And then you have much thinks:

How are we supposed to measure things, that you have never ever touched in your life?

How do you expect anything happens, when you have never done this before?

How do you prepare for something, that you don’t know is going to happen?

How do you initiate, when there isn’t a plan that could’ve been laid out because of the reasons above?

And the answer is in front of your electrocardiogram and blood sugar tests – moar energy drinks.

Marius composed most of the music for the film, leaving me with the bits that required a bit of Number Eleven flavoured Contradictions. To balance the entire thing out a little.

His work under Entropija is flow – very lively and organic, so his approach went towards carrying the films inner dialogue. Dynamic and constantly evolving.

Mine – the complete opposite, dragging your face through shards of glass continuously – one big reed sausage of massive.

We composed the pieces using placeholder recordings, or sample libraries of real instruments, in order to get a good sense of how it feels and what it could become before recording. FL Studio’s versatile collection of stock plugins helps.

All seems pretty balanced and making-sense, however – it cannot be yet-another conceptual pile of “what’s the meaning of it all”, which we artists tend to make, personally. This has to fit a concrete narrative – the moving picture.

The music is no longer about us, it’s about how you understand and present the narrative alongside its pictures.

And I have never composed or mixed a soundtrack for any *proper* moving picture. I have mixed and I have been involved in pretty awful representations of what it could’ve been, just to know how it shouldn’t be done.

But there’s no knowledge of how it „should” be done.

I’ve never worked with live instruments enough (apart from mixing them live).

I’ve never played them, recorded them, mixed a soundtrack entirely out of them.

I’ve never mixed them with impulse reverbs from real locations.

I’ve never blah blah.

Let alone carrying the feeling of the narrative via the soundtracks sound design. Therefore I had to dig within myself, how do I understand the things that happen, how do I make you feel like I want you to feel? How does it speaks?

I made noises inside patchers within FL Studio for more than 20 years, and it seems to me that I’m capable of mixing anything, just because I’ve seen the borders of what’s capable through my own, and everyone else’s curiosities via Electron Emitter.

But I can’t just go all out, and pile everything on top. I had to give it character.

Pick your character

In the ages of limitless potential of AI potatoes within your computer box, you will immediately get stuck with choice paralysis, because everything is available.

Then every misery monetizing motherfucker will start talking about those philophosical meta-intelligence analogues of „limitations inspire creativity” dogshit tutorials, that just forces you to make something intentionally worse.

How about – Pick your character?

Don’t limit yourself to live instruments.

Because you may want to add physical modelling in the reverbs, or add overtones with a synth. Just like a photograph – you can enhance raw sensor data with digital engoodizeiaition. Doesn’t become less real if done right.

The capture method alone already adds a deviation from reality. The sensor adds it’s perspective – colouration, just like a microphone and the recording technique used.

Don’t limit yourself by not using digital effects.

Because you may want a long reverb of the impulse that is short. You can extend it logarithmically, add modulation to it, play with EQ to create turbulence and movement.

Does not become less real, if your intention is not a documentary.

Don’t limit yourself to traditional mic’ing techniques.

How do you mic a Sheng?

Hyperreality

The entire film is based on Authenticity. The theme and surroundings are a mix of reality and mysticism, that you can’t separate.

It feels too real to be true.

Therefore, it becomes those character traits, which can be used conceptually for the sound-design choices, composition and mixing.

The sound-sources have to be real.

The performances have to be authentic.

The reverbs have to be real (real location, or object impulses).

And they have to feel SO REAL, it would make you believe they can’t be.

That is where recording and mic’ing techniques got defined. We record in anechoic scenarios, reduce the reverb to the minimum, preferably – none, in order to be able to use impulse reverbs of certain locations.

The locations have their own history, which aligns with the intent of the films narrative, regardless of their actual sonic properties.

Mic the instruments up in such a manner, that’d allow to dissolve the presence of the instrument as an “object” in a space, to surround you by the sound it produces.

And that’s where digital potatoes step in, adding to the reality, instead of subtracting from it with the all too familiar „digital versus analogue”.

We’re not trying to create a documentary of sound here, such as how a human would actually hear the performance in an optimal listening position.

We’re trying to make you feel like it reeds your mind.

The Pump Organ

The backbone of the entire soundtrack – our XIX century Swedish pump organ, which I fell in love with and is the reason I’m seeking music theory and key-instrument lessons.

So I’d be able to make cats in my neighbourhood miserable.

