The Undercover Soundtrack – Toni Davidson

May 4, 2016June 14, 2016 Roz Morris @Roz_MorrisLeave a comment

The Undercover Soundtrack is a series where I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week my guest is multi-translated author Toni Davidson @silemrenk

Soundtrack by Brian Eno, Erik Satie, Max Richter, Nils Frahm, Olafur Arnalds, Marsen Jules, Peter Broderick, Rival Consoles, Goldmund, Speedy J

Long before my first book was published I believed that the setting for writing had to be just right, that there should be a room with a view. To be a writer, there needed to be a gnarled, wooden desk strewn with the debris of streams of consciousness – an emptied glass, an ashtray brimming with Gitanes and old editions of Beckett and Huysmans. I believed that environment completely influenced the writing process, that imagination would be nurtured by being surrounded by nice things. This ideal didn’t last. Lack of money, crap housing and the onset of reality eroded romantic ideals. Besides, the external was a vain distraction. I needed, with youthful earnestness, to explore myself and what better companion than music.

Push forward and my first novel Scar Culture – a novel about the uses and abuses of psychotherapy with a dark, satirical heart – was written to what seems now a limited range of bleakness and ambience. I didn’t want words, sung or spoken, to fill or influence creative pauses, so I chose the airy drones of Eno’s Ambient 1 or Satie’s Gnossiennes and Gymnopodie. On repeat, no surprises, just layers of sound and knolls of notes that were not so much background as everywhere in my head.

Music for reading

While I struggled to get the novel published, I messed around with its structure, excerpting one voice then another and made my own music to accompany a reading. It was simple stuff, a soundscape of pads and dripping sounds. Arty no doubt, especially when I sampled sentences from the text into the recording. It was of its time for sure but I enjoyed amplifying my voice so that it had to fight with the music I created. This wasn’t a bad thing. To fight one’s own words as a writer is to be a creative pugilist. It’s no use being in harmony all the time, such melodic reassurance can be counteractive. Sometimes dissonance can expose expectation – a prime example of this is Stravinsky’s first performance of Rite of Spring.

Writer, responder

Music became more embedded in my writing process when I moved to Vietnam with my girlfriend. Over the five years I stayed there, I became a different kind of writer and a different responder. I was not making music any more, I was not going out listening to music any more, most music I heard was in my headphones. My Gun Was As Tall As Me, my second novel, is set in a SE Asian country and it is crucial that the atmosphere of the novel is as dense and as humid as much of the sub-tropical environment I lived in. As I was teaching long hours in the daytime, later at night was my time to write and music helped me shift gears, to replace a working environment with a writing one.

One artist dominated the writing of the novel. Max Richter’s Memoryhouse and The Blue Notebooks became entwined with my writing head. The music was both juxtaposition to my sub-tropical environment with its cold synth washes, the echoing footsteps of European noir and a compliment. Within the music, the soaring then plaintive roller-coastering melody fitted perfectly with the distressing narrative of the novel; hope lifting the spirits and then horror torturing them. The music became a faithful companion as I wrote about the fate of Internally Displaced People in Burma. For sure, the music influenced the writing of the book; it released emotions that helped me get beyond the mechanics of writing and into the soul of the story.

Toying with expectation

By the time I started writing my third novel, The Alpine Casanovas, writing now had its own playlist. Gone were the days when a CD would need to be found just at the wrong moment. I could create a playlist and shuffle around, toying with expectation again. In the time since My Gun Was As Tall As Me, I had deepened my interest in contemporary classical music/electronica – Nils Frahm, Olafur Arnalds, Marsen Jules – most of who are on the Erased Tapes label. I have come to rely on the label to produce a body of work that suits my ears and the other label that does that is Type Records. In particular the mix tapes produced by label artists provide a narrative accompaniment giving the listener, as any good DJ does, a sense that the journey is more important than the destination.

