Thoughts and Processes III

Notes from Far

Below is an edited version of an interview from 2019

How did you become involved in this project?

Yuko Edwards, who created Notes From Far, read an interview I did with the folks at Meanwhile Creative and got in touch with me. She came to Cardiff, we had a chat, and that’s how it happened, really.

Can you talk about what you did on this project and how that differed to other projects you’ve worked on?

Well, first of all, I got involved towards the very end of what had been a long road for Yuko and Desmond—some of the conversations between Yuko and Desmond that make up parts of the film go back a couple of decades or so, I believe. Also, for Yuko, it was a long haul cutting down the film’s length from 60 to the 17 or so minutes it is now.

In our first discussions about the sound Yuko basically said to me, let’s not try to reinvent the wheel, let’s just give it a nip and tuck here and there. That approach isn’t generally how I go about things, though. It’s hard for me to do a surface job: I always want to find out what’s underneath. That was different for a start!

I suppose this was a bit of a reverse engineering job. I kind of took everything apart to find out how and why it fitted together the way it did, and then put I it back together again! Yuko and I listened to what I had done and finessed it so that the end result was really this amalgam of how I interpreted Desmond’s story and how Yuko did.

One of my primary objectives at the start was for it to sound more like a film, and to add focus and clarity to the soundtrack, while at the same time being aware of the film an artistic statement, too.

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The use of score is interesting in this film. The music Desmond talks about during the film is not the music we hear. How did you go about bridging that gap?

The score had already been completed by the time I came along and Yuko had a very clear idea about how it should function. There is a clear thread running through the film, and that thread is Desmond and music, and so the score is almost constant—deliberately so— as a way of trying to represent relationship for Desmond.

The score was composed and performed by Chris Corsano, who’s a college friend of Yuko. He’s an amazing jazz drummer and percussionist who has worked with Sonic Youth and Bjork, and his score adds a lot of texture to the film. I’m generally not a massive fan of non-diegetic constantly music playing over dialogue or speech, it’s a bit like putting olive oil and butter on your bread. However, this was a very particular and motivated use — the score and Desmond’s voice were essentially functioning as one unified element — and so the challenge was to balance these two elements appropriately.

The music had to be loud enough that we can process it as having an active role. It’s there because it’s meant to be there and it’s communicating something, not just filling space or to keep people interested. On the other hand, Desmond’s voice and intelligibility are important for the film and key to understanding Desmond as a person and a man. Achieving the right balance between speech and score was complicated because a lot of what we hear from Desmond is via telephone conversations he had with Yuko over a number of years. Many of these conversations were from the nineties! So, of course these passages are distinctive sonically, and we perceive them as being of ‘poorer’ audio quality, and with that it’s harder to understand what’s being said.

The balance of score and speech was also important in terms of framing. So, there isn’t music all the time, and by choosing the moments where there is no score carefully, we in fact added another layer of interest and another layer of storytelling because those ‘silent’ passages are important punctuation points which I think brings nuance and focus to the story in some way.

I would say that my main involvement with the score was in dialoguing with Yuko about why we might not want it in some places, and about achieving the right balance, in terms of volume and amplitude, but also storytelling symbolism, between the score and the speech.

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Do you have a favourite sound or sound moment used in this film?

One of the things that fascinates me about sound in general is the serendipitous nature of it: it really is a kind of magic or manipulation that works when it works, and you have an idea in your mind that something will work, but you don’t really know. There are a couple of sounds that I’m particularly fond of. There’s a really short cut away to an overhead fan in the Rough Trade West record store in London, and the fan sound (which is actually a couple of different layered sounds) is really apposite. It’s no more than a couple of seconds on screen, and you could just as easily have no sound there, but I think the choice is vindicated because it just adds a layer of naturalness, not ostentation, to the sequence. I also managed to sneak in a couple of music elements in there, which was fun — a bit of piano and, bizarrely, one note on the acoustic guitar. There’s a section in the film where we decided to use a little bit of Desmond playing guitar. He plays a D chord arpeggio but misses the last note, so I recorded the missing note to fill it in. These are the strange kinds of things that are pretty minute in terms of detail, but really help to keep the focus where it should be: on the visual storytelling.

Can you sum up what you’ve tried to achieve with the sound design?

I hope that what the sound does without too much ceremony or ostentation is help to communicate the loss and separation that Desmond has experienced and still obviously feels, as well as the ability of sound and music to create and forge worlds of comfort; as a way through which to understand the world. Sound and music have been Desmond’s way of understanding, processing and dealing with some of the things that have happened to him, and some of the very devastating things that have happened to him throughout his life. I hope the sound design helps to make his experience feel real and authentic.

You can find out more about Notes From Far Yuko Edwards’s other work on her website.