My first job as the music composer was to make the track for the music video. I had begun by using the approach of using real instruments, as this is what would have been available at the time and the only way to make music. As a group, Jack and I booked out the multitrack recording studio, and through Jane, we had found a Sitar player called ‘Neil’ from Leicester. On this day, he came up to Lincoln and we had a jam with Jack and Josh Andrusiak, a bass player and student. We had recorded some of these jams; as there wasn’t much time to write something. We had also recorded a solo of the sitar being played.
After much experimentation with the sounds, and speaking to the director, I found it best to make the track myself on Logic. I felt that the music we had made in the studio was out of time and didn’t sound too much like it was from the 1960s, even though we had used similar techniques for recording the instruments as they would have back then.
I had used the sitar solo, chopped it up into about 50 equal sized sections using the scissor tool and placed them into a monophonic exs24 sampler, using the sounds as one shots. I placed an arrangement of the sampler notes over some drum productions. This creative process of arranging the track didn’t seem to take too long, and I sent the early mixdown to Jane, the director. She was happy with where I was going with the track, and this progressed to later in the year where the actresses were coming in for shoots. We recorded Stephanie (The main Actress, called Holly in real life) singing over the track. This took minimal mixing down, except for adding tape saturation and using some of the production techniques in the music that they would have done back in the 1960’s but instead in a digital music way. The authenticity of the film as being produced with modern filming techniques has meant that the electronic recreational aest
The music I had made in Logic , I had more creative control over, and feel like I could have done a better job of that in a sound way than with the real instruments. Because we were Jamming with real instruments and the time constraints, this too was another reason I had decided to make a fully structured track
As for the tracks in the rest of the film, I had created songs for each diegetic atmospheric part of the film. For example, there are a few scenes in the bar, so I had decided to make up music that sounded Jazzy and Bluesy, to convey the sound of being in a social atmosphere. This music had a slight filter on it and was layered with the atmos of people talking in a bar to add to the realism of the scene and boost its aesthetic.
The LSD trip scenes are the most interesting pieces of sound/music in my opinion. There is no dialogue in these scenes so the viewer is concentrating purely on just the visual and sound elements of the movie. For these scenes I used my Reaktor 6 instruments and Absynth 5, as well as FM8. The sequential movement of the journey through the trips are reflected in the sound, and the vibe of each trip is driven by the sound mainly. The sound follows the animations within the LSD trip one (The good trip). And Slowly gets more minimal as the characters come out of the trip. Having not experienced LSD first hand, I left this to interpretation and tried as best as I could to get sounds that would fit the animation and fit the overall feeling of the scene.
Similarly, the bad trip that Stephanie has portrays an amplification of the emotion that she is going through in the film. The sounds present in this trip aims to give the viewer an intense feeling of shock/ goose bumps. Having a sound that fits the trip should make up the minimal effect on screen; otherwise it would be empty in my opinion.
We had used a track by Barney and Jack Martin, (who are Jack Webber’s housemates) in the film also. The music present is cued in at the bar and is used as a piece of non-diegetic music, as opposed to the other music. This music is reminiscent of the emotion of a kind of melancholy and perhaps a bit of loneliness within the film. It only appears for a few seconds, as the scene begins, but is effective in my opinion for portraying the thoughts of the actresses, that are sat there at the bar with their heads in their hands. It almost is a window into their emotions, so the communication aspect here with the music is extremely important.
The ending music has a similar theme too, with the sad sounds of the aftermath of when the actresses had been shouting at each other and are crying. The music communicates this even further, and aims to help the viewer to empathize with the characters. This is a very relatable part of the film to a lot of people, based on the feedback given to the film group.
The music of the montage sequence is quite fast paced and a bit more rhythmic than the other music, and this reflects on the actress’ emotion of regret, in a sense. She is trying to get a hold of one of the actresses that previously in the film she kissed , and the reaction wasn’t great as she walked off.
“Jefferson Airplane- White Rabbit” was one of the main tracks that I was using reference wise for the mixdown and sound of the tracks I had been producing. I really enjoy its sound and I feel as though it is one of the main tracks of the psychedelic culture in England of that Era.