Vision
I wrote music for a dream world, rather than for a performance. A world where all definitions arediffused and all meaning is ambiguous, where symbolism and archetypes replace language andlogic. A world where everything is at a distance until it’s too close for comfort. A permanentlyunstable and moving world. Aurora goes to sleep a girl and wakes up as a woman. In thattransition, she has to confront all her natural subconscious urges and try to find a place forthem.This album is an adaptation of the score for a mixed media dance performance, and wasoriginally composed for a 32 channel surround sound system. I had to add and cut a lot ofmaterial to make sure the music translates my intentions in stereo sound, and functions withoutthe live performance and video elements.I feel very lucky to have received this commission for the score for Sleeping Beauty Dreams, inwhich I was trusted with a lot of freedom to write whatever music I wanted to explore for myself.My main objective while writing was to further explore the foggy territories where traditionalmusic and my specific sound design processes overlap: to make a full length album of musicwith firm roots in melody and harmony, using innovative sounds and technology.
Process
Most of the music was made before I knew what scene it would go into. When I write music foruse within a narrative structure, I still like to just write music without thinking too much about it,and then later see where the music fits into the story. Many of these sketches started out as justexploring exciting techniques like extreme distortion, irregular meters like 5/4, and microtonality.Some of this music started from a recorded improvisation performance rather than a sequencedcomposition: the melodic themes in Aurora’s Theme, War Dance, Descent, Awaken Into ADream, and A New Dawn were recorded improvisations. Breathless Night and Voyager arebased on recordings of modular synth patches that either played themselves or that I fed notesfrom a keyboard. Almost all of the sounds that I used for these compositions are processedrecordings from the modular synthesizer and connected hardware equipment. It proved usefulto use devices that are focused on expressive performance rather than microscopic control.
THYS 