Reloading The Musical Matrix Part Two

By: Randall D. Larson
Date: Thursday, May 22, 2003

The soundtrack CD from THE MATRIX RELOADED has done a bullet-time blowout on the original MATRIX soundtrack in its first day of release, according to composer Don Davis' publicist, Ray Costa. Don Davis' score album from the original MATRIX (1999) has SoundScanned just over 60,000 units. In the first day of sales for the double-disc MATRIX RELOADED soundtrack (reviewed in last week's column), which includes 17 minutes of Don Davis' score, the one-day total virtually reached that number. THE MATRIX RELOADED soundtrack is currently #8 on Billboard's Top 200 Chart. Lucky for us then that today we continue our discussion with Davis.

"I'm honored that the Wachowski Brothers wanted to release the music as a whole [soundtrack and score] to keep the musical integrity of the project, and that Maverick Records had the foresight to release a two-disc set," Davis says. "As brilliant as they are in helming the Matrix franchise, the brothers were [equally so] in overseeing this soundtrack. As a consumer, I always feel a little bit slighted if I get a soundtrack CD that's mostly songs or only score music. This soundtrack is a real effort to change the paradigm of what's being offered to consumers in film music."

The MATRIX's signature mix of modern orchestral scoring techniques with the prevalent alternative rock and techno music required that Davis work his score in between and around those songs, making sure the musical flavor, rhythm, and frequency was compatible with the songs so there wouldn't be any jarring juxtapositions between them.

"In RELOADED

there is quite a bit more collaboration going on between myself and those who are providing the more pop elements of the score than there was in the first MATRIX," he says. "Essentially in the first MATRIX they had gathered some tracks, of various artists, and were able to edit those tracks so that they fit the picture. In RELOADED, those tracks were created for the movie, and in some instances, I think most notably the freeway chase, Ben Watkins, who runs a band called Juno Reactor, and myself worked out that sequence rather carefully. And I think it's pretty successful insofar as it really has the best of what can be done with tracks, because Ben is really good at that, and also enabling an orchestra (and a choir!) to support the film in a way that really only an orchestra (and choir) 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 expertise."

In some films, the use of tracks seems quite obligatory songs thrown in for no apparent reason other than to sell records in the aftermarket but in the MATRIX films they are carefully designed and integrated to become part of the story's essential texture. The placement and purpose of the tracks are huge parts of the vision of the Wachowskis.

"The placement and purpose always comes from the directors," Davis says. "I think that's more so true of this movie than it is of most, because Larry and Andy have managed to really retain control and focus on just about every element of the movie, and you don't see that very often. I'm not sure how they manage to maintain this control, but there they have it! So there's really nothing in the movie that Larry and Andy didn't choose to have there. These brothers are not compromising fellows; they recognize the need for a pop element in the score, but they also recognize the limitations of what pop music can do for them in supporting their action.

"So they've pretty much stuck to an algorithm. Their action sequences are longer than most and tend to be more intense than most, and such that a pop element isn't going to support the whole thing; but an orchestral element just isn't going to be able to maintain the intensity either, because the intensity has to keep growing. So their idea was that generally it works to start out a sequence with more of a pop element, because they don't need the jeopardy element until later. The pop music brings an element of fun, but generally falls short when it needs to convey jeopardy or that sort of intensity. So they start with a pop element and then develop it into an orchestral element. That seems to be a pretty sound concept for treating their brand of action."

Logistically, integrating the orchestral approach, which is driven by a development of musical texture and drama, with the alternative rock tracks, which are characterized primarily by rhythmic development and repetition, proved to be less difficult for Davis than one might have expected perhaps because the tracks weren't your usual verse-chorus-verse pop tunes, but ranged closer to the kind of style that Davis was going with his score.

"It might

be deceptively simple," says Davis. "But I think the key to making it work is the collaboration, and also the supervision by Larry and Andy as to what they want. I think it worked out remarkably well to get together with Ben and really hammer these challenges out, and that's really the only way to do it, to work with it until there is an integration."

An advantage that Davis had in RELOADED that he didn't have in the first film was that, for the most part, he wasn't dealing with preexisting songs that were simply needle-dropped into the film, requiring him to figure out how to come out of the tunes and into his score. Because most of the songs were written specifically for the film, Davis had the opportunity to work with some of the composers such as the Juno Reactor cues written by Ben Watkins and achieve a better sense of unity between them and the score music he was writing.

