Reloading The Musical Matrix Part One

Don Davis returns to the land of Morpheus, Neo, Trinity, and the Matrix with a ferocious cyberscore

By Randall D. Larson     May 15, 2003

This Week's Recommendation

The soundtrack CD preceded the theatrical release of THE MATRIX RELOADED by a week, giving Matrixheads an advance listen to the musical amalgamation that would synergize their cinematic experience starting today. In RELOADED (Warner Sunset 48411-2), Don Davis revitalizes his already energetic approach to THE MATRIX (1999) with a throbbing, beat-driven mix of symphs and synths that goes a long way to give the music a pulsating rhythmic drive. At least that's what's presented on the CD, which is actually more of the beat-structured material. Warner has chosen to mix the score with the songs on a single release and, typically, the actual underscore gets short shrift in favor of the more exploitative song-structured material. But their presentation does give Davis' music its own turn on the platter. The RELOADED soundtrack CD contains two discs the first contains a dozen songs or alternative rock instrumentals (Linkin Park, Marilyn Manson, Rob Zombie, Fluke, Oakenfold, and so on). The second disc contains two straight score cues ("Main Title" and "Trinity Dream," both under 2 minutes in length), a percussive Rob Dougan instrumental, two Juno Reactor/Don Davis mixes, and a 17.34-minute suite of score material which will have to satisfy the soundtrack purists until Warner releases a separate score CD or else somebody boots the whole 95-minute score on the soundtrack underground.

As for

the music represented on the CD, it's Don Davis on overdrive. The Main Title starts out simply we're back in 1999 and hearing THE MATRIX for the first time, as his reflective synth echoes accompany the green Matrix code as it rains down the theater screen. The Matrix motif opens into dramatic action material for strings, counterpointed against the Matrix motif as it blares forth from trumpets. The cue ends way too soon, but its style charges right ahead into "Trinity Dream" which is a similar mixture of energetic violins, brass, and the echoing surges of the Matrix motif. The percussive Dougan and Juno Reactor material driving action scenes with a vigorously relentless musical riff - actually synchs very well with Davis' score material (Davis worked closely with Juno's Ben Watkins to achieve a close stylistic compatibility in several action sequences). But to get to the real heart of Davis' score, take a listen to the score suite. Davis exercises the score's musical highlights and creates a kind of tone poem for THE MATRIX as the music rises and falls, carries the powerful choral surges and mysterious motif riffs that characterize the Matrix, and as it matches the film's hypnotically stylish action scenes with an increasingly furious sonic assault.

Despite its respective brevity, Davis has reworked the score's essential moments into a splendid suite, carrying the listener through a variety of musical moments, energies, and reflections. The music ebbs and flows, pooling reflectively for a while, and then surging forth with the sonic of a debris flow careening down an engorged mountain pass. The music is tremendous; perhaps not as groundbreaking as Don's first venture into Matrixland, but full of its same qualities making the most of his instrumental textures and creating a musical sound design that captures the many textured layers of the film, its storyline, and its characters, and breathes continued life into them.

The CD is also an enhanced CD which means it comes with a variety of material that you can play on your PC or IMac previews from RELOADED and the Animatrix's FINAL FLIGHT OF THE OSIRIS, and a documentary on the making of the Enter The Matrix videogame.

BEHIND THE MATRIX MUSIC

I first [IMG6L]met Don Davis on the 20^th Century Fox scoring stage in February 1999, as he was recording the music for THE MATRIX. At that time, he described his approach to scoring this unusual film as embodying a post-modern approach. He told me what he meant by that: "There's kind of a movement in concert music that I haven't heard used very often in film scoring. They're calling it post-modern, but actually it's kind of [a] cumulative kind of thing. About 15 or 20 years ago, composers started to turn their back on total serialism, that big, dissonant style that was predominant until then. The first composers to do that were minimalists, and were not particularly accepted by the establishment - they also turned their back on a lot of other things like harmony and any kind of interest! And there's an assimilation that's going on now that accepts minimalism and that kind of direct accessibility that also embraces elements of the expressionist, dissonant, thing that happened before that.

"It's really kind of an exciting time in music. There's a climate of accepting an assimilation of all these styles that have been developing independently of each other for 34 years now, and it's like all these barriers are starting to drop. And it seemed to me that THE MATRIX, which is such a groundbreaking film, and in particular the fact that it deals with reality and different meanings of reality, things like that, that it would be a perfect canvas to introduce this kind of music into film."

Davis proved to be correct. His fertile musical imaginings did more than embellish the stylistic energies of the Wachowski brothers, but concocted a dazzling musical mosaic of styles, tonalities, and textures that accomplished in one score what modern film music had been slowly working its way toward in the preceding couple of decades, since the advent of computerized electronic instruments first rose as an equal and important section within modern film orchestras.

With his

original MATRIX score in 1999, Don Davis provided what I consider to be one of the last decade's pivotal scores. You'll find the score included in my "Year's Best," "Decade's Best," and "Most Significant Scores of the Millennium" columns posted on this site in the early months of 2000. Davis' fusing of electronics and acoustics, his reflective treatment of multiple layers of orchestra and synthesizer as the score rages and calms, and his inventive morphology of strange sounds, powerful choruses, blaring dissonances, and pulsating rhythmatics was simply extraordinary.

So it was with genuine interest that I spoke to Davis at the end of February 2003, as he was finishing up the score, wondering what his approach to the second film in the trilogy would bring. The essence of our interview can be found in a sidebar inside the current issue of the Cinescape print magazine. The rest of it appears here, and in next week's column. Consider what follows as "Don Davis and The Matrix Reloaded: The Columnist's Cut" or "Don Davis Interview: The Deleted Statements."  :)

One of Davis' first considerations when he began working on THE MATRIX RELOADED was recognizing that it was the second installment of a three-part story. This consideration wasn't there when he scored the original MATRIX because nobody knew how phenomenally successful it would be. The Wachowski Brothers had indeed written the story as a trilogy, but at the time of its release THE MATRIX was, for all intents and purposes, a single entity, with its own start, middle, and end.

