We messed around with the voices a bit in the mix, but, initially, it’s that prayer and then suddenly the drums, the percussion when they hit [their chests] becomes the beat. That was recorded in Steve Noble’s kitchen in London. The percussion, it sounds so big, but it’s literally just him with a drum skin on his lap.
How did Erzsébet’s theme develop?
Well it’s such an overwhelming idea: for [László] to meet his wife who he’s been separated from through all that trauma of the war. Even thinking about it is quite overwhelming. I liked the idea of hearing László’s theme throughout the first half and then it developing into Erzsébet’s theme when you meet her. I really wanted the theme to have this journey of disintegration. So you hear it in this really pure form at the start of the second half. And then by the time they’re fucking on heroin, it’s really weird and druggy. That was this session that I did with Axel [Dörner] and Carina [Khorkhordina] where we used Erzsébet’s theme as a starting point, playing that quite precisely. And then moving into an improvisation and then back into the theme. The idea was that everything sort of disintegrates in the second half [of the film].
Can you talk about recording the instances of prepared piano throughout the score?
My session with the prepared piano was at [Cafe] Oto way before we started the production. I spent the day with Billy Steiger and Tom Wheatley, who I’ve worked with for many years now. And we were experimenting with bits of paper, screws, Blu-Tack. It was a day of really miking up the piano in quite interesting ways with stereo and vocal mics. There were about 16 mics on the prepared piano at Oto. I use a microphone called the U 89 for a lot of my recording, and they’re very accurate. I used a stereo mic on the bass, just on the low end [of the piano]. So we could really get this huge sound out of the percussion, because a lot of the stuff that might sound like drums is low end [of the piano]. So I got really rich sounds from that session that I used throughout the film.
John Tilbury definitely is related to [John] Cage in the way that he prepared the piano. John [Tilbury] used mostly screws and coins. His wife, Janice, came into the studio and had this little bag… she actually puts the coins and stuff on the strings. It’s really beautiful watching them.
What was Sophie Agnel preparing her piano with?
Sophie Agnel doesn’t prepare the piano; Sophie actually plays the strings of the piano. I’m partly saying that because I think that’s quite a distinction for her. She bounces balls on the strings. There’s this beautiful sound where she’s rubbing them with a mallet, playing a lot of strings at the same time, so they’re resonating and it’s like an orchestra.
The marble quarry shots in Carrara, Italy, are one of the most stunning things I’ve seen on film. Can you talk about composing for that scene?
When I saw the images from the set, I wondered how sound ricocheted off those marble slabs. I knew you could record reverb, so we shot a gun into [the marble quarry in Carrara]; you record that gunshot, and the effect [the marble] has on the echo of it, basically. And then you take that and bring it into this program and it basically removes the gunshot. So it makes an algorithm of the response of the raw sound, and then makes it into a reverb that you can then apply to anything. So, in this case, we applied it to Evan Parker’s saxophone.
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English (US) ·