gormen-GHAAASSST

gormenghast, in other words. besides all of my university coursework fun, i have been having the honour of working with the indubitably incredible Theatre Paradok on a production of mervyn peake’s monolithic trilogy of novels. my job title is music director, but this is somewhat misleading as what i am really doing is creating soundscapes, making foley (sound effects like splashes and creaking doors), and threading thematic noises through the dialogue and movements onstage. we are also going to have images projected, and my colleague alistair grant has been hard at art director work making some beautiful things. you should check out his blog.

i hadn’t even read the book by the time we started work, which was worrying me a little, but my worries turned out to be unfounded. i went to the initial read-through of the script (john constable’s adaptation), and that night had my first of many gormenghast dreams, in which i wander the castle all by myself listening to the walls and doors and stones, knocking on surfaces and investigating spaces. that might sound a bit weird, but once i settled into it, collecting and arranging the sounds and foley objects started to feel like a collaboration with the castle, as well as the cast and production team. we have a lovely church venue for the performance now, and because of the enormously echoic space the sound performance will really be a collaboration with the castle – thanks to a clever speaker array idea (not my own!) the natural reverb of the church will take hold of every sound hurled at the walls, and spread it around and up into its lovely roof. we will all be listening to the stones, as it should be.

so – practically my rig will consist of a laptop to play pre-recorded sound files, and also some foley objects and homemade rain machine effects boxes plugged into a mixer, so the whole acoustic-amplified-digital spectrum can be covered.

the sound files below represent my first test runs for character themes, weather/foley effects, and some scene ambiences. most of these will play from my laptop setup. the files all peak at -3db (for the nerds) and are mp3 format (so i can get the nice wordpress audio player up). they have all been assembled from my own raw field recordings and studio recordings… even the birds. apart from the owl hoots, these were originally a bbc sound effects recording before i got to them and pitch shifted the life out of them. the flapping and turning book pages for sepulchrave were recorded with alistair, who had the original idea of books representing the owls’ wings. he has some interesting test videos of book flapping on his own blog. each sound file below is swamped in a protools preset ‘cathedral’ reverb to give an idea of how all of the sounds will behave within the same space.

i’ll give a little bit of detail on how things were made and link to the character pages on mervyn peake’s site for more info and book extracts, but apart from that you should really just listen.

CHARACTERS/AMBIENCES

sepulchrave, 76th earl of groan: surrounded at all times by his library of books and perhaps a distant owl

gertrude, countess of groan: keeper of many birds

fuchsia groan: her fragile music box theme will deteriorate in pitch and speed as her situation becomes more desperate 

titus groan: this clip is for titus’ rituals through time, his sounds will be based around the ritual and the stones but will mostly be performed live rather than pre-recorded. 

cora and clarice : their music box is already broken, with as much noise from the mechanism as the notes. it will also pitch lower and slower as time goes on.

steerpike : his theme needs to be sinister and also cut through the gormenghast soundscape because he stands out as the bringer of change and ultimately chaos; this is me trying out a bowing action on a little spanish guitar. his sound will hopefully be performed live rather than pre-recorded.

the thing: outside in the natural world full of leaves and birds. this is me pointing a microphone into an aviary in edinburgh zoo. i will be cutting the people noises and my laugh at the end from this clip, but couldn’t resist leaving it in for just now

swelter: the grotesque chef of gormenghast or, more accurately, the ambience of his kingdom – the kitchen

death owls: i’m not giving the plot away, but in one scene some of the characters are eaten alive by a swarm of owls. this is my initial sketch for the scene; it begins with a creature eating something’s flesh, before the owls descend.

FOLEY/WEATHER EFFECTS

smash

splash

creaking doors

storm

wind

rain

fire

the castle flooding

DRONES

i’m also working on building up some drone/textural rumbles to create tension and unease, particularly as the third act escalates to the finish. these are tests for the first sub-tastic layer; i’m going to have three or four elements to play with and layer/mix about live rather than compose one complete tone to trigger. these clips are, appropriately enough, slowed down clips of some of the above samples. they need a little patience but persevere, they sound lovely. to me anyway.

the first two were originally titus’ stones

this last one is the castle flooding noise; it takes a while to hear it and you almost feel it before it is audible (or maybe i was just looking at the waveform in protools).

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