Not so RELOADED. The incredibly successful franchise spawned by THE MATRIX permitted Larry & Andy Wachowski to embellish their entire story in glorious fullness. Therefore, RELOADED would be the middle part of a story that wouldn't be resolved until the third film, REVOLUTIONS. Davis was aware of this going in, and tempered his score with that in mind.

"The music [IMG5L]that's happening in RELOADED is going to be expanded upon in the third one," says Davis. "What's really exciting about doing a trilogy is that you can fully develop ideas that with just one movie would only go so far. So what I wanted to do, and what I was able to do, was really develop these ideas to their fullest extent. Essentially I was trying to do what Larry and Andy had done, which is to take the initial ideas from the first movie and expand them exponentially. There is a relationship to the first score, but there's a lot of new stuff. I think the intensity is [higher]."

Not all of Davis' initial impressions worked out, however. Some of them took an about face during the compositional process. "When I first read the script, there was a fairly long sequence with the Oracle, who we saw in the first movie," says Davis. "It was a long dialog thing, and it didn't change that much, at least in reading the script and I thought, 'Wow, why don't we record it with an orchestra, a little piano here and there, maybe even a bit of choir, and let's play it back backwards from the dubbing stage.'" Larry and Andy shared Davis' excitement over this approach, until they got together for the spotting session (where directors and composer decided where the music will go). "When we spotted it, Larry and Andy said they didn't want music there, so that pretty much went right out the window!" Davis shrugs. "That goes back to the question I'm asked fairly often: when I read a script, do I get ideas from that, and do you start working right away? Typically, no, I don't." Most composers tend to get most of their inspiration from the visualizations they see on film, which often times prove far different and more powerful than what they read in the script.

"But it was clear that certain things needed to be supported with music, and I think a big part of that is that this is a movie about a war that's beginning. A mobilizing of forces occurs in RELOADED, and that has kind of a specific musical approach that will be expanded upon in REVOLUTIONS. And, what people may not realize, is that this is really a love story, and there is a love theme that is slowly developing through the whole thing."

Among the unique aspects of Davis' MATRIX scores is the relationship between the orchestra and the electronic material, the merging of textures that create a new kind of hybrid sound a necessary and perfect accompaniment to the world depicted in the films. In RELOADED, Davis strove to continue the same kind of musical sound design.

"The sound design is primarily orchestral," says Davis. "The synthesizer elements are somewhat subtle and peripheral, but, that being said, they are essential. The Agent Smith character had an ambient sound to him in the first MATRIX that I continued in the second one, and I expanded on that a bit."

Davis also worked with his engineer and one of his percussionists recorded ambient sounds and then sampled those sounds into the synthesizers so they could be altered, played back, and incorporated into his overall sound texture. "We got together and we placed some dry ice on a number of things, metallic instruments like tam tams, cymbals, and also the inside of the piano." The dry ice made the metal instrument surfaces vibrate. When those recorded sounds were processed and edited by engineer Larry Mah, they created a splendidly unusual sonic atmosphere which Davis used as a motif for the Agent Smith character in RELOADED.

In a sense,

the score for THE MATRIX RELOADED achieves a kind of thematic structure in addition to its more inherent sensibility as an ambient musical design. "I would say the thematic structure and the ambience are inseparable," Davis says. "The thematic structure is the ambience. I guess that's kind of a broad use of the word "thematic" but it is treated as a theme. Actually, because when the Agent Smith character emerges and he does his nefarious deeds, that ambience is present, just as a thematic idea would be present if that was the case."

In other moments, the primary Matrix theme (the blaring, reflective horns) emerges frequently, associated with the Matrix world as it influences the characters and the storyline. "It would be hard to call the Matrix music a theme," says Davis. "I mean, there are thematic ideas to it, motivic ideas, but certainly not a theme in the traditional movie sense of a theme. But, that being said, there is a love theme that just kind of peaks through in the first MATRIX that's more developed in RELOADED, and I think will see a culmination [in] REVOLUTIONS. A love theme for Neo."

Rather than contrasting the love theme with some of the more MATRIX-style music, Davis said he is integrating the two. "Larry and Andy don't typically resonate with real melodic music, which is a big reason why it didn't occur in the first MATRIX," he says. "That's why the love theme only peaks through every now and then. Originally I would have had it a little more prominent, but they didn't feel that that was the correct way to go. But when it becomes prominent, the score does become a bit more conventional. I don't think that real melodic music in terms of what people think of, the kind of thing you whistle when you leave the theater, is really the kind of thing that is associated with the post-modern style, anyway.

"So when a director asks a composer to do something modern and original and that's never been done before, you can't really. That, to me, is a directive to not be songlike and melodic. So, it can be a conflict in a lot of cases, because some movies really require a melodic statement that identifies the movie. I mean, try to think of STAR WARS without that wonderful overture. It would have been half the movie. And I think even John Williams would admit that STAR WARS is a very traditional approach. I think what makes John William particularly interesting to me as a composer is that he can take a very traditional, even a 19^th Century approach, and make it sound brand new. That's a very special gift. But it's not modern, it's not new, it's not something that's never been done before. And so when you try to go into that direction, it's not going to be melodic. The elements in RELOADED and REVOLUTIONS that do play that love story will admittedly be more traditional than some of the other things that I think I've developed."

Check back next week for the conclusion of our Don Davis interview.

Soundtrax is our weekly Movie Soundtrack column.

Questions? Comments? Let us know what you think at feedback@cinescape.com.