes of Teorema, the discordant [score] that [composer Ennio] Morricone had created for that film and just how avant-garde and strange it was. I was just playing around with those ideas and riffing off that. The first thing was I made a demo; I created a piece of music with all that in mind, put it through all my synths and stuff and sent it to Bruce. It was quite clearly going to work.

Had you seen any of the film before that? Or seen any of the script?

H: I hadn’t, but weirdly my friend and I had watched Teorema on a streaming platform three days before. We sat up and were like: “What is this queer film with Terence Stamp by Pasolini that we hadn’t seen?” We watched it and it was so crazy; we loved it and were really gagged by this film. Then, literally three days later, Bruce and I had the conversation and he said that The Visitor was a reimagining of it.

B: That’s synchronicity. Also, in Morricone’s original score, he tried to update the music to the 60s and used this weird interpretation of pop music at the time. A few tracks are almost like British club music from then, especially when The Visitor arrives and the music playing in the house is this weird, bouncy pop song. That was something I talked about with Hannah. I thought techno music would be appropriate because it’s a more contemporary interpretation of that kind of pop music.

Hannah, did you base the music you made on the original score at all?

H: The main theme, which recurs throughout the film, was based on that original score. Then all of the sex scenes have techno – some of those tracks I had made already. Bruce had sent me a load of amazing references from obscure 70s movies, like John Barry’s score for The Day of the Locust, John Carpenter’s The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers composed by Denny Zeitlin. So I had this idea of what he wanted: quirky, quite camp and trying to interpret the pop side of Morricone’s score through some modern ways that weren’t just techno.

How different is the process of making a whole film soundtrack compared to a club banger?

B: I wanted her to go back and forth between techno that drives all the sex scenes and more traditional ideas of soundtrack music, which is more atmospheric, orchestral and without a driving beat or rhythm, that relates to the characters and the pauses between the sex scenes.

H: I really love making those kinds of atmospheres. It’s so abstract and it’s not like making a club banger at all. I love how free those kinds of soundscapes can be, just tweaking them to fit what’s happening. It’s more like DJing, because you’re absorbing the atmosphere on screen and interpreting that through music and sounds. It’s like taking in the feeling in the room and the crowd, so it’s a similar process.

Of course, there’s a lot of sex scenes in the film. Bruce, why do you think club music works so well for that?

B: It’s a [play on] a bit of a porn convention. A lot of modern porn does use driving music, especially since narrative has become less important in a lot of industry porn; they treat it almost like a music video. So that’s the idea of having music that constantly has a beat in the background – it facilitates the sex in a way. 

Much of my work over the past ten years has been about the overlap of religious and sexual ecstasy and how similar they are, [through] overlaying religious imagery and sexual imagery. So quite often, I was asking Hannah: “Could you put in orgasmic sounds or some religious overtones?” The film goes back and forth between religious atmospheric music, and what you would consider the devil’s music – techno is a kind of driving, pagan music. It’s thumping, like getting thumped sexually goes along with the beat and sex has a rhythm.

It’s an interesting contrast there, but people have been talking about techno and religion in the same vein for ages. Many clubbers will talk about going to Berghain as going to Sunday “church”. How much was using techno in that context a nod towards the history of queerness, and clubbing as a part of that?

B: There’s definitely a religiosity to techno. In Berlin techno clubs, they are all standing facing one direction and the DJ is the deity. Sometimes there’s a real cult of DJs, where people are standing there transfixed – kind of like with a preacher. And people are having this ecstatic response to the music, so that definitely plays into what we were doing with the techno.

H: To add to that, when people are lost to the music and a whole room has gone into a different space that becomes very spiritual. You can’t really describe what’s happening when the music takes over. Whether you’re high or not, it’s something that is like going into a fifth dimension. It does feel very spiritual. We had a theme as well that we were trying to create called “Catholic sex techno”, with choral voices, throbbing beats and bells that Bruce wanted to achieve for some of the scenes.

How important is transgression and deviance to the art that both of you make? Is it something you are always thinking about when making music or a film?

H: It’s not something I think about. I don’t relate to mainstream culture a lot of the time, so I’m drawn to outsider characters in clubs, films and music. The art that gets created through that doesn’t necessarily feel deviant to me. It’s not a conscious effort, but it’s an effort to find things that are out there and not doing things that are homogenous.

B: I’ve been around for a long time, so I’ve lived through pre-liberation, the gay liberation movement and post-liberation. It’s a bit more directly political for me. Being queer was resistance against things that were very immediate and dangerous, like homophobia and homophobic violence; being able to express yourself without being harassed by the police, the authorities, or whoever. When I make work that’s considered to be more pornographic I’ve had to fight against a lot of suppression of my work over the years. It’s from the position of an outsider who has been marginalised, making art for people who have been marginalised and aren’t trying to necessarily have this mainstream acceptance. So being an outsider and forging solidarity with like-minded outsiders is much more interesting to me. It’s a direct, political kind of engagement.

What do you think transgression means in the modern age, when what we see and what is deemed successful is driven by algorithms?

B: I feel like I’ve kept doing the same thing I’ve always been doing. Technology is a bit of a distraction – it will always be there and used for good and bad purposes, you just have to figure out how to make it work for you. The other thing is that a lot of things seem transgressive these days and you have to question whether they actually are. Just like Brat – it’s amazing how something that started pop and innocent suddenly became this politically charged thing that overtook the world and transmogrified into a mainstream political meme. Then people say “Brat is over” because it’s been used up by the mainstream and totally perverted the original meaning of it. You have to be careful with technology because sometimes it’s taking [your art] out of your hands.

H: When I was about five, those VHS films that you would watch every day, those shape you like [content you watch online] does. Mine were films like the original Hairspray and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, featuring all these queer icons – Bruce being one of them – that have been with me since I was a tiny child. They still are, and they were like my real-life algorithm.

What does The Visitor mean to you personally?

B: For me, the movie was very much about the process. It’s very hard to make a movie and it’s even harder to make a movie where you have complete creative freedom. The spirit of the whole project was to be improvisational – it was riffing on this idea of reimagining Teorema, but it was very much working with performers and spontaneously taking it in unexpected directions. That’s what allowed me to work with someone like Hannah and work in the same spirit – there were no rules.

H: It’s definitely very boundary-pushing. Collaborating with Bruce and just creating, while working with a hero and master, was an honour.

The Visitor Original Soundtrack by Hannah Holland is set to be released on 20 September via Spotlight Records. The Visitor is available to stream via MUBI.