And I immediately disassembled it as much as possible, without impacting its mechanical performance, in order to get as much sound and texture as possible, since all the pretty woodwork is just a vintage analog low-pass filter.

Miced up in LCR (left center right) in the back, LR up front, two piezos on the frame, two mics at the pedals near the bellows. And then mixed afterwards in such a manner (panned, delayed, and MS processed) that it would feel as if you were inside the organ.

Front LR going to RL usually, LCR being the backbone. But if more layers are present, they may get reversed to RCL and such, twisted and mangled in such ways, you would feel surrounded by reeds and winds.

And me, tying my fingers into a knot, while trying to perform the odd-time-signature-avantgarde-complex-italian-words-crossaint-blet compositions of Marius, when I can’t even keep a steady 4/4 with the pedals.

In a room that has formed stalactites of Terea tars, energy drink fumes, and dust, at +35 degrees Celsius. Inside our not-so-temporary Studio C, since the Foley Room was occupied to do …foley, which is an entirely different story.

And it was my first time playing a key instrument, not a midi keyboard, where you can do things wrong and get away with editing.

Pipe Organ in The Church of Vytautas the Great.

Erm… I have to be careful with my wishes.

With Marius, we have built a house in three days, brought two rotten pianos to break the laws of physics and such.

But this – burns a hole in the list of things that were mad.

Recording the Pipe Organ in The Church of Vytautas the Great in Kaunas during the night.

I’ll start with weather forecasts, such as „we’ll be seeing fish flying and submarines getting lost in the sky”.

Then, finding a way to record 31 fucking microphones in sync.

Somehow getting all the necessary equipment to do so.

Squishing all of that in my little VW Golf mk3.

Setting it all up, with ~1 kilometer of XLR cables.

The pipe organ is as big as a small room. And it’s split into two sections – front and back. Forget acoustics and capturing it reverb-free, it’s as lush as 6 solid seconds of reverb.

Can’t go round it, go directly at it – that’s why I insisted on splitting it into „fields” – Near-Field, Mid-Field, and Far-Field, miced in LCR, the main one being Mid-Field miced in MS pairs in LCR.

Front and back facing small diaphragm condensers near and far away, a shotgun at the altar as the farthest one, keyboard and pedals miced, dynamics right at the pipes.

Then recording the tracks of the pipe organ, through the night, when your sanity has already left via cigarette smoke through the gaps in my sunroof, which was leaking, when I sailed to Kaunas, so half of the lost fish ended up in my head.

Seriously – the weather was so bad, I actually lost car parts on the way due to turbulence (a window wind deflector).

It was disorienting in the church, to begin with. I’ve got to directly feel what we lost, as a generation, or people in general, when people started going against religion, or anything „holy”, regardless whether it’s real or not.

When you go outside – you are showered with ads, tutorials, fun, memes, algorithmic hooks, trained on getting your attention and dragging you away from yourself.

Your own home becomes a symbol of smart toasters made in China – nothing is sacred, nothing is special. You are a consumer for a world that has nothing special.

Then you enter a church.

No ads. No overly-shaped asses. No discounts or missed opportunities, or „tech-enthusiasm”.

Every picture, every architectural decision, every object and its placement is made in such a way, to reflect you – back to you.

Who are You, and what do You believe in?

God? Yourself? Your path? Doesn’t matter, since they’re all symbols you may choose to carry forward. Regardless of whether it’s real or not, it’s your choice to determine who you are to yourself, and make your choices.

Very enlightemens aresn’t its?

The pipe organ, compounded by the acoustics sounds exactly like it, be it association, or astral semantics. And I wanted to capture that. In the ages of “god is dead”, how do I make you feel its presence via the consumerist China-made microphones?

Every whisper 50 metres away can be heard, exactly as you said it. Every bench presence is heard. Every location and function of the main instrument is heard.

It is the pipe organ, the player, or the massive air pump – it’s all there, part of everything.

Doesn’t matter where you stand, it sounds different everywhere, it’s so random, it seems the same, yet it’s not.

That’s why I wanted to record with as much temporal resolution as I can get my hands on – spreading the mics across the entire church in fields, in order to capture the travel of sound. We nearly maxed the Behringer X32 with 31 mics.

Positioning you within that experience.

It makes you notice the power of „belief” be it God or Reddit, or the analogues of both.

Once you drive yourself bad enough, so that you start having dreams of your family members being shipped to you via Lietuvos Paštas with no body parts and half a head left (and even then the customer service managed to lose tracking of the shipment) – you understand the power of what you choose to believe.

