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KGNU INTERVIEW

March 29, 2021

 

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. You can listen to the entire interview here.  

 

 

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                                                      A production still of the film set.

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Gary McBride:  Good evening and welcome to a Present Edge — 21st century and avant-garde music in the classical tradition. I’m Gary McBride and this evening I’ll be talking with CU composer Nelson Walker and Colorado filmmaker Marco Corvo on their collaboration: a film entitled impermanence which will soon be streaming online as part of the University of Colorado Pendulum New Music Series at CUPresents.org.

 

G: Marco, could you talk a little bit about the film impermanence?  What it is and why you created it and sort of how it came together.

 

Marco Corvo (M): Yeah, so this is a documentary, kind of an unusual documentary because there are no humans in it. And it’s an exhibition of my photographic work during COVID-19, so that explains why nobody could attend it. But that’s really the idea [of the film]. What the film is really about, I think it is today’s temporal crisis. Um... now we are living a present that it’s just a few dots of time disconnected between each other. And it’s no longer framed by a past and a future, so that we've lost completely the duration of time. Um... this film is an attempt to reclaim a contemplative life where the passing of time is once again meaningful.

 

G: I’ve taken a look at the film: it’s absolutely beautiful…

 

M: Oh, thank you.

 

G: Let me try to describe what is it that we are seeing. So, it’s in glorious black and white and we're actually in what looks like an old barn. And I recognize the scenery… I think you must have filmed it around Nederland somewhere.

 

M: Correct. The barn where we filmed… Actually, the whole footage has been shot near my home. I live in a mountain cabin west of Boulder, between Boulder and Nederland and the entire location of the film it’s right around the house… So, yeah.

 

G: We move through the landscape, and through the barn. And in the barn we actually see some of your work. Do you wanna talk a little bit about how you move in and out? Because the photographs that we see… It’s almost as we ourselves are, I don’t know, discovering these works one by one: behind a pillar, next to a bale of hay. Can you describe a little bit about what was your thinking as how you put that together?

 

M: Sure. I picked this location which is a place very kind of meaningful for me and for our community up here, our mountain community. It’s a place where… it used to be a gathering place where we had a farm stand, and music in the barn, and it was [where we spent] wonderful weekends over the Summer. A place where children and families would play together, would spend time together.

 

Um… The film starts with the nature that surrounds the area… Along with the sound of the water rushing in a stream that marks the time. And that kind of takes us… Guides us towards the buildings around the barn, where the horses are. Then, the horses lead us to the barn. And we… Our gaze, because there are no people in the film, enters the barn. And, in a sort of mysterious, magical way, we attend this exhibition. So, the prints are organized in groups. There is a group of prints that leads to another…They go out of sight, and new ones appear in different parts of the barn.

 

G: At what point did you start to imagine a collaboration with the composer for this piece?

 

M: I think I can condense this [collaboration process] in about three references that I gave the composer. So, reference number 1: Don’t ask me why, I don’t really have an answer for it, but I absolutely wanted a cello, as the main instrument, the main voice for the score of the film. That’s why Nelson came immediately to mind. He’s a wonderful cello player, you know, next to his composing skills. So, the cello piece that I selected was Bach, suite #5 in C minor, Sarabande. It’s a piece of music that has the qualities that I was looking for… Which are repetition and this back-and-forth movement, which recalls exactly what I was doing with the camera. Back-and-forth… It’s kind of like the movement of the pendulum, if you think about it. That’s what the time reference is. Pendulum. [laughs] Like the name of the program [in which impermanence will premiere] happens to be. It also has that haunting, and mysterious qualities that I was looking for. That’s the reference number 1.

 

The second reference: I didn’t want a score to just describe what we already see in the images, I wanted something more than that. I wanted a strong score that had its own artistic character. A strong character that would bring us into, um… Into an interior world, if you want. [That would] bring the audience into an interior world. So, that’s when comes into play the sound design we were talking about, Gary. The sound design, which is… Just field recordings that are tweaked electronically, right Nelson? Um… Using the sound design in that manner would help us. That’s why the reference number 2 was the work of the composer [Eduard] Artemiev, [working] with the director Andrej Tarkovsky on the film Stalker, which is one of my favorite films. Um… The sound is so important in that film. And it becomes the strong core, you know, of the whole score.

 

Reference number 3: I like the way another composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto blends together the acoustic sound with the sound design. He does that through a sort of minimalist sound that he uses. He did that wonderfully in the soundtrack for the film The revenant… don’t know if you’ve seen that one, [G: oh yes…yes.] directed by Alejandro Iñárritu. A beautiful film with Leonardo Di Caprio. And the sound there… I really like that score because it would bring together, you know, the acoustic sound — sometimes of a full orchestra — with sound design in a very strong way. So, that was the challenge for Nelson: to try to bring all of this together. And he did such a wonderful job! I’m so proud of [laughs] the soundtrack for this film.

