Even though I'm not much of a metal fan any more, I really like Year of No Light's instrumental album Ausserwelt from 2010. Superior, grandiose, epic post-metal. So my interest was piqued when I heard that they were recording their original soundtrack to Carl Theodor Dreyer's classic Vampyr from 1932. I remember hearing that the band had occasionally performed this music live at screenings of the movie in the years following Ausserwelt, but since I'm stuck in California, I never even entertained the thought of hearing/seeing them do it for myself. I've had the dvd in my collection for quite a while and have thrown it on the tv at least a couple times, but wasn't intimately familiar with it. I remember it being full of creepy atmosphere and somber faces and nightmarish, shadowy scenes. In other words, Year of No Light's doom and gloom drone-y metal would be perfectly appropriate. Upon first hearing the soundtrack when it was released in early 2013, I didn't like it as much as Ausserwelt. Though it still has their distinctive style, and definitely has some gorgeous riffage. Over the months I've gotten much more familiar with it, and it has grown on me quite a bit. But then I was thinking- it sure would be great to hear this music as the soundtrack for the actual movie as it was intended, right? And the good news is that I know how to do stuff like that, so I got to work. After lining up the movie and the audio in my computer, a few issues popped up immediately: The movie is one hour 13 minutes; YoNL's soundtrack is one hour 10 minutes. Hmm. Start it three minutes into the movie? End it three minutes early? Somewhere in between? Did they use the same version of the movie as a guide when composing the music that I had? I was using the Criterion Collection version, which is (pretty much always) the definitive version, yes? I started syncing up parts that were fairly apparent to me that they were lined up in the correct spot in the movie. I started with some part in the first part of the film, but when I did that, stuff in the other parts of the film were clearly not synced. Similar results cropped up doing it the other way with synced music in the later parts of the movie throwing off the synced parts in the front half. This was obviously going to be a bit trickier than simply dropping the music in place and letting it roll. So what I ended up doing was taking it track by track, syncing up the parts that were obviously meant to sync up, and then dealing with the aftermath afterwards, that being overlapping audio or filling in the empty gaps between songs. With some careful stretching and skillful editing, I got it to a point where everything sounded in place, and all transitions were so smooth that, quite frankly, if I hadn't mentioned that I'd edited any of it, upon hearing it, nobody would have ever guessed, because the edits are invisible. Also, whoever produced/remastered the movie for Criterion also included their own soundtrack of the original music as written by Wolfgang Zeller. It would have been the most logical thing for me to simply lose that music in my mix, because the YoNL soundtrack would replace it. However, many sound effects, incidental noises and even some dialog is included in the dvd's soundtrack as well, and that stuff I wanted to keep. In any case, I wanted to use those sounds in my mix, but not necessarily the music, because stacking one independently composed piece of music over another, especially for the entire length of a movie, will result in trainwreck after trainwreck after trainwreck, right? Right? Well actually, after all the YoNL music was in place, I kept the dvd's music up at a certain volume, and while these two elements didn't exactly fit like hand in glove, they still work pretty well together. Believe me, if I thought that combining the two music sources would intrude or diminish YoNL's soundtrack, I wouldn't hesitate to kill the dvd audio in a heartbeat. But, after reviewing the final mix numerous times, I think the music on the dvd compliment's YoNL's music and never gets in the way of their compositions. Plus, it's cool that this version is more than just the dvd audio by itself, and more than just the YoNL album by itself. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, yes? In the end, this is almost assuredly not exactly how Year of No Light would have placed the music in the scenes, but, given the sequencing of the album, it's as close as I can get it, and it sounds good to me. Listen to/buy the music here- http://yearofnolight.bandcamp.com/album/vampyr Presonus Studio One 2 for all of the heavy duty audio editing. Final assembling, minor audio touch-ups in Final Cut Pro X. Brian Albers, Humorless Productions. http://www.mixcloud.com/humorlessproductions/ http://humorlessproductions.wordpress.com/ https://www.facebook.com/pages/Humorless-Productions/190626074303436?ref=hl

• published: 16 Sep 2013
• views: 2