Pick your guidance, basically, because you are left with questions after such dreams.

And so I wanted to give the music this exact feeling.

Is there an effect for that? Like SoundGodizer?

Reeds more

After the astral projections of self-realisation, and experiencing the power of God the almighty (why is he different in all the pictures?), we go back right to hell – my house.

Which has become a science-fiction phenomenons of rare-species organisms and mushrooms growing out of piles of Terea, bits and pieces falling off the container of this writer, empty bags of Queal, dead mosquitoes and more reed instruments.

It was a hot summer. And the industrial fan I bought for actual mushroom farming, capable of moving 3200m2 of air per hour (tutorial has to be clear enough because it won’t get stuck in this one) was becoming increasingly useful.

Onwards:

Melodica

And the EPIC migraine it has induced the next day, because you’re blowing while experimenting, when practicing, and then performing. Your eyes will pop out, and you will become stupid from lack of oxygen.

That may be the result of the fact that I know that I have big, strong lungs (I can hold my breath for more than 4 minutes, and my sneeze produces a muzzle flash).

So I blew it so hard like it’s in a plumbers documentary online.

So hard I could pitch-bend a fucking melodica.

The Accordion

And Marius has not recovered yet from his grindfest.

But my guess is that he had his own desperations as well, which could be a nice continuation on Part 3.

The Clothes airer

People who know me from before I became a domain name, know that there is one instrument that I actually CAN play.

It’s just like a violin (duh), it’s just different in every way imaginable.

And you can’t dry clothes on a violin.

You won’t be able to play a melody with it, not by chance, not by skill. It’s as random as AI in the „discover” section on a fresh instagram account.

Let alone compose with it.

Which meant I recorded sample libraries of the clothes airer, playing it in different ways, and compiled it into Decent Sampler libraries and figured out what Martele stands for (a bow technique) and a bunch of Italian words.

The rest in pieces

I get the feeling that this is getting long. Partly because I’ve been writing this for several hours, but mostly because it’s not even a third of the instruments used in the OST.

We actually found someone who has a grand piano and volunteered to stand in for the soundtrack.

Then – a flute, a shakuhachi, an erhu, a trombone, a cello, a violin, and even some Baltic horns of DIFFERENT TYPES.

Not to mention our own piles of stuff, most of which is Marius’s collection, which he brought in with an actual truck.

A sheng, a German zither from Paleolithic ages, the cheapest drums on Thomann, guitars and all sorts of percussion, two pickled pianos, a bass bed (a sort of diy bass guitar), and the list can go on.

Because we will play with anything, since we have found out that Aliexpress, beats therapy, and I bought some transducers.

The on-the-spot Foley Room

Just because I’m mad and my intention was to experiment with the „hyperreality” idea, it required every instrument to be recorded in a zero-reverberation scenario.

Which meant buying a larger car, not only to carry the piles of microphones and all the gear, but as many acoustic panels as I could fit.

Not only that, but developing a workflow and routines of recording on the spot, rather than in a controlled environment, such as our own studios, far outside of town and its noises.

Plastic tool boxes used as tables, learning to swear in Windows Event Viewer codes, power management to prevent the coil buzz from the CPU power draw, groundless extension cords to prevent ground loops, and tactical placement of sound absorbers, so the local BMW 316i drivers would not end up in the credits for the soundtrack.

A Motu 896 mk3 Hybrid, for its 8 pristine ~128dB SNR preamps, multiple headphone outputs, incredibly stable phantom power and most importantly – transparency. No useless warmth or marketing gimmickry.

And the discovery that a Wacom tablet is a perfect second screen for a laptop, that fits into the laptop bag.

The spatiality is much conceptual

Since everything was recorded with maximum sound absorption, every recording is so dry, you can hear the tinnitus of the player in the recordings.

This allowed me to shape the spaces in which the instruments are being played. Most of the instruments were recorded in LCR and a piezo, if applicable.

But some – such as the pump organ or the grand piano – as much as 9.
And then of course the church with 31.

Why, you may ask, use so much? It’s not even necessary.

Yes. But it gives me choices.

One track uses the front mics. The other track – rear mics.

And then comes the impulse reverbs.

Some mics feed into one tunnel of the 1st Fort of Kaunas.
Some mics feed into the other tunnel.

There was a war inside the space, a bomb fell onto it, it was occupied by the Soviets. A place of conflict.