"It was easier in that respect, but it was harder in that it was more work to do!" Davis grins. "It was an immensely challenging score, if for no other reason than there was a lot of it, but it was also very intense music. There's a lot of action, more action than in the first movie, and so it was a big, big challenge."

Another challenge for any composer especially on an effects and action intensive film like MATRIX RELOADED was competing against loud sound effects. "That impacts our work in every movie," Davis notes. "Fortunately I have a good relationship with Dane Davis [no relation], who is doing the sound effects. We have spoken on a number of occasions about how either of us are approaching a particular sequence, whether we're spending time in a high range or in a low range. Actually there's quite a bit of thought put to that. I don't know if it's more than your average movie, but Dane and I always try to work with each other than to work against each other."

The need to create an integration or a complement between the tonal ranges of the sound effects and music may be something a lot of filmgoers aren't aware of. Davis works closely with the directors to achieve a lot of that compatibility. "A lot of that comes from Larry and Andy, their being cognizant of the process," says Davis. "What happens more often than not is that a director will spot with a composer and he'll come to some action sequence, and he'll say, 'Ok, this has to be huge, give it all you've got! Really knock it off the screen!' So the composer goes home and thinks he's got to do everything he can to make this huge and exciting and thrilling. And then the next day the director spots it with the sound effects guy, and he says, 'Look, this has to be huge, knock this right off the screen, give it everything you've got!' So then we both get to the dub stage, and you have both music and sound effects at 100%. Something has to give or it's just going to be noise. So the best thing to do, in most cases, is just to choose your spot. It's become pretty much a knee jerk reaction for me now. When I see an explosion on the screen, there's no point trying to play music over that. You're just not going to hear it. So in spotting, when an explosion comes up, I'll say, 'Ok, let's build-build-build-build up to the explosion' because typically sound effects guys don't have much to do until the bomb explodes and then get out and let the sound effects guy wow you with how exciting an explosion can really be."

A couple [IMG6R]of new advances in recording technology since the first film came out also tend to give RELOADED a sonic edge. One is the ability for composers to record their scores in Dolby 5.1 now, permitting a far more intense and accurate recording process, which especially enhances a complexly textured score like THE MATRIX RELOADED. The other is the ability to record at a much higher sample rate that before (akin to taking a photograph at 300DPI instead of 72 DPI. It achieves a much finer sonic resolution).

"The innovations that have occurred in the last four years have been more in refining what's out there than with creating new things," says Davis. "We can now record at 96K [96,000 kilohertz] as a sample rate, which is a very high resolution in digital recording, and it's really just now that dubbing stages can accommodate such a high sample rate. The fact that the resolutions are getting better and that working in the digital domain has really matured and become very, very sonically viable, has definitely impacted what we're doing here on RELOADED."

THE MATRIX was recorded onto tape back in 1999. RELOADED, like most film scores nowadays, was recorded digitally onto a computer hard drive. This provided some amazing techniques when merging the orchestra with the electronics. "For the most part, Armin Steiner, my mixer, likes to create a live mix as we're recording, and so he records it directly to Dolby 5.1," says Davis. "His recording technique is so good that I don't really need to remix the orchestra, structurally. I don't have to go into his layout of close mics to try and get a balance of the woodwinds against the balance of the brass. [It's already fine.] What we generally do is take the various takes and edit them together to remove things like stage noises, the occasional clam, and things like that. We edit the orchestral tracks so that their performances are correct, and then we build the synthesizer tracks to accompany the orchestral 5.1 surround mix."

The RELOADED score was recorded with a 100-piece orchestra accompanied by an 80-voice choir, which achieved quite a stunning aural effect in the music. Both were slightly larger than the ensembles used to record the original MATRIX music. "It was a spectacular group, actually," Davis nods. "We had a couple of somewhat famous opera singers who sang on that - John Dyker, Jonathan Mack. Dramatically, it was more the traditional scoring concepts that the choir would accompany. Moments of wonder and awe, moments of tragedy, and things like that."

With all [IMG5L]the various details of the Matrix franchise to be worked out two movies, nine anime shorts to be supervised and delivered, and a major video game based on it all Davis didn't see as much of Larry and Andy Wachowski as he did in the original film, or in their first collaboration, BOUND. "Larry and Andy were very insistent that these three very separate projects be very, very interrelated," says Davis. "So these guys were incredibly busy. But so was everyone else involved in the process. All the people who worked on the movie also wanted to work on the animes as well, and on the video game. So there was quite a bit of stress on all levels. I was trying to really give Larry and Andy as much space as I possibly could and not take up their time unless it was absolutely necessary. So I don't know that my relationship with them has expanded or not; their role in the universe has expanded exponentially, and as such I don't feel I can justify in taking up a lot of their time. So basically the meetings we did have, I was trying, in deference to them, to make them as brief and as succinct as possible."

