Colliding Reactions

By: Randall D. Larson (Interview transcription by Kelsey J. Larson)
Date: Thursday, January 05, 2006

Juno Reactor is described as a "goa trance music" group (a style of electronic music defined by a recurring and repetitive beat), often known for their tribal influences. The group was initially formed in 1990 by musicians Ben Watkins and Stephen Holweck as an experimental ambient project to record soundtrack to accompany a sculptural art installation and performance project by sculpture artist (and Watkins' girlfriend) Norma Fletcher. In 1993 the group decided to concentrate on music, and released their first single, called "Laughing Gas." An album, Transmissions, soon followed, as did seven others to date. Juno Reactor's first soundtrack gig occurred in 1995 when their instrumental remix of Traci Lord's song "Control" was featured on the soundtrack for MORTAL KOMBAT; they returned for the sequel MORTAL KOMBAT ANNIHILATION with original tracks like "Conga Fury" and several other movie appearances followed, including the anime series TEXHNOLYZE, which featured their single "Guardian Angel" as its opening theme

But it was 1999 that Juno Reactor's involvement with THE MATRIX (1999) and its sequels that allowed Watkins and his troupe to make a cinematic statement with their music. While the first MATRIX had gathered some tracks from various artists and fit them into the picture, the Wachowsky's decided to have artists create tracks specifically for THE MATRIX RELOADED. In that film, Ben Watkins collaborated with the film's composer, Don Davis, to craft some pieces of music that enhanced and supplemented the film's musical score, notably the freeway chase scene, which featured Watkins' "Mona Lisa Overdrive" (the title comes from a William Gibson novel). The process was repeated for the third film, THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS.

For the freeway chase from RELOADED, Davis and Watkins worked out that sequence very carefully to provide the right mixture of electronics and orchestra/choir to enhance the pulse and the emotion of the sequence. "I think it's pretty successful insofar as it really has the best of what can be done with tracks, and Ben is really good at that," Davis told me in 2003. "We also enabled an orchestra and a choir to support the film in a way that really only an orchestra can. I think some interesting work was done here, and I think Ben's treatment of the tracks was better than I could have done on my own, just because that's really his focus, his expertise."

The same year as the first MATRIX film, Watkins got the opportunity to score a film himself, composing the music for Graham Baker's BEOWULF, which starred Christopher Lambert as the legendary 6th Century warrior.

Juno Reactor's unique fusion of electronica, trance, industrial music and other influences provided an effective sonic atmosphere for films like this. The band's latest album, Labyrinth, is a complex and evocative fusion of techno grooves, chilled vibes, and high energy progressive rhythms (the album includes two tracks from MATRIX films, "Mona Lisa Overdrive" and "Navras").

I spoke to Ben Watkins earlier last year about his work on THE MATRIX, his efforts for other films, and his musical directions for Juno Reactor. The interview is presented here for the first time.

Q: What led to the creation of Juno Reactor?

Ben Watkins: It started out as an art collective of installation artists and musicians. We wanted to make Juno Reactor a creative force, with everyone working together.

[Installation art is art that, through the use of sculptural materials and other media, seeks to modify the way we experience a particular space. Installation art is not necessarily confined to gallery spaces and can refer to any material intervention in everyday public or private spaces. wikipedia.com] The first installation we did was in an empty warehouse overlooking London Bridge, where these artists built a seventy-foot-long concrete structure inside the warehouse, and we had like a massive party, until the police came in at about one o'clock and shut the whole thing down! That was the beginning of it. Then we got a decommissioned missile from the Ministry of Defense...

Q: You're kidding!

Ben Watkins: No! This was around the time of the First Gulf War, and we put our missile on a flatbed truck and drove it around central London, past Whitehall and past Parliament. Then we put it into a silo-shaped gallery that used to be a hospital in World War I. We did quite a few of those sorts of things, where it was music and installation. That was my girlfriend, Norma Fletcher's idea, she got the missile and organized it and got the people in. After that she got an armored personnel carrier and turned it into this thing called 'Time for the 21st Century' and that was put outside the Yugoslavian embassy.

Q: So there's definitely a message here in your artistry, then?

Ben Watkins: Yeah. It was quite politically orientated, really early on. Then some friends of mine started coming back from India, and they were telling me about how electronic music was really kicking off there, and DJs from all over the world were really coming together in India. And so I started writing very much for them because it didn't seem that different to what I've done before with bands like The Flowerpot men. I was very much into that music. It became much easier at that time to fund the music division of Juno Reactor, opposed to the artists. It was hard to get sponsorships for the art stuff. And so we carried on doing videos and film work.

Q: Where did the name Juno Reactor come from?

