Zoey Van Goey's Kim Moore on her score for Hell Unltd

When former Zoey Van Goey singer-turned-sound artist, composer and collaborator extraordinaire Kim Moore was asked by the GFT to score a film to mark International Women’s Day she jumped at the chance to work in yet another new medium. She had never seen the movie in question, an influential but little-seen short by Norman McLaren and Helen Biggar, and she certainly didn’t expect to find herself obsessed with the interwar period and with the story of a woman who has “fallen out of the history books.” Yet that’s exactly the effect that 1936’s Hell Unltd has had.

Sitting in The Arches Café Bar, with a glass of wine and copious notes on the table beside her, Kim is so clearly overwhelmed with her passion for the project that it’s hard to get a word in edgeways. She describes the process of preparation behind the live event at the GFT this month as a true artistic journey of discovery.

“I went away from the meeting and watched it on YouTube and, as a film, it’s just brilliant. It’s funny looking back at it now, knowing what happened in the Second World War. You wonder what would have happened if Britain hadn’t entered the war,” she explains.

“It’s really inspiring to watch a film like that being made by two people who were just so desperate to do something. This was their only avenue to shout about something they felt so strongly about and to try and make a difference.”

Made on a shoestring at Glasgow School of Art, Hell Unltd is a seriously experimental mix of animation, found footage and staged action, flashing by in very modern jump cuts. An assault on the senses, it was designed to counter the contemporary government’s claim to have cut spending on weapons and to condemn them for committing to further conflict. Moore hopes that the score she has created with fellow composer Gareth Griffiths, based around sampled sounds, synths, live guitar and viola, will help “make it easier for people to understand.”

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“Helen was incredibly inspiring, I’m totally in love with her. She’s just amazing. It’s quite scary trying to do her justice” – Kim Moore

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“Being involved in this project has made me think a lot more about where I think I am politically. I’ve become obsessed with war,” says Moore. “It’s always something I’ve been quite conflicted about. 1936 was a difficult time – a lot of people from Scotland went to join the International Brigade and fight in the Spanish Civil War, so it’s difficult to know where you would stand.

“On the one hand you have people like Helen and Norman, who were pacifists. On the other people going off to fight against fascism. We’ve never been faced with anything like that in our generation, we don’t know what that’s like to feel the after-effects of this huge war and then see this other war inevitably coming. It’s absolutely terrifying.”

McLaren’s Oscar-winning story after Hell Unltd is well known, however, Moore is aiming to shed light on the less well-known Helen Biggar. “Norman shot to fame but Helen fell out of the history books. She designed all the sets; she did a lot of the editing. It really was a collaboration but there’s just nothing about her,” she says.

Though Moore admits to feeling ambivalent about International Women’s Day – “The fact that we have one at all is conflicting. It shouldn’t have to be there” – she is proud to locate herself in Glasgow’s tradition of female artists and to kick-start a discussion around what has historically happened to creative women.

To further help in this goal, before her performance there will be a rare screening of Traces Left, a 1983 documentary about Helen Biggar and her place within the Glasgow art and political scene in the 1930s and 40s. It has already deeply touched Kim. “Helen was incredibly inspiring,” she says. “I’m totally in love with her. She’s just amazing. It’s quite scary trying to do her justice.”