And now, as I work on my next novel, Electro Birseck, the play list has expanded. Because of the length of time I take to write my novels, I like to seek new work by artists known to me – their previous work is often too associated with my own previous work. Gotta move on. This novel has music at the heart of its narrative, dance music – from disco to techno – from one generation’s drugged-up hedonism in outlandish costume to an underground music community culture in a location partitioned by ethnic differences. Truly music is now embedded fundamentally in my writing process as the playlist shuffles from the solo piano of Peter Broderick to the sequenced patterns of Rival Consoles; from Goldmund to banging sessions by Speedy J at the Boiler Room.

Above all, music means a portable environment. My original and somewhat pretentious aesthetic desires have evolved to the relative simplicity of headphones and laptop. Because of my work patterns and my relocations, I have learned to write anywhere, from hotel lobby to the beach; from station waiting rooms to a room being battered by wet season storms. Music allows me to be wherever I need to be to write. I press play and I am instantly back where I was when I left off.

Toni Davidson was born in Ayrshire, Scotland. His novel Scar Culture (Canongate, 1999), has been translated into nine languages. His short story collection, The Gradual Gathering of Lust, was published in 2008. In 2012 his second novel My Gun Was As Tall As Me, was published by Freight Books. His most recent novel, The Alpine Casanovas, also published by Freight and launched at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, in August 2015. For more visit his website: tonidavidson.com. And find him on Twitter @silemrenk

Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack – Dan Gennoe

January 20, 2016 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris1 Comment

The Undercover Soundtrack is a series where I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week my guest is novelist and former music journalist Dan Gennoe @dangennoe

Soundtrack by Miles Davis, Tindersticks, Bernard Herrmann, Abel Korzeniowski, Shigeru Umebayashi, Goldfrapp, Erik Satie, Clint Mansell, ISAN, Fila Brazillia, Cliff Martinez

I spent 16 years as a music journalist interviewing pop stars and writing about music for the likes of Esquire, GQ, Q and The Mail on Sunday. I had to describe the sounds and pick apart the meaning. It was my job to get inside the artist’s head and try to understand what they were trying to say and what led them to try to say it. Music was the outcome and I had to find the root cause.

Now it’s the other way around. Music is the beginning, the starting point for everything I’m trying to say. It’s a way to immerse myself in the feelings and emotions and people and places I want to write about.

All Neon Like Love is a book about loneliness and isolation, love and obsession, grief and the need to connect with people and the world around us. It’s a book about the need for intimacy, that’s equal parts romance and melancholy.

Grey present, warm past

Set in London and Paris it follows a nameless man searching for an ex, a woman so perfect in his memory that she starts to disappear into fantasy. His need to recapture what he thinks they had together leads him to obsessive, at points disturbing, behaviour. I wanted his present day world to be grey and intense and his remembered past with her to be warm and indulgent – so the reader would understand what it was he thought he was missing and would understand, if not approve of, the lengths he went to to recapture it. I wanted the words to be hypnotic and beautiful, for the reader to be seduced by them and then too mesmerised to look away when it was all getting too much.

To find all of that I put together a playlist of 148 tracks, ranging from lilting classical piano and lyrical jazz, to dark electronica and industrial beats. Miles Davis, Tindersticks and Bernard Herrmann wouldn’t normally be found on the same playlist, but they all had a profound effect on shaping the mood and rhythm and in maintaining the tone of All Neon.

Romance and longing

I love film soundtracks and scores, and most of the music that I listen to when I write is either composed for, or I have discovered via, a film – which I guess makes sense given that scores are made to stir emotions and enhance moods.

The soundtrack for Tom Ford’s beautifully shot film adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man got particularly heavy use during the writing of All Neon Like Love, not least for the beautifully sad romance of Abel Korzeniowski’s strings. Stillness of the Mind in particular is filled with so much longing, and so much sadness, that it would instantly make me feel all the emptiness that filled the central character’s days as he tried and failed to move on from Sophie, the object of his affection/obsession. And on the rare occasions when Stillness of the Mind didn’t do it, the lightness and longing of Mescaline’s piano, with its tragically hopeful melody, definitely would.

