3 Melodies, 3 Musicians: “Old Record”

Following the release of our soundtrack I will tell 3 stories about melodies we recorded and about wonderful musicians we recorded them with.

“Old record” is an intro and outro in our film and it was written after we shot it. The idea was to write an “old times” melody which is sort of repetitive because we needed to use two different parts of it in two different parts of the movie. And when I was thinking about the arrangement I came up with another idea. Imagine that you’re listening to an old vinyl record that you were listening to when you were falling in love. You recognise the melody but you don’t remember it exactly and than on the second “verse” — you remember everything. The melody and this period in your life. And you’re overwhelmed. In the track that is the moment where all the musicians are picking up this piano tune. Try to listen to it again and remember something nice.

I wanted to write a woodwind section here but since we only had one day in the studio and 3 tracks to record I knew that we wouldn’t have much time to experiment. I personally like clarinet more than saxophone (which is a very unusual preference) and I thought of it immediately. It is very close to probably my favourite instrument — Armenian duduk, but clarinet is obviously more versatile. Another thing for me was to write the score for it before the recording — once again optimising time. One time during the night (around 2am) I realised that I was writing music out of clarinet’s range and I had to rewrite it from scratch.

Aleksander Titov really sorted our day. The recording was in amazing Snap! Studios and he invited Rachel Coe to help us to elevate our jazz trio. She plays 3 parts in this track and when those two clarinets are coming together I think it’s just sublime (I must mention Andrei Aliakrinski from Dobrolet Studio doing mixing here as well). Rachel recorded two tracks (and 5 parts in total) in maybe an hour which is wonderful and a little crazy. Just listen to this solo towards the end of the track. It does really set the tone for this EP and our film as well.

Two more stories to come. You can find our soundtrack here: Spotify, Apple Music / iTunes, Deezer, Tidal, Bandcamp.