voices #35
◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
here we got:
Akira Film Script
answering some questions. We have already observed his drone / ambient work here.
[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The track from “Autumn’s Dawn” that we prefer is “Capturing The Flag”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Akira Film Script: The whole album is built from meditations on my youth – before each session, I’d do an extended meditation on some point in my childhood, pre-internet, then upon exiting the meditation, I’d go straight to my machines and document how I felt, in sound. ‘Capturing the Flag’ was created when exiting a meditation focused on the final moments of actually, finally, successfully capturing and delivering the other team’s flag in an intense game of Capture the Flag, ultimately winning the game. When I was a kid, before the area I live in today had become so built up, there was this incredibly large field, with a large ditch running through it (in hindsight, it may have been a water way for when the rains came through, letting excess runoff out to the bay). The ditch became our midline, and we’d establish our forts on either side of it, then raise our flags. It was a winding ditch, so there were plenty of areas to pass though it and emerge on the other side without being caught – if you were lucky; there wasn’t much coverage up top of the ditch on either side, save a few bushes and overgrown fox tails. If you were lucky enough to make it to the opposing team’s fort, unseen, then the real fear set in – now you had to successfully get back to your fort. This was a nerve wracking experience, filled with anxiety, fear, dread, heightened senses – true fear. But if, and when, you saw you were in the home stretch, guaranteed to win, all the dread washed away for instant euphoria – YOU DID IT! YOU MADE IT! That was the moment that I set out to capture in ‘Capturing the Flag’ – the glory of a successful round, the washing away of the fears, the true elation of victory, and not in hindsight, but in, and of, the moment itself. Harps have always felt heavenly to me, and I love a rising portamento synth or string and how it can lift a movement in a song, so the combination of both were my target for capturing that feeling, that moment, of capturing the flag. Add to it, somehow drone-based ambience has always felt like a moment in suspension to me, so while I could have composed an uplifted, rising musical movement in hopeful keys and progressions, it suited the capturing of the moment – the polaroid nature of it all – to make a drone around these uplifting inputs.
[2. CREATION]
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