Similarly hopeless in its romance, Shigeru Umebayashi’s Yumeji’s Theme from Chinese film, In The Mood For Love, inspired much of the more lyrical passages in the book where the central character is fondly remembering, or perhaps reinventing, days he and Sophie spent together. I wanted the rhythm and flow of the words to lull the reader and allow them to feel the effect of the memories he was reliving, but for there to be a disquieting undercurrent to these sections, to make the reader feel ill at ease with how in love he and Sophie are in his version of things. If it works, it’s largely down to repeat listening of the flawed romance of the violin melody of Yumeji’s Theme.

As well as the hypnotic quality, I wanted a dream-like feel to parts of the book, where he gets lost in the perfectness of the remembered affair. Few people do dreamlike romance as well as Goldfrapp, and few Goldfrapp tracks are as perfectly romantic and dreamlike as Let It Take You from their Supernature album. If ever I wanted to know what love felt like in the head of my protagonist, a verse and chorus of that made me know everything.

But ultimately, the romance and longing the main character feels are less love and more about his fragile mental state, which is probably why I kept being drawn to Bernard Hermann’s score for Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the track Variation on Scotty Trails Madeline – which in the film soundtracks James Stewart’s Scotty following Madeline, the object of his obsession. It’s a beautifully melancholic love theme with a sense of distance and separation to its restrained strings.

Serenity and darker

There were two piano pieces by composer Erik Satie that I kept returning to when I was writing the passages of the book where the obsession of the central character is starting to fester and grow. Gnossienne No.1 and Gnossienne No.4 both have a desolate calm about them which is exactly how I wanted the character to be at this point. He’s very isolated and distant, with a sort of serenity to him, which like the quiet piano refrains of both tracks, feels like it could take a darker turn at any moment.

Soundtracks are a great source for dark moods. Put Your Love In Me from the Tindersticks soundtrack for French revenge thriller Les Salauds, and Clint Mansell’s Welcome To Lunar Industries from sci-fi suspense movie Moon, are eerie and disturbing and claustrophobic and hypnotic and bitter and are about as dark and fixated as anything can be, yet they have a seductive quality that made them easy to get lost in. I would have them on loop for hours at a time when I wanted to darken the tone of the writing and add a discomfort to his thoughts and actions. I wanted the reader to be lulled by the rhythm of the writing yet for there to be a tension and disquiet to it which I hoped would seep into it from these two tracks.

Just as important, though, was the sense that obsession was something he welcomed, that it was something he was happy to occupy himself with, that it was something he immersed himself in. So to the mix of dark obsession tracks I added a lighter, more peaceful but no less oppressive track, Scoop Remix by electronic duo ISAN. It’s a strangely clinical yet warm instrumental, with machine noises and lethargic guitars and a beat that seems to grow and envelope. Listening to it I could imagine him slowly giving himself up to his unhealthy obsession and for it being the one thing that he had that he felt totally comfortable with.

London and Paris

More than just the backdrop to the story, London and Paris are two of the most influential characters in the book, shaping events and how he views and remembers them. London is a grey, flat, empty place for him, it’s the reality that he doesn’t want to face. It’s endless hours of his own company in an empty Barbican flat. I wanted his London to be shapeless but claustrophobic. I didn’t want it to be grim, I wanted it to be beautiful but endless. Listening to Fila Brazillia’s Subtle Body, with its slowly repeating synth chords, weightless electronic swells and wintery bell chimes gave me his view across a damp and endless London skyline. The otherworldly steel drum loops of First Sleep from Cliff Martinez’s score for Stephen Soderberg’s remake of Solaris, were the source of much of the isolation and loneliness the character feels in the flat. If Subtle Body was him looking out, First Sleep was him bouncing off the walls. That was London in the present. In the past both London and the flat were warmer, happier places – one scene features a drunken seduction as Miles Davis’s So What wafts from the stereo and out into the summer night.

