It's possible I make films because I never learned how to compose music. So there are musical rhythms in the flow of images contained in my films.

     And while I was excited by the idea of a score for WIRED ANGEL to be composed by Joe Renzetti at the same time, I was a bit apprehensive. It felt like a loss of control.

     I had thought about possible combinations of picture and music in WIRED ANGEL from the very start; in fact music and sound design were always a part of my conceptual strategy. But Renzetti is a formidable composer and I knew that his work would lend another layer of artistry to WIRED ANGEL.

     We agreed on the basic concept for the score: that it should, like the images, be at once ancient and modern, that it should on some fundamental level be based on Gregorian modes (in fact, it goes even further back - to the Byzantine in some places) and that it should have a thematic structure that parallels the film's narrative progression.

     We brought five singers well versed in early music into the studio, and I gave them short phrases from Latin liturgical chant to sing; these phrases and a range of phonemes were multi-sampled by Renzetti (we later did a similar session with children singing) and this gave Joe the vocal parts around which he did his arrangement. He added to this an intriguing array of instrumental and percussive samples and with an incredible amount of musical labor created a beautiful score for the film, ending up composing about as much music as he would normally compose for three feature films !

     While he was creating the score, I employed Fred Szymanski to create sound design elements for parts of the film where I wanted a more ambient texture to the audio, and to apply intensive digital voice processing to the speech that we had recorded - thus transforming the narrative voice-overs into something like musical events to sit effectively in the mix while retaining the dramatic tension of their content.

     In any case, I had little to fear; the images can stand on their own with integrity, the final mixed soundtrack can stand on its own - it very much tells the story in the way that music can, and combined I think we have created a very new and different paradigm in Image and Sound.