We have a guest blog from the Dead Rat Orchestra. They will be at the Colchester Arts Centre www.colchesterartscentre.com/gigs/dead-rat-orchestra-cloisters on Thursday 12th July. This give a bit of a background to their work in composing sound tracks:
Mike Day, (Director of The Guga Hunters of Ness) and Dead Rat Orchestra first connected in 2008 at performance at London's Cafe Oto. The last song of our set was a ten minute epic, comprising of gritty fiddle reeling to an undulating wash of harmonium drones and peeling bells, whilst I sung an intentionally indiscernible vocal line that navigated the depths of the music. After the performance an enthused Mike approached us, he introduced himself as a filmmaker and proclaimed that we had just composed the soundtrack to his next film! The piece was to be a short film about a ship lost at sea, curiously, and unbeknownst to Mike, the obscured melody I had been singing was traditional sea-ballad called The Cruel Ship's Captain: We were all struck by the synergy of the moment; a collaboration was born.
I began writing compositions for Mike's short films, and throughout our dealings I heard snatches of his adventures, filming, sailing, his past-life as a lawyer and a string of other brushes with death. Soon enough I began to hear accounts of the Outer Hebrides, of its crofting traditions and treacherous waters, of grinding down giant waves in a tiny boat and of daredevil climbs up cliff faces with a video camera. These were the tales of Sulas Sgier and his documentary film the Guga Hunters of Ness.
DRO were Mike's first port of call for the Guga Hunters soundtrack. We soon realised that within the film he had captured something truly special, and potentially fleeting, as such we wanted to carefully craft the soundtrack in honour of the men who had allowed him to film their tradition. We hired a decommissioned LightShip in Colchester (TS Colne Light) and installed our own recording studio in the great red vessel. For a week we entrenching ourselves (with Mike) in its bowels to focus on the task, working closely to imbue the music with the qualities of his experience of the island, the men and the tradition. We created something of which we are all very proud.
Click here to hear an exclusive MP3 from the Guga Hunters of Ness Soundtrack:
http://soundcloud.com/criticalheights/05-dead-rat-orchestra-the
You can see extracts from the "making of" films of The Guga Hunters of Ness here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/nature/the_guga_hunters_of_ness_creating_the_programme.shtml
