Mixtapes ‘09 Q & A
POSTED BY Tim
See below for an excerpt from a Q and A I had to write up about the Mixtape project:
How did you settle upon the idea of your theme?
Matt: I’ve always liked the road movie as a genre. This probably goes back to reading ‘On The Road’ when I was in my early twenties and falling in love with the romantic notion of The Beat Poets – that whole 50s and 60s idealism connected with Ginsberg and Kerouac.
There’s also something about road movies that seem to lend themselves to really interesting narratives as well. They are often quite simple stories – a character or characters travel from A to B, but the genre can be wildly adventurous or absurd at the same time and there’s always sense of anticipation about whether the protagonists will ever reach their destination.
It seemed to me like there was a lot of scope within the genre to maybe make something quite visually interesting with a lot of movement and rhythm.
How did you go about piecing together your mixtape?
MP: I started by making a simple list of road movies off the top of my head. I had an initial list of maybe 50 films, some of them quite tenuous. Then I started cutting down the list to films that were similar in style. There was a whole section of ‘comedy’ road movies like ‘Smokey and The Bandit’, ‘The Cannonball Run’ etc that I decided to cut from the list as they seemed to belong to a totally different genre of road movie. That’s probably a whole different mixtape in itself.
I then started watching or revisiting some of the films and looking for a common thread within all of them. Although some of the films don’t take place solely on the road, ‘Drugstore Cowboy’ for example, there’s a major element of the road movie within it.
TB: I started as I normally do by creating a library of pieces of music and sounds that I felt could match the look and feel of the images and the narrative that was emerging. It is always important for me to make the process as interesting as possible, so I restricted myself to using sounds created from:
- My iPhone (the Megasynth and BeBot apps are excellent)
- My son’s 3/4 size bass guitar
- Vinyl and a record player with pitch control
- A tiny Yamaha PS 200 Portasound keyboard a friend bought me for £2 from the Sunday Market at Brighton Marina. Thanks Mike.
- Various low-cost / found percussion.
I fed sounds created from these instruments into Ableton Live on my Mac, and began manipulating them to create something that matched the film. I then saved these mixes into my iPhone and carried on playing over the top of them to see what worked, so a lot of the time I didn’t even have my Mac laptop with me.
Did the time-consuming element of going through the films effect the final content of your mixtape?
Absolutely. I suspected that there would be some common scenes or actions within each film, such as a character getting ready to drive off on a road trip, but there were other visual elements such as characters exchanging glances, or sequences of the road at night that I hadn’t thought of previously.
I had initially thought of a fairly non narrative mixtape of characters simply driving but the more road movies I watched the more a basic narrative seemed to emerge which I thought would be more watchable over a 24 minute period.
Was the setting of a 24 minute running time constricting or helpful?
It was useful to have a constraint and the 24 minute mark lent itself to breaking up the mixtape into ‘chapters’. The rough cut was 34 minutes and I found it quite difficult to drop scenes that I really enjoyed for the good of the rest of the piece but I think that brevity makes for a better mixtape.
TB: I ended up creating an hour plus of material, and had to scrap some of my favourite pieces, but you got to be able to do that sometimes. The nice thing about using Abeleton Live though is that nothing gets wasted and the abandoned pieces will probably turn up in another project some day.
How did you collaborate on the music for the mixtape?
MP:
TB: The process was a pleasure: we had similar ideas as to what was working or not, and Matt really encorages experimentation, which is nice. We just kept to and fro- ing rough cuts until we were there.
How did you think the mixtape went down with its viewers? What responses have you had?
If you were to make another mixtape what would you do?
I’d be interested in making a much more layered, abstract piece which is purely visual that a composer could run riot with. Something more akin to club visuals rather than a narrative led mixtape.
TB: That would depend on the visuals, but I loved the opportunity and the process involved. Perhaps use a different set of criteria and limitations; just using my acoustic guitar, or sounds created solely from the soundtrack, maybe shell out another two quid on a new instrument, who knows…
0