Soundtrack for Short Film: Two Dogs
» Altered still from “Two Dogs,” a short film I scored for Shaan Syed in 2004 «
Imitation without duplication scoring art film
Back in 2004, I was given a rather odd opportunity to pretend I was Brian Eno.
Director Shaan Syed approached me to re-score a piece he had done called “Two Dogs,” a looping hand-drawn animation about a pair of canines “in an ongoing and repeated dance of play and seduction.” The piece was scheduled to show at the Mercer Union gallery in Toronto in a few weeks time, but he had to replace the copyright-controlled temp score which featured Eno’s “Music for Airports.”
Syed wanted something a lot like Eno’s music without ripping it off, so for the next couple of days I did my best to get inside Eno’s head. I found out that the Airports album was done recording tape loops of synthesizers which would then be played back on separate reel-to-reel machines, thereby allowing the different voices to exist in their own time looping in and out of each other without any adherence to time signature.
My only problem is that I didn’t even have one reel-to-reel, let alone several. At that time, my entire music production system consisted of Propellerhead Reason, version 2.5 in those days, which made it really easy to quantize things but not so much the other way around.
The problem was solved by turning off the quantize function and recording MIDI loops individually with all the other tracks muted. When I had four loops I liked, I just copied and pasted each one individually to fill out the timeline, and suddenly I had ten and a half minutes of randomized noodling to call my own.
I really like this piece, actually. I’m usually a control-freak about composition, so I think experimenting with generative techniques where the method can get the better of me once in a while is a good thing.
The tune itself makes a lovely backdrop for quiet activities (yoga, tai chi, meditation, acupuncture, reading, etc.), and I’ve often thought of doing a whole album of similar material for extended relaxation. My acupuncturist has far too much Kitaro in his office as it is, so maybe a little more of this in the world wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
- 01. Wide Asleep - DRM-Free MP3, 5.97 MB, 10:26
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Posted on July 27th, 2008 at 8:47 AM [GMT-5] in Music for Film by stv
July 29th, 2008 at 10:33 am
[...] also done a few other animal-related shorts in my time (other than the “Two Dogs” film I blogged about earlier this week, including another one with a dog trying to get some [...]
March 17th, 2010 at 4:16 am
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