Ben Watkins: It comes from the goddess Juno. All the goddesses had started out with the name Juno in front. There was Juno Luciana, who was the goddess of celestial lightand then Christianity turned it into Lucy I think Lucifer has a relation to it as well, because that was the light bringer. So the idea is Juno Reactor is like the whole of the ancient goddesses all coming together to create a force, like the force of the ancient world.

Q: How would you classify the kind of music that Juno does, or how would you like to have it classified?

Ben Watkins: I think it's a collision, music that's waiting for the crash.

Q: What would you say are your biggest musical influences?

Ben Watkins: Harmonically, classical music, blues, rock, early electronic music, choral music especially. I started out when I was about four. My dad's a pretty massive classical fan; he doesn't play any instruments or anything, but he used to put on all the classical records on when I was a kid, and he'd just sit me in front of it. I could just sit there for hours and hours and hours just listening to whatever he would put on. I started playing piano when I was about five or six, and then I started violin. I won a choral scholarship. I got really bored when I was about fourteen; I'd listened to so much classical stuff and sung so much stuff! Then I got really intoxicated by rock music, and then I started learning classical guitar. It's been really nice, the way classical music has come back to me in the last ten years.

Q: I can detect that influence in Labyrinth; although it's not a classical piece, the way you develop it is along the lines of the way a symphony might develop itself.

Ben Watkins: I don't know if I could call it symphonically, but I really like arrangement and I really like melody and I really like harmony and I really like dissonance. Coming out to LA and working with people like Don Davis and [music editor] Zig Gron has been great. It's just really nice meeting different people who come from a completely different field of music, and then going home and incorporating some of it into Juno Reactor.

Q: Starting in about '95, some of Juno Reactor's songs began to find their way into film soundtracksMORTAL KOMBAT and VIRTUOSITY. What did those kinds of experiences do for you?

Ben Watkins: The first one that happened was FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF. I did a track called "Big City" I think that was in '85 or '86. I thought at the time that it

would just be a one-off. But I've always been interested in films. When I work, in fact, I'm often watching a film. With "Conquistador" [on Labyrinth] I was watching AGUIRRE: WRATH OF GOD. I didn't watch anything else; that was it. I watched it for months, solidly. And that gave me the focus of where my head was at. And the same with things like "War Dogs" [also on Labyrinth]. I was watching LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and BATTLE OF ALGIERS. It's like when you turn away from the computer, you're still in there you're really focused towards what you're trying to do. And I've been doing that for years and years, so when I was able to then do music for a film, it really helped. I just found it so easy. Not necessarily the technical side of it, but I found it easy because there was already something to be written about, you didn't have to come up with the idea of what this track is about, you already know what it's about. All you have to do is make it fit the picture.

Q: Which brings me right up to BEOWULF. How did you get that assignment to score that film?

Ben Watkins: No one else was willing to do it! I think that's the truth of it.

Q: What kind of music did Graham Baker want from you for the film?

Ben Watkins: I got a call from Patricia Joseph from TVT Records. She's the one who put one of Traci Lord's tracks that I'd done into MORTAL KOMBAT. She rang me up and said 'Do you fancy having a go?' and I said, 'yeah, I'd love to.' 'Well, it might be kind of difficult; I don't know whether to throw you this one straight away because it might be a difficult job.' But it wasn't really. I had one or two conversations with the producer, and I sent him the initial cues. I sent them six cues, of which they didn't like any, because I think I was trying to make it too classical. And they said 'no, just do what you do,' and literally I sent them sixty cues back, and I think I had to redo one of them, and that was it. I think they had bigger problems than the music. So that job was really easy. I think I really got schooling in film music by doing the MATRIX jobs, you know.

Q: How would you describe your approach to BEOWULF?

Ben Watkins: I tried to give it a sort of choral, tribal feel.

Q: Overall, was BEOWULF a good experience for you?

Ben Watkins: I loved it. I mean, I just fell in love with doing music to picture. It seemed like anyone could just throw me anything and I would have done it, after that job, definitely, because I just loved the whole experience. As much as I do now, I love that, putting music to picture, I just wish I could get more opportunities to do it.

Q: How would you contrast the music you did for BEOWULF with the music you did for the video game, Mark of Kri?

Ben Watkins: Mark of Kri was a hell of a pain in the ass! All the people involved were fantastic, though. I think in the end we did about eighteen hours of music, and none of

it would repeat itself for three hours, so if you played the same level for three hours you wouldn't hear the same bit of music. Each level of music could only have three quarters of one megabyte, so literally you had to take sound and reduce the sound quality to the sound of a gnat. I had to write the piece, then take the sounds and convert them into their sampler, and then convert all the sequences into their sequencer. And it was one heck of a painful job, it really was.

Q: Your single "Hotaka" was released in Japan in 2002 and incorporated taiko drums. Would you describe that experience?

