Messengers (Original Soundtrack) presents Jana Irmert’s score for Jeffrey Zablotny’s film Messengers, a poetic exploration of three subterranean observatories hidden deep beneath Canada, Japan, and Antarctica. Descending into vast underground research facilities built to detect some of the universe’s most elusive phenomena, the film unfolds as a tactile meditation on human curiosity, deep time, and the shadowy regions of the unconscious mind.

At the heart of the soundtrack is a vintage Yamaha Electone organ whose dark, ethereal, and distinctly analog voice became the score’s guiding presence. Rather than treating the instrument as a pristine sound source, Irmert embraces its physicality: the subtle noises of keys, mechanisms, and air remain woven into the recordings, preserving the traces of a human body interacting with a real object in space and time. These sonic imperfections become a counterweight to the film’s abstract investigations of subatomic phenomena, grounding its cosmic inquiries in something tangible and immediate.

The music unfolds through constantly shifting textures and evolving harmonic fields, reflecting one of the film’s central ideas: a world composed of particles in perpetual motion, where certainty dissolves into probability and transformation.

Alongside the electric organ, seismic recordings and resonances drawn from natural materials are woven throughout the score, creating a sonic fabric in which composition and sound design become inseparable. Sounds emerge, recede, and recombine, creating a sense of suspended time in which movement is continuous yet often imperceptible. Throughout the score, darkness is presented as a fertile and luminous space of possibility where hidden forces shape reality beneath the threshold of perception.

Balancing ambiguity and clarity, the elusive and the palpable, the music inhabits the same liminal territory as the film itself. The organ’s warm, corporeal presence anchors the listener amid vast and mesmerizing imagery, while its drifting resonances and spectral overtones open pathways toward contemplation. What emerges is a deeply atmospheric work that invites listeners to linger in uncertainty, tracing the delicate boundary between matter and mystery, between what can be measured and what can only be sensed.

Produced entirely from sounds recorded in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and Colombia, Portals evokes the hidden world of sounds that lie beyond our perception.

Whether concealed in ultra-sonic frequency registers or in the depths of the aquatic medium, these sounds bear witness to an unsuspected and teeming animal activity. Insects, frogs, bats and freshwater dolphins move about, hiding from our eyes and ears. Revealing this palette of sounds, in particular through transposition, and placing it back in the realm of the audible, Jana Irmert invites and guides us on a fascinating exploration of an unsuspected, speculative and non-human world of sound, which she exposes and recomposes in a way that is both respectful and personal, accompanying this teeming and fascinating sound material in a musical gesture of great clarity.

Portals is an attempt to access the evocative power of an Amazonian forest on the brink of catastrophe, through a decentring of the listening experience delicately composed by Jana Irmert. (François Bonnet)

The power of a soundtrack is to not only support the film's narrative, but to open up spaces beyond the visible - to add layers of meaning and complexity that can easily unfold in sound.

"I like to think of the music as a sort of bog or swamp landscape that lies underneath the film's structure, all connected - sometimes you just see the surface and it can look very unassuming, until you dip your foot in. Then you dive down all the way, and there's a whole universe where you never reach the bottom. It's a mysterious, expanding, strange world and it's my job to decide how much of it we get to hear."

When I Dissolve collects the compositions Jana Irmert created for Henrike Meyer's auto-fictional hybrid documentary To Be an Extra. The film follows the filmmaker herself as she navigates the struggles of making her first feature length film while working as an extra on tv shows and film sets. From her perspective as an out-of-focus extra, she gains a new existential insight into the precarious life on the fringes of both the film industry and society.

Informed by the two artists' conversations about phenomena at the periphery of our existence like black holes, breathing rooms and body parts that suddenly feel disconnected, ominous noises grow out of the silence into blooming synth-heavy montages.

Here, the score stands on its own, a journey to the edges of our multiple realities.

Highlighting the immersive and multi-layered character of the music, the release is additionally available in Dolby Atmos, mixed by Philipp Rumsch.