PREVIEWS

I first thought of making a soundtrack album to accompany my novel, The Beautiful Dead End (Anvil Press, 2002; Point mort, Editions Alto, 2005), when I heard Barry Adamson’s Moss Side Story in the early 1990s. Adamson envisioned his concept album, complete with snatches of dialogue, radio broadcasts and sound effects, as the soundtrack for an imaginary film. Around that same time, I began to collect soundtrack albums (like those by Simon Fisher Turner for Derek Jarman’s films, and Ry Cooder’s for Wim Wenders’), along with theme albums produced by Hal Willner and the early cassette magazines from England’s Touch record label. The soundtracks (often for movies I hadn’t yet seen) and compilations created a near-perfect cinematic headspace for writing. I could feel the music seeping into, infecting, my writing. What I really wanted, however, was something customized for the novel I was working on.

In the mid-1990s I brought together several musicians to see if we could put onto tape the kind of sounds that I wanted to hear. None of those first recordings made it into the final mix, but the process confirmed for me that it was possible to create music that would evoke the world of the novel.

By late 2001 the novel was in the process of being published, and I had a clear idea of the album I wanted to produce. I invited a few composers and musicians to submit material that would suit the tone of the project. I slotted pieces from Giorgio Magnanensi, Jocelyn Robert, David P. Smith, Lee Hutzulak, Christopher Butterfield and Todd R. Mason into a rough mix and determined what other music was still needed. I organized several new recording sessions with Victoria-based musicians. With a scene-by-scene synopsis of the narrative to improvise from, they improvised music that captured the mood of the scenes I wanted to “score.” From these sessions I gathered enough material to complete the soundtrack.

Some of the material was mixed in Vancouver by Giorgio Magnanensi, who had also provided music from sessions he’d recorded in Italy with Minz and Maunz, his Italian ensemble. Some of Minz and Maunz’s group improvisations were recorded in the great hall of a medieval castle (built on the ruins of a Roman fort), in the tiny village of Capannole, near Sienna. Using homemade speakers and amplifiers, they also recorded in a 13th century Romanic church in Badia Agnano in Tuscany, benefiting from the room’s natural reverb, which allowed them to create an electronic sound in an acoustic environment.

Tolan McNeil, who plays guitar on several tracks with the Dead End Quintet, mixed the remainder of the music and mastered the album in his Victoria studio.

In late 2004, Lee Hutzulak remixed the album, presenting me with a radical reconfiguration of the whole project, having edited, collaged and combined tracks to create thickly-textured, at times frightening, versions of the pieces. From Lee’s remixes, I selected my favourites and assembled them, along with some of the earlier mixes, for the final edit of the album.

In the end, 23 musicians from Italy, Quebec, Vancouver and Victoria contributed solo or ensemble pieces to the instrumental music on this disc. The pieces range from dark electroacoustic chamber music to spacy country ambience. Almost everything was improvised live in single takes with no overdubs — a testament to the creativity and open ears of these musicians.

It’s one of life’s ironies that the soundtrack, which was to accompany the writing of my novel, is finally being released some years after the publication of the book itself, but I trust the album will capture ears in the way that Adamson’s early work, and other soundtracks, did mine. — CH, August 2005