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The first phase of producing The Cavern of Deep Tones involved selecting movie soundtracks that contained archetypical passages, fragments or general auras of 'brooding film music'. This naturally enough led to a selection of horror and sc-fi movie soundtracks, though possibly this was the genre I had in mind as being the type of movie music that would lead me fundamentally to the 'Other' of music in such recordings. But totally by chance, all the scores I ended up selecting were by Jerry Goldsmith. This was in part due to Goldsmith's distincitve 'borrowing' and 'reducing' of the 20th Century canon, but also to do with the pre-digital yet hi-fi recording of his late-70s/early-80s scores. Plus post-STAR WARS, film scores in sci-fi especially have very little atonality and heaps of heroic grandeur. Goldsmith's scores to ALIEN, POLTERGEIST, OUTLAND, COMA, SWARM and OMEN extol a sensational embrace of atonal schisms generally absent in many other composers' work in the same genres across this period.
The main procedeure for sculpting the sounds for The Cavern of Deep Tones involved finding textural moments from a single vinyl LP recording of a soundtrack, and then feeding each selection through an effects bank (a DP4). Each 'effected fragment' was then sampled while operating EQ settingson the mixing desk and tweaking parameter settings on the DP4. The resulting sample was then edited via complex waveform manipulation and MIDI modulation assignment and operations within an Ensoniq ASR10. In a quite loose and improvisatory way, a fragment was thus effected, sampled then edited, then an additional framgment from the same LP soundtrack underwent the same process, until a multi-tracked composition was formed wholly from fragments from a single soundtrack. Each time, the waveform editing was dedicated towards discovering and developing a way to perform the sound by some means - a melody, a chord pattern, a base tonality, a rhythmic patterning. Each sample was thus shaped by the ways it could be transformed by a specific approach to the keyboard. Following some of the basic precepts of musique concrete, a trombone sustain would be edited into a envelope-shaped percussive event, then perfomed to sound like giant timpani; a celeste would be down-pitched and looped/diffused to create a low rumbling drone. These complete inversions were epicentral to the The Cavern of Deep Tones project, in that a 're-orchestration' was developed to turn the original score inside-out and abstract its musicality so as to 'return the music to noise'.
Once some compositional shape grew out of the multi-tracking of these effected/sampled/edited fragments and their interlocked performance, 4-channel quadraphonic spatialization was then developed (though much of the initial processing involved shaping the sounds while listening to it in quad configuration). The final mixing entailed paying particular attention to how the sounds developed a narrational mometum in space. At this stage also, selected elements were re-edited to appear in the centre channel and a discrete sub-woofer channel to facilitate Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding and playback. The CD version of The Cavern of Deep Tones takes the stereo rear configuration and combines it into a mono track which appears in the rear channels when the CD is played through a surround amplifier equipped with Dolby Pro-Logic Surround encoding and connected through a surround speaker configuration.
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