PIANO THEME: NOWHERE LEFT TO RUN
An excerpt from my original score on Felipe Mafasoli’s experimental film “Nowhere Left to Run”-- an abstract, associative vision of a post-apocalyptic dream world. If you’re in the Twin Cities, you can see it this weekend. The film-- which, in its final form, may or may not include this scene-- screens this coming Friday at Cellular Cinema’s Cave 4 Festival, 9 pm.
Readers may recognize the melody of this piece, which appears in different arrangements throughout the film. I’ve posted about the other versions here and here. I did my best to channel the Flaming Lips on this version, which accompanied a tableaux that evoked equal parts beauty and decay. In case anyone was curious, I dug back through the session to see what toys I used to create it.
All of the signals originate from virtual instruments. The piano is a sampled, out-of-tune “honky tonk” instrument, apparently treated only with compression and no other processing. The drone is a mandolin voice through a fuzz module, bitcrusher, another fuzz module with different settings than the first one, a whole ton of reverb, a filter to foreground some overtones, and some EQ rounding off the high and low end. The distorted bass line that comes in is a sampled standup bass through compressor, fuzz, reverb, and then another compressor.
Enjoy!