What was different was that it was all sound for the most part. There was melody involved in the pieces, but it was really all about mood. There’s so much of that in the songs we work on anyway, but to think only about the way the mood was developing was a big difference. The songs tend to start the same way with just the three of us kind of playing and seeing what comes out, but once we had something that we were working on, it was a lot different, and the pieces were all 10 minutes long!

The Sounds of the Sounds of Science features 78 minutes of instrumental music by Yo La Tengo. This album contains the entire score written and performed by the band to accompany eight legendary but rarely-seen undersea documentary shorts by influential French avant-garde filmmaker Jean Painlevé. Yo La Tengo’s score, which originally debuted on stage at the San Francisco Film Festival in April 2001 with the band providing live accompaniment to the films, echoes the films’ haunting surrealist imagery, yet the music is equally evocative on its own, from the dreamy soundscapes of “Sea Urchins” and “How Some Jellyfish Are Born” to the harsher, more dissonant moods of “Liquid Crystals” and “The Love Life of The Octopus.”

Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sounds_of_the_Sounds_of_Science

Bandcamp
https://yolatengo.bandcamp.com/album/the-sounds-of-the-sounds-of-science

Album Playlist
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIWbIjy0uueHvKyre7rgMcPwQtppWuPfM