The Will Beneath

The Will Beneath, 2024 (Album/Foley/Post Production Audio); Composed, Performed, Produced, Recorded, Mixed

The Will Beneath follows Naomi, a servant of Cecil Rhodes, who is forced to fight back when her and Rhodes’ mistress are under threat. This was a major undertaking for me as an artist, collaborator and professional. I was the onset sound mixer, foley artist, composer, and post production mixer; to put it bluntly, every sound in the 25 minute long project was recorded and processed entirely by myself.

For the score, the intention was to make something that blended traditional textures and instruments with modern production sensibilities to create something eerie, intense and powerful. The solution was to use only acoustic instruments (something unfamiliar to my typically synth heavy projects) and create a project with the same structure and theory as modern house or hard techno. The first step was to record djembe as a basis for the song's percussion. The writer and director of this project, my close friend Diag Govender, is from South Africa and thus the idea to do this would ground the film’s score in the project’s world. I recorded djembe group practice sessions at the Syracuse Community Folk Art’s center and sampled the recordings across the project, with their permission of course. I later added in trumpet, harmonica, violin, shakers, ocarina, flute, vocals, and a few other things here and there that have been so heavily processed I can’t even remember what they are. My sister played the flute in the high school marching band and was able to perform a motif I wrote for her. By this point, creating and sequencing the tracks was a fairly quick process as everything from the samples and instruments to the motifs and key had been decided in advance. Some additional textures (in the last track) were created after the rest of the score so as to fill out some scenes with more understated music.

Much of the foley was recorded straight from the objects in the movie as Diag still had access to them. Sounds were often diegetic but with post processing to bring them out more for claustrophobic and otherworldly effect. For example the bell that Rhode’s uses to call Naomi rings out in a high pitch even after the bell has stopped ringing, or when the plate is rattling to emphasize Naomi’s discomfort and anxiety when a deal is being made that will affect her home. Dialogue was mixed to allow the actors to all be balanced and comprehensible despite the heavy accents they used. All the post mixing took about two months of my summer in 2024 seeing as I had never done this much post audio on a project of this scale before.