Original Score and Sound Design by Radium Audio

Diving through the mind’s eye … sifting debris of the splintering conscious … lurking in chambers of hope and memory …. spark ignites the other in self … stealing dominion in fragile reality … fated collision … who shall prevail?

Director Rusch Meyer is inspired by a visit to an old disused sanatorium while scouting potential locations for his next project. Exploring the long, dark, rotting corridors, the decaying rooms, he finds himself pondering on the contrasts of tragedy and hope which must inevitably have coexisted in such a place, journeys taken inside the mind which may never have been physically possible, parallel lives lived in the imaginations of the people who worked or were admitted as patients in the building, escaping in their own way the drudgery and despair of their environment. He says

I could sense the history of the place as I walked around, so many stories of disease, death, but also of hope and of recovery, and I started to imagine the different mental states inside of a person who might have worked or been a patient here, and so my idea for the film, a journey between the subconscious and the superego, really grew from there

When Rusch Meyer invites Radium to create a score and soundscape for “Alter Ego” we are immediately captivated by the story unfolding before us in the very early rough cut he sends through. Because the environment has been such a strong influence in the genesis of the project and creates a kind of emotional architecture for our main character, we choose to construct a very organic soundtrack which channels the disintegrating physicality and the air of forboding surrounding her, while following her trajectory throughout the piece.

After some trial and error we find that manipulation and crushing of raw chicken carcases produces the best bone crunching sounds to mark the body movements, and we layer in some very transparent breathy textures and vocals, to highlight the surreal nature of the experience, wrapping and folding these around the live piano and strings we record to evolve a consistently real feel throughout the emotional journey, rising through some electronic undercurrents reinforcing the everpresent darkness and melancholy of this particular time and space … as we bear witness to the birth of the Alter Ego.