CyberPUNK Fiction

Cyber-Flesh Conspiracies: Anatomy of a soundtrack that never existed.

By Dave Mansfield (a.k.a. Daveoramma 6.1.4)

Seriously, this started as a joke. Chase, the label boss of Re-Constriction records, had a deep love of industrial bands doing covers of songs from wildly different genres (Just take a look around my discography page and you’ll see what I mean.). One night in late 1996, Chase calls me with a brainstorm of doing an industrial version of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. He had all of the artwork lined up in his mind... Cool. Plus he has access to a myriad of awesome industrial dance music talent... Awesome. And was wondering if we (Society.Burning) would do a track for them… Being a huge fan of the movie my first question was “Who’s doing the spoken word parodies?”

Well, I guess that would be me. So I promptly ran out and bought the soundtrack CD and sat up all night transcribing the original dialogue so I could dissect it and write my own versions. I was almost completely useless at work the following day. After about a week I had a rough draft of the new script that I passed around to Chase, Boom Chr. Paige, Twitch and my good friend John Holder for additional input. Now at this point I would like to point out that Brother John is a true 8-bit computer guru, Episcopalian missionary and former Arthurian Legend English Major who fixed all of the ‘techno-babble’ in Jules and Vincent’s conversations not to mention taught me volumes about people’s speaking cadences. In short, the man is smegging brilliant and technically all of the hacker lingo is/was accurate. Thank God for all of you White Hats out there. :)

Originally we were slated for only one song, “Flowers on the Wall”, but then when I found out that no-one on Re-Con’s roster was taking on the instrumentals, four in all, our involvement stepped up to another level. In the bargaining process we also picked up “If Love is a Red Dress” as a chance to showcase Tracey’s (Boom’s wife and our world-class on-stage keyboardist) vocal talents. Boom and I began composing the music using one simple rule, at some point we needed to use AT LEAST ONE musical riff from the original song, everything else was fair game. We also approached it like a soundtrack for a movie rather than a shake-your-booty (or in our case, slam dance-your-booty) industrial dance music and cover a wider range of soundscapes.

By the Summer of ’97 the music from everyone involved was all coming together, but we were still editing the script. Chase loves Star Wars but I think that’s about as cyberPUNK as Star Trek TNG. Sorry, maybe that’s just me. We were discussing “The Mos Eisley Download Contest” and the subject drifted to the album needing a wholesome Akira-style screaming moment. You know the scene where Tetsuo has grown into a mutated 100 foot tall blob of flesh and Canada is shooting him with the laser canon? Yeah, that kind of scream. Then it hits me to translate the conversation into Japanese and just run with the whole Manga theme for that short. Bingo.

I then started begging, buying-off and cajoling my friends from work and art school into standing in front of the microphone to record the dialogue. At the time my computer was a P2 400 MHz system and capable of streaming up to three 11 KHz audio channels (oooh, aaah), so I did all of the audio design and recording on my trusty VS-880 digital 8-track recording console and slaved my computer (running Cakewalk) through midi while capturing raw materials on my Tascam DA-30 Digital Audio Tape deck using a Shure SM-58 microphone to record it all. Most of the dialogue was recorded in my living room, with the exception of the scenes featuring the amazingly talented Roman Green which was done at Free Reelin’ Studios in near downtown Denver (Thanks again for letting us stay there all night, Shirley… Again!!)

Since these spoken word pieces were supposedly taken from a soundtrack that never really existed, I then began further “crafting” the world in which these scenes took place. In other words, arranging background Foley and sound effects. As a weird industrial musician, I have a huge library of sound effects CDs (It’s a habit I picked up from Boom) which have also served me well in my more recent animation endeavors (see Mortal Skin). But other people’s recording can only take you so far and for more specific Foley cues (for example, someone standing on the table during the restaurant heist in the opening sequence) I would have to record my own material.