Ben Watkins: Well, I love drums. We played this festival called The Hotaka Mountain Festival. The mountain is named after a General who came up from the south and killed all the people in the north. It's a really beautiful mountain in the Gunma region of Japan, which is really traditional and absolutely gorgeous. We were playing this

festival right at the top of this mountain, and Gocoo were playing on the same stage, and I heard them and thought, wow, they're just amazing. It's predominantly women drummers and they've all got long hair, and when they play the drums they're dancing and you're really sort of hypnotized by how it looks. And I think because they're women, and because they're all dancing it's not that rigid kind of drum playing there's this funkiness to what they do. And I said to our manager in Japan that I'd love to do a track with them. So later they booked a studio overlooking Mount Fuji literally you're in the control room and you look out and there's the mountain right in front of you. We spent three or four days in the studio, just doing track after track after track. That was just fantastic.

Q: You used them also in your track 'Teahouse' from THE MATRIX: RELOADED. Was that from that same initial session?

Ben Watkins: Yeah.

Q: What led to your involvement with THE MATRIX: RELOADED?

Ben Watkins: I got a call from the Wachowski's asking if I'd come over and have a conversation so I went out in November (2002). They showed me the freeway chase and they'd already temped in about four Juno Reactor tunes, and they said they wanted it to sound like one piece of music and they wanted it to collaborate with the orchestral music, so it was like a weaving of the two styles, as opposed to what they'd done on the first film. They really wanted a weaving and entwinement of the two things.

Q: So you did "Mona Lisa Overdrive" for the freeway chase, and then the "Burly Brawl?"

Ben Watkins: Yeah.

Q: How did you work with Don Davis in creating the music that was used for RELOADED?

Ben Watkins: When I went in for my first meeting with the Wachowskis, I played them what I had and they practically threw everything out, I think because I'd put in a lot of sound effects. They wanted to get rid of anything that sounded close to a sound

effect. I went off for a meeting with Don, and I brought a load of classical ideas, things like Holliger and William Walton, that sort of thing. I sat down with Don and Don reworked those ideas, and then put in a lot of the motifs that were usual to THE MATRIX. Don initially had a bit of trepidation about it, but I think he started to have faith in it more as it went on. When I was asked to do "Burly Brawl" Don had already done all this orchestral stuff, and I started rearranging it and putting in all the electronic and live instruments, and then we met up together again and he rewrote new elements that were anchored in what I'd done.

Q: Many consider Don's score for THE MATRIX to be a ground-breaking scoring approach. What was it like to be involved in this process?

Ben Watkins: Well, I just loved every second of it. I miss it very much. It's possibly the best music I've experienced in my life, and it more than likely will remain so because nothing will be able to touch it. Every day I woke up really excited, and at night I went to bed feeling excited. I don't think I could ever imagine having anything better.

Q: How did the collaboration with RELOADED evolve in REVOLUTIONS?

Ben Watkins: I think by that time we trusted each other more. It's almost like I could take the electronic stuff over to Don and know that he would just do what was right for it. I think in "Mona Lisa Overdrive" and bits of "Burly Brawl" I was quite worried if it was going to work or not. But after seeing the results of those all finished, I was very confident in working with Don. I'd also had some insight into some of the music that he'd shown me that he was into, so I was able to go back home and listen to Penderecki, Ligeti, Xenakis, Martinu, and those sort of things, and just really got turned on by them. So when the Wachowski Brothers asked me to take a look at the Hell Club, I was able to sort of map things that I thought Don might be into. Sometimes I'd just take samples of Penderecki, knowing that Don would just come along and do his take on it. I think that's how it worked.

Q: How did your experiences with MATRIX affect what you're now doing with Juno Reactor?

Ben Watkins: I think it frightened me at first. I thought "Navras" was supposed to be the best thing we did, as a collaboration, between Don and myself. It's funny actually, because it should really be everyone who did something on that track, like Lakshmi

Shankar or Azam Ali or Greg Ellis, Mabi Thobejane, Deepak Ram they should all have credits, really because they all put a hundred percent into that track. It's really a collaboration between all of us. So coming back and then focusing on the tunes I wanted to put into the album - that made it quite daunting. For about three months I couldn't write anything. I didn't like anything at all, and thought it was all rubbish! And it wasn't until I got [co-composer] Eduardo Niebla down and we started mucking around with gamelan type riffs that the light came.

Q: You've described Labyrinth as a much darker piece than the previous Juno Reactor work. What inspired you to create this kind of music?

Ben Watkins: I think pretty much what's happening around us today politically and environmentally.

Q: So there's definitely a message in the music here, or at least a semblance of one.

Ben Watkins: I don't know if it's a message. More a reaction, really, or a reflection. I find it very hard coming up with happy little tunes, and bouncing around the planet when all this shit's going on.

