Inspired by Nic’s drawings, we’ve been collectively thinking about the world of Tobias Brown for a good while now. Set in a time when the Old World is losing ground to the technology of the industrial revolution and capitalism begins it’s march towards progress at the cost of the planet and the welfare of it’s inhabitants.
Above everything, this is going to be a place of adventure, intrigue, action and joyful silliness.
One of the first things I did was to put together a mix of music that represented the story, characters and time period (historically accurate or not) that wanted to combine for this show. This included classical music like Elgar and Rachmaninoff, jazz from Jelly Roll Morton and Hot Club de France alongside Oom-Pah music (courtesy of Ed Dowie), hip hop and 90s big beat. Because the mix was mostly sourced from my record collection, the whole thing was infused with the warm crackly sound of vinyl and I realised that I wanted to exploit that.
One of our constant dilemmas making the sound part of Paper Cinema shows is how to create a coherent soundtrack both live and with limited resources - and hopefully in an entertaining way. I thought that some turntablism/plunderphonic techniques could be a great way to link us to the past and allow access to sounds we could never make in our on stage setting.
I’ve always loved sound effect LP’s too and have started a new collection for use in the show. Over our R&D period along with Fran I experimented with making music incorporating sounds from records and other communications technologies (radios, morse code, typewriters and telephones).
The turntable obsession also spilled over into the visual language as we started to play around with the idea of Phenakistocopes (A sort of simple Zoetrope that can be made using a record turntable). In this video I’ve edited some test footage sent through from Teele Uustani along with a track i made with the sound effects Lp’s and
In my own practice, I’ve been exploring the idea of doing more with less and working out how technology can be incorporated into performances in fun and flexible ways - you will never find us using backing tracks but we could start to use a degree of automation. In this track I set up Ableton to work with my hardware gear to create loops and easily add and mix soundsand effects.