Hello & Welcome!

Thanks for taking time to find out more about my score for the feature documentary A Story of Bones.

Eight years in the making, this film chronicles the efforts to memorialise “the most significant physical trace of the middle passage of the trans-Atlantic slave trade” on the island of Saint Helena, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic.

This is my little scrap book, a small way of sharing the process behind the creation of this score. The sounds and visuals are accompanied by insights and musings from what to me is an endlessly fascinating process of exploring ways of using music and sound to elevate visual storytelling.

This was a remarkable project to be a part of and I hope you enjoy exploring the music and some of the stories behind it.

Now The Work Begins

The pictures were captured on film by director Dominic Aubrey de Vere during the six day voyage from Cape Town to Saint Helena aboard the RMS (Royal Mail Ship) St. Helena which was the only way to get to the island until the airport was finally opened.

The Weight of Silence...

The concept behind the score

Before this project, I knew nothing of Saint Helena, nothing of it’s culture nor it’s historical significance, but on being introduced to the unfolding story I felt a sense of responsibility to contribute to its telling.

It arrived in my life at a time when the tone of public discourse on race was reaching a crescendo with serious questions being asked of the selective nature of Britain’s colonial history, the institutions it created and the persecution and the privilege that remains to this day as it’s living legacy.

On first meeting with directors Dom and Joe and editor James, their collective sense of responsibility shone through in their commitment to be true to Annina and the journey she was undertaking. This set the tone for what would be an incredibly fulfilling creative collaboration. 

While listening back to the 90Gb library of field recordings documenting the sound of Saint Helena, I found myself wondering about the things we hear in the silence, and how the nature of the activity preceding a silence imparts a quality, which we are often able to sense.

Thinking about the silence on Saint Helena, I imagined there to be a character that would speak of unrest, of a past calling out to be properly confronted and resolved.

This idea became the central nucleus that gave rise to the whole approach for the original score, which strives to reflect the weight of the silence in the air of a place with such a significant yet suppressed history. 

Airport Opening

Vignettes of Saint Helena, captured on film during Dom & Jo's first trip to the island in 2014

Finding The Sound

The gems I almost didn't send

The blank page at the beginning of a project can be liberating as much as it can be terrifying and it’s always a process of finding an entry point, an idea or concept to kick start the creativity. 

After reading the treatment and watching an early assembly of the first act I sat at my keyboard hit record and just played whatever came out, but from conversations we’d had I knew we didn’t want a piano score so I filed it away and forgot about it. 

I then indulged in what could be considered productive procrastination, searching for inspiration by spending hours exploring the island through this rich encyclopedia of Oliver’s sound recordings. 

I was drawn in particular to the sounds of the outdoor ambiences like wind in Rupert's Valley and this inspired thoughts about solitude and silence and the things that come to the surface when the world is quiet around us. Prompted by some of the abstract conceptual conversation I’d been having with Dom & Joe, I found myself exploring the idea of being laid to rest and the question of what the air must be like in a place where there are many souls who have not yet been afforded that dignity. 

It felt really important conceptually to find a way to incorporate recordings into the fabric of the score and in that way infuse it with the indefinable quality that contains the essence of the place and the unspoken answer to that question.

I took some small fragments of the recordings and stretched, manipulated and processed them then combined them with thin layers of tonal musical elements derived from simple musical recordings I’d made. Weaving them together resulted in these really cool and very emotive textures. They were definitely more than sound design elements but didn’t quite feel substantial enough to call them music. I ended up referring to them as “musical air” but they had a definite emotional quality to them. 

Alongside these textures, I wrote a number of themes inspired by the themes explored in the film. 

You always hope to make a good impression with the first batch of original musical ideas you share. You’ve been in your own little world of musical exploration and now you’re sharing what you came up with for the first time. You like what you’ve done but you begin to wonder whether the wider team get it. So that first delivery can be quite nerve wracking. Naturally you want to get the collaboration off to a good start so the selection process for this first batch can be particularly rigorous.

The morning of this first delivery, my score mixer Ty delivers the mixes, they sound fantastic. I’ve finished making my selection, I’ve made the decision to leave these textures out. They’re raw materials, these guys will think I'm nuts. I’ve put everything else in a folder and I’m uploading the files. While they’re uploading I’m writing the email to accompany the delivery.  For some reason I’m still umming and ahhing about including these textures… I think they’re great but I’m just not convinced they’ll understand what the heck they are. I almost don’t include them but as a last minute decision I change my mind and they are included. I hit send and wait.

This wait is ALWAYS excruciating on this first delivery. A decade in and it’s no different today! Can’t remember how long it was before we had the next catch up call (it felt like forever) and they’re happy, but what’s most interesting is that the pieces that resonated most were those textures that I almost left out! They became the bedrock of the score and these and similar textures can be heard throughout the film and are woven into most of the cues.

You just never know what's going to land!!

The Musical Textures

It Matters...

The Story Will Live

Annina and Peggy are both incredible people with important messages to share and in compiling the soundtrack it felt important to include a small number of sound bites that would give a listener some insight into the themes addressed in the film. Their placement in the soundtrack act as guides and milestones in the journey through the score.

It Matters How You Choose To Remember

An Appropriate Ending

Crafting the final thoughts

The film addresses very challenging subject matter and there is no sugar coated ending. This means there’s much to consider as the film closes. Our exit from the film is accompanied by three pieces, but it wasn’t always that way…

After reading the treatment and watching an early assembly of the first act I sat at my keyboard, hit record and just played whatever came out. From conversations we’d had early on, we knew we didn’t want a piano score so I filed away that sketch and completely forgot about it. 

Throughout the entire process, there was a record that was synced to the closing titles. Everyone loved it so that was out of scope for me, that was until they couldn’t license it and it had to be removed. No pressure, but I’ve now got to replace it (GULP)!

No idea what to do. I tried writing a few songs, but everything felt forced. Chatting to Toby the music supervisor we binned off the idea of a song and decided to keep it in the realms of score.  

In searching for an idea, I started playing through ideas I’d recorded. In my search I stumbled on that very first piano sketch I’d forgotten about. I tried it out against the closing titles and it was literally like magic. It was perfect. That piece became “It Matters How You Choose To Remember” and it contains the outpouring of the emotion that is restrained in the score.

This piece is topped and tailed to make a three distinct phases to the closing of the film that we intended to guide you back into the present.