Does Davis consider his MATRIX score to be groundbreaking? One of the reasons I continually point to THE MATRIX as an example of what film scores are becoming these days is because of what it does in its reflective texture, its layered integration of the symphonic with the synthetic, and its overall approach to scoring the film's multilayered visual textures and subtexts. Its post-modern musical approach tends to suggest this is what science fiction film scores may be evolving into, more of a mix of acoustic and electronic, the thematic and the textural, the traditional and the modernistic. So I asked Davis if he found other scores adopting a similar approach, perhaps being influenced by what he was trying to accomplish in THE MATRIX. Unexpectedly, Davis brought up a composer he referred to in last week's column as a great example of what can be done with traditional scoring techniques John Williams.

"I think it's very interesting that two of John Williams' scores, MINORITY REPORT and A.I., have clearly gone in the direction of the post-modern, minimalist style writing," Davis says. "I don't think that he was using THE MATRIX as a model, though; he kind of took it from the other side of the equation, but I thought it was very interesting and very encouraging that John Williams was going in kind of a post-modern way, stylistically. Outside of that, I don't know. I would like to think that it was groundbreaking, but I don't hear a lot of other composers trying to do that. But, then, there aren't a whole lot of movies that can really sustain that as a stylistic treatment."

In addition to scoring RELOADED and prepping for REVOLUTIONS later this year, Davis also composed the music for each of the ANIMATRIX short films, nine episodes of animated MATRIX stories released initially on the Internet (one of them, "Final Flight of the Osiris," was shown in theaters in March preceding showings of DREAMCATCHER. All will be compiled on DVD next month). Davis consciously strove to create some cross-fertilization between the ANIMATRIX shorts and the three feature films. "Osiris" contains an ambitious score performed by a 50-piece orchestra, and much of the musical development from THE MATRIX and RELOADED finds its way into that animated short. "'Final Flight of the Osiris' is kind of a prelude to RELOADED," Davis says. "There are thematic concepts that are presented in 'Final Flight' that do emerge in RELOADED, and I think will also be heard in REVOLUTIONS."

With each ANIMATRIX quite different in style and tonality, Davis had to morph himself and his music to fit each short film. He has scored each film as an individual entity, but parts of them do have musical elements that relate to the overall MATRIX mythology.

"The real challenge

was that we were dealing with these entities and also trying to score a movie at the same time, so it got a little crazy," Davis says. "But, logistically, with the exception of 'Final Flight,' they were done electronically, so it was a little bit of a different approach right off the bat. The narrative on the animes are so specific that, honestly, the challenge was to find the voice that that particular anime would have had."

As for the Matrix video game, Davis, being buried in RELOADED at the time, couldn't spend a lot of time on it. A composer named Erik Lundborg wrote an electronic score for the game that was based on Davis' MATRIX scores. "He essentially took music from the first MATRIX, and also he had access to all the music I had written for the animes and the music I was writing for RELOADED as I was writing it, and he adapted all this for the video game," says Davis. "He did an incredibly great job under very difficult circumstances."

With The Year of THE MATRIX almost behind him except for the challenges of REVOLUTIONS looming this summer Davis is taking some time off from the world of Morpheus, Neo, Trinity, and multiple Agent Smiths. For relaxation, he's currently working on an opera, with excerpts commissioned by the Los Angeles Master Chorale to be premiered in 2005. Where Davis will go after that, once REVOLUTIONS is completed, remains to be seen. But he's already enjoyed some of the fruits that his labor on the original MATRIX has afforded such as assignments to compose such high profile films as JURASSIC PARK III and BEHIND ENEMY LINES. The future may loom brightly, but Davis reflects proudly on his accomplishments in THE MATRIX.

"The thing that was astonishing about the first MATRIX was watching something that I had experienced in the abstract become part of the popular culture, and I think that's going to increase exponentially with the release of RELOADED and REVOLUTIONS," says Davis. "Specifically, there's a couple of jokes, or witticisms, that I think will become definitely part of the popular culture, and experiencing that is really surreal! If it's surreal for me, I can only imagine what the experience is like for Larry and Andy. But that's really kind of the most interesting part of it, how the collective unconscious really works."

For more info on the MATRIX RELOADED soundtrack, visit www.intothematrixmusic.com.

Soundtrax is our weekly Movie Soundtrack column.

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