THE DRIP

The Writing process

I began by taking notes on the reference track "Nick Cave and the Bad Seed - From Her to Eternity', it was quite a surprising track to take notes from, Joe particularly liked the monotonous beat of the piano, so I began by writing a piano track, which would become the grounding foundation of the piece. Joe described the mood as ‘intense and dark almost like a storm at sea’. 

To capture this sound I used a lot of dark gritty distortion on the bass guitar which plays along side the heavy piano track. The drums needed to be intense and driving but I didn’t want to use a traditional drum kit to begin with. I wanted to play with some world percussion and settled on a mixture of Boule and African drums. 

I felt the introduction to the film didn’t give much away and the imagery was rather ambiguous I used some obscure instrumental samples including Waterphones and recordings of bowed cymbals and tin whistle that I felt sounded quite eerie and sinister to build on this ambiguity. 

Although it developed over time the introduction was influenced by electroacoustic music elements, which I felt added the mysterious other worldly sound I was looking for. I used some production techniques such as reversing and paulstretch to create some of the soundscape. 

The instrumentation over the duration of the piece gradually became more recognisable with the introduction of modern western instruments such as the electric guitar synthesisers and drum kit representing a sort of unveiling of the events unfolding on screen. I wanted to build the music up so that the climax cued exactly when the erratic flickering shots had stopped and your left with the final visual where his body overflows and drowns (1:39). I also introduced a reversed sample that I felt produced a similar effect to that of the flickering.

The end is a simple but epic wall of sound that builds and cues in exactly as the carnage unfolds.