Q: How did you adapt "Mona Lisa Overdrive" and "Navras" for the Labyrinth album?

Ben Watkins: With "Navras" I kept it pretty much in place, I just moved levels. With "Mona Lisa Overdrive" I put back in the parts that the Wachowski Brothers didn't want in the film that I still liked, like the vocals and the "Kyrie Eleison" parts, and those things.

Q: How would you describe the process you used when conceptualizing and then recording the album?

Ben Watkins: Well, I'm a bit like a mole, really. I sort of keep on digging until I think it feels right, and usually by that time I've thrown in everything including the kitchen sink. Minimalism isn't my thing.

Q: What kind of conceptualization process do you go through when creating a new album?

Ben Watkins: Usually I just come up with things, either on the guitar or on the keyboard. Usually I find the initial idea to a track lands in about ten-minutes - that spark that comes in and starts making you do all these things, happens really quickly. The rest is pretty much organizational and technical. I wish I could change the percentage, so that it was creative ninety-five percent of the time and technical five, but I suppose it's creative five percent of the time and technical ninety-five percent which is really boring!

Q: What was most challenging for you in composing Labyrinth?

Ben Watkins: Trying to come up with something I liked. That was the most challenging! And also finding new people that I wanted to work with, adding more people who had a virtuosic element to their playing, you know. There was a guy called Tigram from Armenia who played this beautiful Ney flute and in fact there was one tune that didn't go on the album. It was just amazing meeting some of these people. Then there were things like "War Dogs," which I'd done with a girl singer named Yasmin, and I'd finished it, mixed it, everything, and her management turned around and were completely outrageous in their demands so I had to take her off. I then asked Eduardo to come down and we used Taz Alexander and suddenly it was actually a million times better. I should have sent Yasmin's management a thank-you card!

I find it very hard coming back to land after THE MATRIX. Working on a film like that is such a team effort, and I loved that involvement. There's so much inspiration, you can just walk down the corridor and talk to someone and get an idea for something. I think when you come back here and you're by yourself I mean, musicians would come down for an hour or two or three and then take off again, but when you're left alone and it's winter and it's cold and it's grim ... you just don't have that communication, so when someone does come round it's a blessing. I'm more of a people person, you know, I like being around people. Sometimes I need to shut the door and tell everyone to go away, but I like working with people.

Q: How do you think Juno Reactor has evolved? Where do you think it fits nowadays?

Ben Watkins: I really like the fact that so many more people are getting into film music. I think it's part of a new movement of music, that is very visual. People buy Danny Elfman music, they buy James Horner. There are such great writers who are involved in film music nowadays that it's really interesting to go off and listen to it, like BLACK HAWK DOWN's got some wicked stuff on it. What turned me on a while back, we were playing in Japan and this DJ called DJ Quattro played at the beginning of his set Danny Elfman's PLANET OF THE APES. And I haven't jumped out of my skin so much for ages, I just ran out and said, 'who the hell is this? What is this music?' And he told me, and I just ran off and got the album. But to hear some great tracks off films out of a massive PA system, is frightening. Even when they're on the films, the bloody people have pulled the levels down too much, it just squashes it. So to hear it coming out of a massive PA is awe-inspiring. So now there are DJs in Japan who are DJ-ing soundtrack music. There's another guy called DJ Xavier and he does whole sets, and it's right across the board. I went to a firework display up in Edinburgh Castle and they started playing all of Don's music, and then they ended it with "Burly Brawl!"

So there is a genre where people are just bored of hearing the regurgitated stuff; maybe a market that isn't a market yet. But I suppose Juno Reactor gets lumped into industrial music. We aren't really techno, people call us ethno-techno, all that sort of rubbish, but I just see it as more filmic music. It's music that's got an image, it's about something, and it's got a film within it, the story of the track. That's more of a Juno thingit's got the film in the track.

For more information on Juno Reactor, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_Reactor  

Also see the band's web site at www.reactorleak.com  

Former editor/publisher of CinemaScore magazine, Randall Larson was for many years senior editor for Soundtrack Magazine and a film music columnist for Cinefantastique magazine. He is the author of Musique Fantastique: A Survey of Film Music in the Fantastic Cinema (Scarecrow, 1984) and Music from the House of Hammer (Scarecrow, 1995). In addition to Soundtrax and Music News for Cinescape.com, Randall reviews soundtracks Music from the Movies, writes for Film Music Magazine, and in many other fields.

Recommended Soundtrack sources:
www.buysoundtrax.com  
www.intrada.com  
www.screenarchives.com  
www.footlight.com  
www.arksquare.com/index_main.html (Japan)
www.intermezzomedia.com/ (Italy)
www.moviegrooves.com  
www.moviemusic.com  

For questions or comments, contact the author at Soundtrax@cinescape.com