The Blizzard
General
Instrumentation
Vinyl LP Samples, Granular Synthesis
Information
Original new film score composed by Kacper Madejek for 'The Blizzard' from 'Dreams' (1990) by Akira Kurosawa. Case study supplementing Madejek's undergraduate NYU thesis titled 'Hauntological Praxis in Film Scoring.'
Music Video
About the Work
This self-contained collection of soundscapes transcends the conceptual order of conventional scoring and instead, builds the sound cues around processed audio, which was sourced from the public domain and vinyl LPs. As I was crate digging the music stores in the UAE – hoping to find an interesting piece of analog media – I came across an alluring front cover from Roy Orbison’s 1968 album 'In Dreams.' The title of this LP struck me as uncannily apt in connection with Kurosawa’s film: both pieces of media share an oneiric core that foregrounds the dialogue between these seemingly unrelated works. By utilizing Orbison’s album – and its contingent painful nostalgia and implied temporal decay – I contract both space and time in hauntological fashion via tele-techno-iconicity. I approached this by experimenting with how different materials and actions affected the signal transmission between the magnetic needle and the vinyl playing on the turntable. I accelerated its analog decay by damaging the vinyl surface with various materials and simultaneously “recording its death throes” (as composer William Basinski would say) to process and use them as micro-samples while sculpting the soundtrack. Dreams’ conceptual resonance with hauntology and the absence of non-diegetic audio make Kurosawa’s vignettes a perfect choice to (re)score. My electroacoustic film music deals with the oneiric indeterminacy and its perils on the screen – have the mountaineers truly escaped the haunted dreamworld, or is their ponderous search for the camp a futile virtual projection; a last spasm as they fall into eternal sleep under the ‘warm snow’?