Miles Davis also features in Paris, or at least inspired the mood of its rainy late night streets with the track, Générique which he recorded for the soundtrack to French new wave film Lift to the Scaffold. Like everything on that soundtrack it’s got a mournful, listless feel to the languid trumpet line and aimless bass which helped me find the rhythm for central character’s lost nights wandering the city in search of Sophie. And then for when he finds her, I needed a song full of allure and alienation, a Parisian soundtrack for an outsider left lurking in doorways rather than enjoying the candlelit romance. Nothing is more Parisian, alienated or made for lurking than Grace Jones’s I’ve Seen That Face Before. The sinister reggae lilt, the lonely accordions and Grace singing of shadowy figures and dancing in bars and restaurants, conjure the emptiness of being on the outside of the perfect romantic scene, which in essence is what the whole of All Neon Like Love is about.

Dan Gennoe is a London based writer and novelist. A former music journalist, he’s written cover features, interviews and reviews for Esquire, GQ, Arena, FHM, Q, Mojo, Red, Time Out, The Independent and The Mail on Sunday. He’s mixed with rappers and rockstars, ghosted celebrity memoirs and worked as a music editor for Google. All Neon Like Love is his first novel. Find him on Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter as @dangennoe

Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack – Mark Richard Beaulieu

August 5, 2015January 19, 2016 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris3 Comments

‘Music for writing the 12th century’

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week’s guest is MFA graduate Mark Richard Beaulieu @MarkRBeaulieu

Soundtrack by Chris Isaak, Elmer Bernstein, David Darling, Alan Silvestri, CocoRosie, Hildegard von Bingen, Laraaji, Jon Hassell, Maurice Moncozet, Maurice Jarre, Natacha Atlas, Ibrahim Maalouf, Prokofiev, Steven Price, David Motion, Erik Satie, Gabriel Yared, Nino Rota, Ennio Morricone, My Life With The Thrill Kill Cult, Trevor Morris, The Ting Tings, Beethoven, Handel

O, let me tell you – writing about the 12th century, you had better be listening to music. And if you are writing about Eleanor of Aquitaine, one must attend troubadours, trobars as my friends call them. When I understood their music, I arrived at the joy of Eleanor and what she heard.

The Young Life is the first of six novels in the Eleanor Code series. In the beginning there is passion. Modern trobar, singer-songwriter Chris Isaak’s Blue Spanish Sky underscores my writing of a 13-year-old girl’s experience of love and sorrow for a father’s sudden death far away. I replayed this theme to write of Eleanor at age 76 lying by his Spanish grave, six novels later. Establishing emotions of a medieval daughter and father who only had each other were reinforced by playing Elmer Bernstein’s To Kill a Mockingbird, David Darling’s Children in Cello Blue, and Alan Silvestri’s Contact end credit.

The musical innovation of the 12th century was trobars composing emotions into personal songs. In The Young Life two female trobars sing to Princess Eleanor to comfort her grief after her father’s death. I wrote inspired while listening to the lament of CocoRosie singing Smokey Taboo. In performance they paint their faces in protest not sentiment, a thing that trobars used to do. I wrote this in, as Eleanor both laments the uncertain murder of her father, and protests the occupation of Aquitaine by France. CocoRosie’s haunting singing mixes a girl child’s voice with operatic glissandos like the chants of Hildegard von Bingen. As the story goes, Queen Eleanor meets Hildegard the visionary abbess crossing the Rhein. Hildegard’s soaring forest songs played in the background as I wrote of French and German pilgrim camps.

Songs with words are difficult to write by, even when voiced in another language. Sometimes I search for weeks to find the perfect music to write a section. To write my scenes for medieval children dancing in rain, a rafting solace on the Loire, and Irene’s watercourse way in Byzantium I found the unique ambient composer Laraaji. His Day of Radiance, or Cave in England played on a hand-built Harry Partch-like zither brought me the words of rain falling in color and reflecting water.

