The music team kicked off by talking about the sound world that Tobias Brown would inhabit. There was already some beautiful and inspiring work in the TB archives from previous R&Ds, so that was the best place to start. I listened in to a world that seemed very tactile and real, mysterious and lilting. I felt submerged in a mystery that I could just about glimpse through the corner of my eye.
A big theme in the show was communication. So I started playing with incorporating morse code into musical ideas, sometimes spelling out words, and sometimes just for an unusual rhythmic dynamic. We also tried out some musique concrete ideas, making a patchwork of sound ideas, adding in elements such as old telephone sounds. All these effects created a great crackly vibe, emulating the hammy B movie feeling we wanted to capture. It created an interesting musical hook for us.
This took me into finding a batch of vinyl flexidisc postcards, which are pretty obsolete nowadays! Popular in the 60s & 70s, they are a small floppy record, sometimes in the format of a large postcard. The flexidiscs I found were pretty warped and full of faded glamour, so perfect for a bit of sampling. I played around with them to create a bed of sound, over which I could shape my own ideas - you can instantly dive headlong into a very special soundworld.
Of course there are some very special flexidiscs out there - during the Soviet era, many bootleg recordings were made on discarded X rays, due to shortages of materials and censorship. So it seemed really pertinent to incorporate this idea of subversive communication and music, in the format of a pretty picture postcard.
Another road we started exploring was that of animals and their communicating. I read about bees tooting & honking, and the extraordinary universe of whale song. The visuals team also provided some amazing links to moths and owls, so I took an old casio keyboard to see if I could get close to ‘Space Owls In Flight’. Verdict – the owls are still a bit lost and await more musical development…
Of course the real magic of The Paper Cinema is in the combination of music with visuals so with that in mind, here is an edit combining music by Fran and Chris with some of the test footage that was created by Teele Uustani and Cat Rock.
Learn more about Francesca Simmons AKA Madame Ceski here
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