Haiku Salut and Meg Morley Give a Restored Silent Film a Composed Unease on The Lost Score

The original negative of the 1930 German silent semi-documentary Menschen am Sonntag is lost. What we have now is a reconstruction, stitched together from archives in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, and Italy. At 1,839 metres it’s still not whole, but it’s close enough to what Berlin audiences saw nearly a century ago. That restored cut is the foundation for The Lost Score, a new album from Derbyshire trio Haiku Salut and Melbourne-born, London-based pianist Meg Morley.

The music was first commissioned in 2019 for a live screening at Birmingham’s Flatpack Film Festival. Haiku Salut (Gemma Barkerwood, Sophie Barkerwood, and Louise Croft) already had experience with silent film, having released an alternative soundtrack for Buster Keaton’s The General the same year. For this project they distilled roughly two hours of live material into ten tracks. The album functions independently, without the images, as a set of intriguing and sometimes arresting compositions.

The score doesn’t just illustrate what’s on screen. Where the film’s courtship scenes read differently to modern eyes, the music pushes back. Haiku Salut’s Barkerwood said they agreed to musically undermine the treatment of women, playing up the sinister undercurrents most of us notice now. “Faces” slips in with noir-ish arpeggios and piano that feel unstable, while “Toxic” turns what was once a whimsical sequence into something darker. That deliberate tension gives The Lost Score its weight.