In another book of the series, The Journey East, I drafted the scene of Eleanor’s strange abduction while she slept, then rewrote it listening to Jon Hassell’s Clairvoyance. His restrained horn gave me words to describe the prelude to dreams and danger. To really get at the trobar experience a historical novelist must hear them perform on period instruments, with the force of the 12th century tongue – Occitan (OXSE-tah). Just as I imagine Queen Eleanor did. I have listened to dozens of troubadour performances, but contemporary performer Maurice Moncozet performing (translated) Rings coming in fountains, helped me imagine Queen Eleanor and her court on blankets before the song’s original medieval composer Jaufre Rudel the Prince of Blaye. Maurice’s vivid interpretation of the 12th century trobar Peire Vidal inspired writing a deeply emotional performance in the Louvre gardens. Translating and getting to know the strange Occitan singing begat a finer writing of emotion and improved dialogue.

Traveling is exciting in the mideast. Eleanor first seemed to fit with Maurice Jarre’s First Entrance to the Desert in his Lawrence of Arabia score, but ultimately an Arabic-inspired court, feast scenes, and trade in the Antioch bazaar benefited from Natacha Atlas with Shubra. Finally Peter Gabriel’s Passion evokes the rooftops and gardens of the Holy Land. Ibrahim Maalouf with his eastern-western cornet was behind a few out-of-control medieval wedding feasts.

Medieval battle in a Holy War. Please no swelling hero music. Crusaders out of supply and desperate required the sparse crudeness of Prokofiev’s The Battle On The Ice: April 5, 1242, and the entire film score of Alexander Nevsky. Supplying ominous violent scenes in empty winter also fit well with Steven Price’s Gravity.

All phases of love and sex are key. The alluring Eleanor inventing court rituals finds sublime kisses in David Motion’s Orlando film score. The art of fine love-making is evoked by Roland Pöntinen playing Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes No. 3. Lovers shift mood in Gabriel Yared’s sexy Betty Blue. Nino Rota’s 1968 Prologue to Romeo and Juliet keeps me in a frame of mind when I am editing teenage Henri Angevin falling head-over-heels for Eleanor Capet. Their families are at war when they exchange their first spark, just like the famous star-crossed lovers.

Romance is contrasted with two Lolita stories that must go further than Nabakov’s book. Eleanor’s 12-year-old sister’s imbroglio and Henri’s later seduction of a 13-year-old nymphette were set in motion by a sympathetic listening to Ennio Morricone’s Lolita Love Theme. To write of courtesans without a code where sex is all about power relied on My Life With The Thrill Kill Cult’s Dirty Little Secrets. The tense energy of sons rebelling against Henri after his elite guards murder Archbishop Thomas Becket, a reformer of a corrupt church, fit Trevor Morris’s The Borgias score.

Chaos writing. I don’t know if you’ve tried this, but I actually play music when I am conceiving a character in stress. Shocked by a death and having to take action in a state of confusion, young Eleanor is written against the loud energetic Ting Tings’ Shut Up and Let Me Go.

The ordered mind. When I want to edit a chapter straight, my go-to long compositions are Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 “Emperor”: Mvt. II, and Handel’s Dixit Dominus.

The innovation of personal love songs intense with human emotion is a key to the 12th century. Only our generation has ever heard the infinite music of the world. A thousand troubadours came into existence, a jumping point into our era filled with the boundless music of our emotions.

Mark Richard Beaulieu grew up in Heidelberg, New York City, Texas and California, receiving an MFA from UC Davis and a BFA from Trinity University in San Antonio. He is an energetic writer, fluent on the 12th century life of Eleanor of Aquitaine, a collected painter, photographer, and innovative software technologist. He lives in Escondido with his wife and pets. The Young Life is the first of six novels in the Eleanor code series. Mark can be found on Facebook, Pinterest, on his website, and on Twitter @MarkRBeaulieu

Undercover Soundtrack

The Undercover Soundtrack – Claire King

February 20, 2013January 19, 2016 Roz Morris @Roz_Morris18 Comments

‘Very French; weighed down by heat and melancholy’

Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative process – perhaps to open a secret channel to understand a character, populate a mysterious place, or explore the depths in a pivotal moment. This week’s guest is debut novelist Claire King @ckingwriter

Soundtrack by Erik Satie, Cat Power, Counting Crows, Francis Cabrel

As an author whose days are pulled and split between parenting, work, chores and all the other usual distractions, when it’s time to write I find it really helpful to use sensory prompts to pull me quickly out of my own world and into the story. Visual prompts like photographs help, as do smells, tastes and definitely music.

