Adam Gibbons hits reset with Music For Motion Pictures
Scratching an itch which has always been there, Adam Gibbons puts his Lack Of Afro persona on hold for a new album inspired by heroes of his such as John Barry, John Williams and David Holmes.
Music For Motion Pictures follows 2021’s The Last Bastion as the second album under his own name, and sees release 13th November 2026. Pre order vinyl, CD and digitals here and listen to the first drop from it below.
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“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 – 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.”
The guitar laden ‘Dripping In Chemistry’ is, in Gibbons’ words, “the sound of attraction – that exciting early phase when you cannot stop thinking about that person,” a chemistry “you can’t quite explain”. ‘Latin Ping’ takes its title from a playlist Gibbons made for the record’s central character (a devotee of Latin music), combined with the pair’s nickname for coffee – “as in, my cup of morning ping’.” The track mirrors both halves of its name, built on a Latin foundation and pushed along at a higher tempo,“which is the feeling you get when the caffeine kicks in.”
Riding over a tight, funk laden ‘spy-esque’ groove, ‘Eddie Redmayne’ takes its name from a comment made while the pair watched the recent remake of The Day Of The Jackal: that Gibbons had “Eddie Redmayne energy”. A comparison, he says, he’d heard a few times before.
For Gibbons, the pull of writing for the screen – real or imagined – has never really left him. “When you write to picture, you’re not just starting from a blank canvas – there is already a sense of direction there, some decisions have already been made and some choices are not available to you as a composer,” he says. “By identifying those ideas that aren’t available to you, the ones that are really jump out. The power that music can have on a scene has always amazed me – the right music in the right place can be utterly transformative.”