00:05I'm Daniel Blumberg and I composed the score for Gianfranco Rossi's Below the Clouds.
00:31I never imagined doing the score for him because he doesn't use score in his films and I like films
00:41without score.
00:43He asked me initially just to work on music for the end credits.
00:51He was very eloquent about and the way he articulated about the sounds that he was interested in.
01:05And by the end of the process the score ended up being from the beginning to the end.
01:12The crude relationship between the camera going underwater and the microphones going underwater was just an example of talking about
01:22how can a submerged sound relate to submerged visuals.
01:33When you're looking at those images, these kind of echoes of the past and how they're relating to the present
01:40day.
01:42It's about finding things appropriate for the film but also allowing us to explore ideas during the process of it.
01:53I really like the quality of improvised music where you sort of don't know what's going to happen between seconds
01:59or milliseconds.
02:13I was excited to work with John Butcher and Seymour Wright who are improvising musicians.
02:33They have a lot of unique techniques and sounds that I can't even imagine some of these sounds that they
02:41can make.
02:45Seymour and I both work very much with the kind of sounds you have to squeeze out from in between
02:51the normal sounds of the instrument.
02:53They're not the ones that reveal themselves very naturally.
03:02And also then imagining how those emerging squeezed out sounds might map onto or align with the spaces and the
03:12emotional intellectual spaces of the film.
03:16I think we were quite mindful too that the sounds we were making were going to be taken back to
03:23that place and put under the water and reprocessed by you.
03:28As an improviser you can always adjust your music to the uniqueness of the situation you're in.
03:50There's this one take of you circular breathing for about five minutes.
04:03When I put that underneath the sea and there's these kind of lapping waves going against that note and the
04:12breath of the wind.
04:13And then that was then mixed with really short loop that I did of your breath through the saxophone.
04:19So digitally precise loop and that juxtaposition of that modern sort of rendering with the really organic like one breath.
04:39So these are two of the specialist mics that I used.
04:42They're called hydrophones and they're basically microphones that can be underwater.
04:52This one I had on a scaffolding pole going into the sea.
04:56And they're used to capture seismic activity, earthquakes, volcanic activity.
05:04I had two of them on either side of the stairway.
05:07Sort of made the stairs into a big microphone.
05:10Got really strange low frequencies from it.
05:16Yeah, that's the geophone.
05:25We're in Cafe Otto today and Cafe Otto have a record label.
05:29And they're putting out the soundtrack to Gianfranco's film.
05:34Since I came here when I was 22, it's about 13 years ago.
05:39It's really been the main place I've come to watch music.
05:43And most people that I work with I've actually met here.
05:49John Butcher who played tenor and soprano on the score.
05:52I've seen him many times over the years in this venue.
05:56And Seymour Wright I met early on when I started coming here.
05:59We've made records together and played live together here.
06:04Even Gianfranco came here years ago.
06:07So it felt like a natural place to release the music.
06:12It's a big part of my life and also has been a big part of my work as an artist.
06:17So it's a big part of my life and also has been a big part of my work as an
06:17artist.
06:17So it's a big part of my life.
06:21So it's a big part of my life.
06:44So it's a big part of my life.
06:54We all know who I am and then we rive away.
07:05We have a big part of my life.
07:05We have a big part of my life.
07:05Thank you very much.
07:11We've made a big part of my life.
07:12We've made a really big part of my life.
07:13So I'm a big part of my life.
07:13You can see me.
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