The Night Rainbow, my debut novel, is set in southern France in the heat of August. It is narrated by five-year-old Pea, and plays out in a very limited environment – her house and the surrounding meadows and hills – but which of course seems much bigger to a child of that age. It also takes place over a surprisingly short span of time. But again, to a child a week can seem like forever. Because of this, I had a relatively small selection of music that I played when I was writing The Night Rainbow that would bring me back to the place, the time and the characters. I always listened to it on headphones, which emphasised the feeling of immersion.

Margot and Pea

The one album that I played over and over was Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes, by Alexandre Tharaud. Of these pieces, Gnossienne 1 for me really captured the feel of the novel. I found this piano music perfectly evocative of the environment I was trying to create – it’s very French, and it seems weighed down by heat and melancholy, yet the delicate notes of the piano evoke the lightness of childish movement. As Pea and Margot made their daily forays down through the peach orchard, over the fence and down past the donkeys to the stream, they were accompanied by this music.

Claude and Pea

Pea’s mother has been struck by tragedy twice in quick succession, having recently lost a baby and her husband. Burdened by grief and isolated from the village, she has retreated into herself. So, left to their own devices, Pea and her little sister run wild in the meadows. This is where they meet Claude, who Pea believes is at least a friend, and possibly a potential new papa. The relationship that develops between them is a cornerstone of the novel. On the one hand it’s an unusual relationship, which from an adult point of view can look rather sinister. But on the other hand, Claude is giving Pea what we, as readers, want to give her – company, food, shelter and kindness. The song that pulled me back to this relationship again and again is Cat Power’s cover of I Found a Reason.

There is something magical and ethereal about this simple song. I hooked onto the sense of being believed in, of hope and of being saved by someone. What struck me when I saw the cover for The Night Rainbow that Bloomsbury had designed was that they had somehow picked up on this image I had of Pea running, running, running. (See also the book trailer for another representation of this) and the piano music they chose (independently) to represent the book. A perfect synergy with my intention for the novel.

Maman

As Pea busies herself trying to take on the role of the adult in her family, her mother is sinking deeper and deeper into desperation. Heavily pregnant, apparently alienated somehow from her own parents and in danger of losing her farmhouse home now that her French husband is dead, Maman is struggling badly. I had to be so careful when writing this character because I wanted readers not to condemn her for being neglectful, but to sympathise with her plight. Her song was Amy Hit the Atmosphere by Counting Crows. I found her desperation in this song, but also a great evocation of that powerful need we have for our mothers, for someone to care for us.

Love

Pea is reminded, towards the end of her story, of a moment between her mother and father dancing. The song they dance to is Je t’aimais, je t’aime et je t’aimerai by Francis Cabrel.

This song is in French, and I’ve not found a translation of the lyrics on the web that I’m completely happy with, but here’s one example.

This song was important to me because in amongst its many beautiful images, it captures the naivety of childhood, the messiness and the regrets of adulthood and amongst all that the essence of enduring, abiding love, that I wanted for my characters. Ultimately isn’t it what we all want for our children and for ourselves?

Claire King works and writes in southern France – where she lives in a shabby stone house in the middle of nowhere with her husband and their two young daughters. Her first novel – The Night Rainbow – is now out from Bloomsbury. Find her at her website and on Twitter @ckingwriter

GIVEAWAY Claire is excited to give away a print copy of The Night Rainbow to a commenter here. Bonus entries if you share on Facebook, Twitter, Google + and elsewhere (one entry per medium). Don’t forget to come here and tell me in the comments where you’ve shared it as I might not know!