The introduction contains a scathing critique of PowerPoint and the way it subtly manipulates users into behaving in a certain way. The images subvert the programme’s functions – there are flow charts with arrows going nowhere and graphs that chart employees’ emotional fluctuations.”I found it interesting but I don’t know if anyone will buy it,” he chuckles, as if the possibility has only just occurred to him. I started playing with it on its own as a medium and I realised I could make these things that were neither films nor slide shows but would run by themselves.”After showing the computerised images in galleries, Byrne decided to record them as a DVD and produce a book of text and artwork called Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information. He decided to do it in the form of a sales pitch and used the PowerPoint software for his presentation.”It was kind of clunky and limited, but in a way I liked that. I find myself looking at films with the classical composers like Mancini or Morricone where the music is really up there. I think ‘Wow! How did they get their music played so loud?’”His other major project this year has been his book. The idea came to him when he was performing readings of his last book, a pseudo-religious tract called The New Sins.

“I’ve been lucky but it’s often the case that people write really interesting film music and it gets played really quietly to a car chase or some dramatic dialogue You just know no one’s going to listen to it. So many of their songs are about the sounds and effects and all that funny stuff that goes around the song They treat songs more like a mini-score, I think. They couldn’t have got away with that 10, even 20 years ago.”This isn’t the first time Byrne has been involved in scoring films – he co-wrote the score to Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, for which he won an Academy Award, and composed the music for Jonathan Demme’s Married To The Mob – though he wouldn’t do it on a full-time basis.”It’s a heartless, thankless job,” he says, smiling grimly. By comparison, pop songs are wide open, in a way too wide open.”Byrne notes how contemporary pop has moved towards creating moods and textures that could easily be appropriated for film “Look at Radiohead.

To some extent, the problem solving aspect makes it a challenge. Everything you’ve written is now obsolete.’ On the other hand, being restricted by someone else’s vision is kind of an impetus to creativity. I was in Glasgow around that time and I have pretty vivid memories of how squalid and dirty it was.”He describes the process of movie-scoring as “problem solving I don’t do crosswords but I imagine it’s very similar It’s about getting all these things to fit together It can be frustrating at times You get sent rough edits of scenes as you’re working Then a week later they’ll say, ‘We’ve got a new edit. Though his parents relocated to Baltimore when he was two, the family would holiday in Scotland most summers.”Appropriately enough, they were the years when the Trocchi book was taking place.