Tattoo: a group portrait by means of tattoos, our audio interpretation of which is a reflection of the journey from innocence to experience.  A recording of school-children playing cross-faded with the crowd at a football match.  We also felt that the soundtrack to the film The Proposition by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, in particular it’s effected violin (and viola) use, was a good reference and we used this to bring an abstract texture to the piece.  We’d also hoped to further the theme by deliberately degrading the sound as it progressed, by means of re-recording onto other formats and in other environments, but time constraints made this impossible.

Overall it’s been an exciting process, and we’re really hoping we’ll have the opportunity to continue it!

Andy (Fear Wasabi)

We’ve got together a couple of times (in locations ranging from a castle to the pub) to discuss the direction we should take with the soundtracking, initially just with the briefs, then again with the rough video cuts. Discussion ranged across a huge number of topics and ideas; long and impressive words such as “juxtaposition” were bandied about freely. Despite this, a general consensus formed very quickly, and I think we’re all on the same page when it comes to direction – a lot of the things we talked about while we were just working off of the briefs were reinforced rather than changed when we saw the videos, which is definitely a good sign.

Without giving too much away – we’ll save the specifics for a later blog (sorry, clog) so as not to spoil the surprise, as it were – here are a few of the things we’ve talked about. We’ve discussed things like going beyond traditional instrumentation, using and manipulating sounds from the “real world”, as it were, and done some research into procuring various noises…and different ways of manipuliating these sounds, everything from digital techniques to recording on then melting reel-to-reel tapes. We also discussed the idea of recording in different locations, using the same sounds but in different places, which in itself can affect the end result. Obviously enough though, the main drive of discussion was about how we can use sound to convey the themes of the videos, or at least what we’ve taken from them. Progress has been made…now we just have to do the actual recording!

Phil Sim (Fear Wasabi)