65daysofstatic, Village Underground, London

As the camera pulls back on Bruce Dern cradling a rabbit in a bio-dome drifting in and out of the rings of Saturn, 65daysofstatic take the stage at the Village Underground. Bass drums kick in, a switchboard crackles to life, and the live soundtrack to SF eco-fable Silent Running begins. The band wrote their own soundtrack to Silent Running with the film on loop in the background, and although the peaks and troughs of the narrative are perfectly suited to 65days’ loud/quiet formula, it’s the film’s obsession with robotics that really resonates.

65daysofstatic are a band inhabiting that blurry field between electronic and ‘live’ music (although in the 21st Century, that distinction has become rather humdrum). The four-piece from Sheffield have milked blood out of the stone of post-rock to produce some of the most exciting instrumental music around. Since 2005 they have been mixing drum kicks with sound processors, guitars with loops and arpeggiators. As such, it is apt that their latest project is a soundtrack to Seventies SF film, Silent Running, a film that obsesses about that very modern battle between nature and technology.

The Convergence Festival (of which this evening is the closing event) is an exploration of the way that technology informs modern music, and each band represents that dichotomy. Whether it’s tech-noise-niks like ‘parent-saddening’ (The Guardian) Fuck Buttons, deutsche-house veterans Booka Shade or avante-garde composer Ben Frost, at a basic level, these artists treat circuits as much a part of musical shading as a chord sequence. Although the heavy handed eco-message of Silent Running initially seems like a perverse choice for 65days - a band so reliant on electronics - in fact it perfectly represents their evolution as a band. A band writing songs as fearful of the future as they are enamoured of its technology.

There are long periods in Silent Running where the band just stand in the darkness, waiting. ‘We learned we didn’t all have to be playing all the time’, says whiz-kid, Paul Wolinski of the making of the soundtrack. Indeed during the dialogue (of which there is very little in the film, having only one human protagonist for 60% of the runtime), the entire band fade into the darkness. Take the orchestra out of the pit, and you have a rather different experience of watching a film - a jarring experience, watching soft, green lights from a soundboard illuminating a face in the dark as a piano plays and a man drives around a spaceship in a buggy, or a shadow beating hell out of drums as the meteor belt around a planet twists and spins. The hum of static from Wolinski’s Korg echoes the sight of static on the dashboard in front of Bruce Dern, as he turns all his ship’s engines off to avoid detection, like submarines did in the War.

The original score for Silent Running was mostly string-based, but featured two songs by hippie-folk-warrior, Joan Baez. 65days however, inject an element of stress into proceedings. This is no longer Baez’s wafting, acoustic ‘In the sun / like a forest is your child / doomed is his innocence’. In 2014 (six years after the film is actually set) the wordless score and crashing drums are the planets, they are the sun, and everything is falling apart. Soundtracks work best when the form mirrors the content, and 65days have made a soundtrack that both embraces this film’s dichotomy of metal and skin, and its fear of the future. Instrumental bands have a tendency to bang on about creating soundtracks for films that don’t exist yet (a poetic notion that essentially reads ‘we don’t need words’), but 65daysofstatic have built on Bruce Trumbull’s SF to create a soundtrack for a film that does exist. Every explosion on screen is accompanied by an explosion onstage, every shot of Titan is accompanied by the splash of drums that sound like the enormousness of a moon. This is a soundtrack that has turned outwards.

Over the course of the last decade, 65daysofstatic have sloughed off the post-rock guitar drudgery of 'The Fall Of Math' and fully embraced technology and music that combines all of that, and makes it better. Despite Silent Running’s protagonist’s concern that nature is more important than technology, the final scene has a piano sound-tracking a long zoom outwards (mirroring the film’s opening) as the robot ‘Dewey’ brings a battered watering can up to care for a tropical plant on a deserted spaceship, and the camera flies backwards into the vacuum. In this context, the combination of man and machine (far from being a horror, as it is in films like ExistenZ, Terminator, Metropolis), is in fact embracing that fear of a fully integrated, technological age. In a time when according to The Guardian, a third of Britons are actually afraid of The Rise Of The Robots, and Google’s newly purchased ‘Deepmind’ can now read unstructured data, and learn as it is reading it, human beings live in an age when the machines can understand people. And now the people are trying to understand the machines.