Sleepwalking (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

The prolific film composer Christopher Young matches the bleak mood of William Maher's low-budget independently distributed directorial debut with his low-key score for Sleepwalking. A working-class domestic drama about an 11-year-old girl and her wayward caregivers, the film has a slow-moving pace and winter scenery (Saskatchewan stood in for Northern California and Utah), and Young uses a guitar (played by Peter Maunu), a piano (Gary Nesteruk), and a bass guitar (Dave Carpenter) in the foreground, with synth programming to approximate sustained strings in the background. The tempos range from slow to walking, and there's plenty of echo on the note-by-note playing of the primary instruments. Occasionally, Young revs up to a canter, as in "The Water Waltz," a lilting pop tune, but for the most part this is ponderous, introspective music, meant to accompany a serious story about people in empty landscapes and desperate circumstances.