Blogs > Special Features > Third Coast Festival 2005
>
Collaboration, Mixing, Writing...and Static
Posted by: Robin Amer on October 22, 2005 08:43 PM | Comments (1)
I was excited to hear Emily Botein's session called Anatomy of a Radio Piece after hearing Rick Moody read the short story on which this radio piece was based at last night's performance. Also because I love Australian producer Sherre DeLys, who was a main contributor to the collaboration. Here is the version of the piece as it aired on the Next Big Thing.
This was a pannel about process, and product and collaboration.
Emily played the piece you can hear above. As you'll notice if you listen, the script is preserved in its entirety. It's narrated by a male voice (which i didn't like as much as Moody's own reading of the piece) and generally a pretty literal interpretation of the sounds described in the text of the piece. Description. Sometimes like the sound has been Foleyed.
Upon listening to this version of the piece, I wished the piece were a little more atmospheric. And that the narrator's voice wasn't always so up front in the mix. That there was more space between the text, that the sound got to sing a little bit more. But a lot of these are my personal aesthetic preferences, and have less to do with whether they were successful in the execution of the piece. The piece comes to an interesting end after the end of the text. a kind of audio crescendo chaos, like the last gasp of the pirate station. With applause. With a trail of static.
Emily goes through a series of emails tracking the correspondence between Sherre, Rick, and herself, all the back and forth, the logistical minutiae of getting this piece together. First there's recording of the narrator's voice...so much bass in the voice. it's really buttery, but also guttural. But they think it's flat. Rick sits in the booth and coaches the actor. Emily thinks he should riff on the script to loosen up, Rick gets upset when the actor adds words that aren't there.
So lots of back and forth. Finally, Sherre kind of passes it off to Emily saying, do with it what you will. Emily says Sherre is like a walking pirate radio station herself, with all of these sounds stored in her head and in her personal archive.
Later in the session Emily played Sherre's version that aired in Australia...ahhhh! This is what I'm talking about! In the Australian version the narrator's voice competes with the sounds, in a way that makes the piece that much better. Really it felt so much less stiff. And, I think, more appropriate for the script. I just liked the interpretation better. Felt a little darker at the end, too. Which I liked. Weird music (Ottis Redding?) behind it. It was weirder, and had more energy and more of an edge. In a weird way, it made it feel like there was more at stake in the text. It was very cool. Sue Mell great point that the changes in the ambience in the mix made it feel like the pirate station was a character in the first version narrator talking about the character. I'm not sure where you can hear the Australian version, unfortunately, cause I can't find a link to it on the ABC's website.
| 
RSS Feed