Set at an institute devoted to culinary and alimentary performance, a collective finds themselves embroiled.
Peter Strickland film, excellent, funny, beautifully shot and with wonderful sound design in a time when I’m stuck a lot more at home and need some weirdness in my life.
Much of the sound design came from your own performances, but there’s also new material. Talk about the process of layering older sounds with new materials, and also integrating foley with the sounds of the food.
It was a very long, very enjoyable process as well. There’s a whole bunch of people involved. The Sonic kitchen band, that’s Tim Kirby and Colin Fletcher. The three of us got together on our own for a whole weekend and just used the same gear as what you see in the film, you know, the reel-to-reel delay, the copycat, and so on. We just did these very long improvisations, but based on the same recipes, so doing tomato soup and so on, an omelet, and you walk away with each session was like 20 minutes, and you edit out the best bits and that was taken to Tim Harrison, who was sound designer. He did some of his own sonic catering as well, using hydrophones, which he could actually put into the cooking.
The one consistent thing was we would eat everything we cooked and recorded. Another important thing was to have a flanger. So Tim had an Eventide flanger. So obviously that is referenced in the film, but then we actually used it a lot. It’s such an evocative sound. I was first aware of it on “Christiane F.”
Would also MEGA-recommend his other recent film In Fabric
You may also know him from Berberian Sound Studio, story of a slightly unwell foley artist for giallo films.
Also, this really makes me want to have more opportunities for scoring.
Soo, what’s your oddest recording for musical or commercial intent?
I sequenced a “demo” track for a… fart organ.
Partner at the time worked for a company that made electronic gimmicks, never figured out if it made it to market.