 

Nelson Walker (N): [laughs] Yeah. Thank you Marco, if I can jump in on that… I have to say this was my first experience really getting to collaborate with someone. And especially someone who had such a clear vision for how he wanted the soundtrack to be. Um… And so, it was very challenging for me at first. There are old email threads where I’m sending, you know, just the cello recording and he’s like: "No that’s not it at all.” And I’m going: “Shoot, what can I do next?”. [laughs] Like, going through iteration after iteration. Um… And yeah, the ideas that I had at the beginning of the process were completely different than… I’m not entirely sure anyone of my original ideas ended up in the final cut… And that was just part of the learning process.

 

G: And, yeah, when I hear the score for the movie, it looks like you've hit every mark that Marco was describing. Right? It has that sort of a contemplative nature of the Bach’s Sarabande, Marco’s filmmaking is very Tarkovskyesque — I am familiar with a number of his films, and…of course! Of course, you admire Tarkovsky! It makes perfect sense. But, Nelson, I wanted to ask you: With a filmmaker with such a keen knowledge of music, and sound design, was it a little bit constricting?

 

N: There was nowhere to hide! [laughs] There was absolutely nowhere to hide. And, yeah, in all honesty, there were times when I was very frustrated…[laughs] I was like: “But I think what I’m doing is really good!” And it just wasn’t what the film needed. That was really — as I said— challenging but, I think, a really important experience to have. Because I’m now more eager to seek out these collaborative spaces. Marco, I mean, if you ever need another film score, by all means…[laughs]

 

M:  Absolutely! Absolutely, I would hire you again and again [laughs].  

 

G:  Marco, I’m really interested in the integration between music and natural sounds. How much of the natural sounds that are in the film were you, and how much of them were Nelson’s discoveries along the way?

 

M:  The field recordings were all Nelson. And we went through a selection, you know: “I like these sounds better than these other sounds”. It’s very intuitive, you know, the process. So, it worked out great even if we were not there in person. We were not there together to work on the music. We were just exchanging emails and [I was] listening to, you know, to what Nelson was doing… In progress.

 

G:  Did the idea of having the book ends of water, at the beginning and the end…Was that the original concept, or was something that arose through the composition process.

 

N: That was all Marco…Yeah. 

 

M: We had this idea of an ocean of trees, you know, in the beginning you see all these trees and there was the presence of the water, which then, it became a time marker. So, that is what, kind of in the process, evolved to be [the sound of water in the beginning]. So, then I decided we needed that sound in the end to conclude, you know, the cycle. And, a conclusion was very important for this film, because of what I mentioned earlier about our temporal crisis: we don’t have conclusions anymore, because the present is so fragmented, we often have to, you know… never finish things. We just jump to something else and we always look for what’s the next thing to do… And [then again] what’s the next thing. Everything is very short and short term. So having a conclusion, I think it was very important.

 

G: Nelson, let me ask you about the genesis of this film [score].

 

N: Yes. As far as creating the soundtrack goes, they’d cut together a sort of a rough cut of the images and then sent that to me to do the sound design and the audio for it.

Um… But, I think, simultaneously the two, the images and the audio actually arose at the same time, in a sense, because the days that we were all out on set filming in this barn I had my, my zoom, my field recorder, and was just wandering around the barn trying to get, you know, audio of the barn creaking… or the chains clanking against the fences that were dividing up the area. Then, at the beginning and the end of this film there are these bookends of the shot from the mountain top. And so, I was able to get some water rushing from that spring that’s up there.

 

G: I was going to ask you about that, because the movie is kind of bookended by this aural… the sound of water. But we don’t hear it in the body of the work. But I think I’m hearing other things throughout… like for example there’s your cello, right?

 

N: Mm-hm. So, everything that I used for the audio was either from the field recordings or from myself sitting in my room with my cello. And so, for example, I do a lot of processing on the cello sound. Actually Annika Socolofsky, my professor last semester gave me the sort of the one tip that made the whole soundtrack fall into place for myself, that was this function in Audacity — of all programs— called poll stretch. That is this effect that allows you to take sounds and time-stretch them out to, you know, 10, 20, 30, 150 times slower. And so, I had just sort of my mid-quality microphone to record [the cello], but was able to actually play this motif and then process that sound and stretch it to the length that I needed. And it became this really sort of eerie, ambient sound, and I was like: “yes! That is the sound that I want for this whole thing.” 

 

G: That’s awesome. So, you’re using Audacity. Can I ask you what other software you are using?

 

N: Yeah. So, I am very new to audio editing, overall. This was my first, real project for working in any sort of digital audio work station. Just in the last few weeks, very recently, I’ve started writing, using Ableton as a direct part of my compositional process. Even for music that’s not electro-acoustic. So, just sitting with my microphone and doing voice recording or playing directly into the [?] and then editing into sort of like a mockup of the final piece.

 

G: Oh, that’s awesome. So, would impermanence kind of mark the beginnings of your electronic sound manipulation...

 

N: Very much so. It was a great opportunity. Some of the very simple things I was doing -- that someone who works with this kind of format more regularly would have been able to do in 5 or 10 minutes -- took me hours to figure out how to do it. Um, but I was using it as an opportunity to teach myself the format.

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G: All right.  Marco Corvo, Nelson Walker,  thank you so much for joining me today at KGNU.