A vast majority of the Foley recording took place in my kitchen and bathroom since they had the “brightest” reverb tones due to the lack of carpeting. Most of the time people try to avoid getting ambient reverb in their recordings but for this project I wanted as much “real world slop” to help define the audio spaces I was creating. This worked especially well for the end of FAQ 25.17 where the dude (me) gets blow away in a kitchen. I piled up all my pots and pans on the kitchen floor and then, with wild abandon, threw myself at them and the half-open cabinet doors while screaming in mortal agony to create the death scene. I only got to perform one take as I had scared the hell out of my neighbors sending them running in droves to see what was wrong and/or to see if I was okay. (If you’re reading this, thank you all again, everyone!) The sound of my guts splattering to the floor was actually wet laundry (jeans mostly) tossed into my bathtub. The mechanized auto-gun sound was created by layering a pitch-shifted sample of a 45 caliber gunshot with a kick drum from an old 808, while the motor noise was created with a 1960’s-era electric wire-wrapping tool.

The street noises were a combination of 1960’s downtown Tokyo (from a CD, of course) and “modern” Capital Hill, Denver, CO (right outside my then-front-door) when I dropped an XLR cable from my bedroom window, walked out onto the street, plugged in my SM-58 microphone and recorded the local crazies walking past my home. Talk about No World Order… Anyway, then on the VS-880 with the (still-swanky) built-in digital reverb I created wide “areas” to bounce the sound around in as I had observed in downtown where the steel and glass towers reflect EVERYTHING. The dialogue, as I mentioned earlier, was recorded at Free-Reelin’ Studios that also featured a wood and glass sound room that, with the addition of a third microphone to capture the ambient sound reflections, sounded just like the interior of a cheap-ass car. Boom, Twitch and I always noted with pride that we could make the most expensive object/place in the world sound like it’s worth 1/200th it’s price. Viva la Retro. :)

To create the ambience of the restaurant sequences I used the audio of a 1970’s British Pub (again, from CD) as a bed, then I added a binaural (stereo to you and me) layer of audio featuring myself tapping and scrapping cutlery against a set of not-so-fine-china to imply a dozen diners enjoying their various sundry meals. I would also like to note that because of this sequence I now only have THREE of my original sets of FOUR plates, bowls and glasses in my cupboard as one entire set gave it’s life as a functional piece of organized existence during the recording of “Cyber-Pumpkin and Energizer Honey Bunny” heist.

The best example of guerilla recording occurred when I captured Kari’s lines for “Mrs. Akira Wallace”. She had an awesome ‘bimbo’ voice she reserved for stupid telemarketers that I had to have, yet, we were forbidden to openly speak to each other due to a mandate from Human Resources. Sort of a post-post-modern-pre-internet Romeo and Juliet scenario, if you will. I showed up at her desk one day with a boom box and a copy of the screenplay, hit record and said “go”! The rest is non-existent cinema history as we obviously terrified the small-minded suits within earshot. Good times… Good times…

Then, in early 1998 during the final mix downs and mastering at Twitch’s audio lab, disaster struck: Twitch’s 3-½-year-old daughter kicked my ass all afternoon on “Bushido Blade” AND “Tekken Two”. What? Stop laughing, I’m serious here! Have you ever had your ass handed to you by a three and a half (yes, it especially matters at that age) year old in a fighting game on a PS-1, let alone all afternoon? PS-ONE, people!!! Simply shameful. For the record, ten years later Darien is now the Guitar Hero Goddess of Denver at 13 (atta grrrl!!!!! You make yer uncle Dave so proud!). Oh yeah, the mastering….

Twitch was savvy enough to own one of the first home-editions of a digital sound card and had the mad skillz to OWN that little hunk of capacitors to achieve in a matter of hours (while I was getting shamed by Darien on the PS-1 no less) what normally took others days (and sometimes weeks) to accomplish, the perfect balancing of a dozen tracks for global distribution. This is a testament to the granddaddies of the current generation of home recording audio gear. By supper time we burned several CDs of our work (yes Virginia, even THAT was impressive at the time) and we all dined on fine Ramen noodles to celebrate our victory after 18 months of hard audio warfare. To the good life.

So in conclusion, never do anything half-assed my friends. Ever. Go out there and make something incredible no matter how little you get paid! NOW!!! If you’re lucky, someone else will make money before you’re dead, just like me. (Why else do you think I’m giving this all away for free?) :) Carry that load, Cowboy.

Cheers,

-Yer old buddy Dave