Friday, June 12, 2026

Antonio Vale da Conceicao - The Violin Case (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

The Violin Case (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) marks the first feature-length scoring assignment for Portuguese-Macanese composer António Vale da Conceição, written for the debut feature by director Max Bessmertny (2025). The film unfolds over a single night in Macao — the former Portuguese enclave on China's southern coast — as a struggling American painter frantically searches for a violin artwork left behind in a taxi. The soundtrack is released on Plaza Mayor Company Ltd, a London/Hong Kong-based independent label specialising in international film scores.

Conceição's music mirrors the very fabric of Macao itself: a city of five languages and layered cultural identities. Across eighteen cues, the score weaves cinematic textures and rhythmic precision into an intimate sonic journey that moves from nocturnal unease ("Sauvage", "The Taxi Ride") through moments of wry comedy ("Mah Jeong Is Good", "Le Party") and deepening existential drift ("He So Sad", "Lost Baby"). Track titles in English, French, Spanish, and transliterated Cantonese echo the film's multilingual cast and its surrealist odyssey through Macao's back alleys after dark.

The film was shot in September 2022 on location across forty Macao sites, drawing on the city's social aesthetic from the 1970s through the 1990s. Conceição, whose previous credits include INA, Beautiful Game, and Beyond the Spreadsheet: The Story of TM1, brings his characteristic ability to craft soundscapes that shift between intimate melody and expansive layered arrangement — a quality well suited to a story that Bessmertny explicitly modelled on Scorsese's After Hours: a city-at-night thriller in which a single misfortune spirals inexorably out of control.

Tracklist:
1. Sauvage
2. The Flying Robber
3. The Taxi Ride
4. The Taxi Driver
5. I'm Somebody
6. Rashed
7. Le Party
8. Let Me In
9. No Me Diga Que No Duele
10. Sauvage Deux
11. Pretty
12. Napoleon on the Beach
13. Hanoi
14. I Remember You
15. He So Sad
16. Lost Baby
17. Mah Jeong Is Good
18. Baby is Lost