Some mics feed into the living room of my late grandfather, from whom I inherited a flat from the lost part of my family I never knew.

Some mics feed into the bedroom in which I found him dead, because he drank himself to death.

All about the post-Soviet trauma here.

The meaning is within

We recorded impulses of the locations, which served the purpose of creating the latent feeling within the music, which doesn’t mean anything at all in engineering terms.

The empty flat sounds just like an empty flat. Regardless of how much alcohol was consumed inside it.

The 1st Fort of Kaunas sounds just like …large tunnels, of which there are plenty of impulses online of shit quality, but not only it carries its own history, it’s part of our history, within which the film takes place.

The Cathedral Square of Vilnius sounds just like any ordinary …Cathedral Square I guess. But it’s part of the history within which the movie takes place, the country and its cultural inheritance, about which it doesn’t care at all, handing me fines for not being a “correct citizen”.

So much art, how does sound sounds

The use of such spaces and reverbs gave it a distinct character, that would’ve been impossible to create with algorithmic reverbs, boutique or vintage garbage, doesn’t matter.

The Fort tunnel reverbs are horrible, incredibly muddy, and resonant. I had to layer EQs on top of EQs, drive them hard, and dynamically compress them, so they would not reduce the clarity of the mix.

The inherited flat is very fluttery, boomy, and ringy, adding a lot of comb-filtering and phasing when mixed with dry signals. Modulation, randomness, layering multiple impulses, and different mic inputs.

The Cathedral Square is massive, long, with delays and reflections (we sourced that from the gunshots in the military parade).

Zapyškis church, forests, and the ice layer of a frozen lake recorded with piezos, all came to play their respective roles in giving the sound the distinction it required.

Most of which was done using:

SIR Audio Tools – SIR3 (a very flexible convolution reverb)
UVI – Shade (an almighty powerful creative EQ)
Black Rooster Audio – OmniTec-67A (big warmth preamp analog)
Klevgrand – Pana (simple and small stereo panner)

And some nasty little shits from my personal collection:
de la Mancha – Unstable (controlled random modulation)
Homegrown Sounds – Soundscaper 2 (the lushest reverb ever)
Interruptor – Echomania 1.2 (4-track tape delay emulation)

Is this the best thing ever?

I had no idea how this was going to sound, what it’s going to become, and more importantly – if it’s even going to work.

Define work, does it sound good? Define good then.

How do you mix a church organ, with a pump organ, melodica, clothes airer, and a piece of rosin that has started to scream by itself, since I rubbed the bow so hard into it?

And give it bigness like in movies, and then make sure it doesn’t rip your ears off in movie theaters, which apparently sounds like the notorious Yamaha NS-10M‘s squared.

With all the resonant, ugly, and claustrophobic spaces, instruments falling apart, out of tune, imperfect, forgotten, and being played intentionally wrong. Or not even instruments to begin with.

In compositions that are intentionally disorienting, soul crushing dissonant absurd, in contrast with the most beautiful soundscape of nature, alongside perfect harmony and inner peace?

It is an experiment

Nothing can be expected. Nothing can be measured, or practiced.

We were riding on this chance that I’d somehow manage to pull off the mix of such a pile of everything, using impulse reverbs, which were incredibly hard to work with.

All the reeds being out of tune, since they’re very temperature sensitive and you can’t tune them.

The instruments being so old, rattley, squeaky and garbage.

Me being the most autism moron, who recorded key presses and certain wind noises separately for layering and sound design, on such a schedule.

All of that with multi-mic setups, doubled by layers of performances reaching 300+ mixer tracks on FL Studio, single-handedly melting some polar bears when rendering, because it’s so much FUN.

And the only thing that wasn’t a first for me, was none.

No budget, no time, just us being utter maximalists, just because we’re bored.

Where what when

The film has its premiere set at the European Film Festival Scanorama 2025 in Vilnius, on November 14th, 19:30 at Forum Cinemas Vingis.

Aaaand it’s sold out.

As of posting this – there are still some spaces available on November 15th, 16:20 in Kaunas, at Forum Cinemas Matijošaičio Ferrari, I guess.

After that – subscribes to mailing list and we’ll let you know.

What’s next

More parts covering the music composition, 5.1 mix, and diegetic sound design by Marius.

Sorting, compiling, releasing the sample libraries of instruments used in the OST and the impulse responses.

OST Album production and release on Electron Emitter …when it is appropriate.

And see if anything watchable can be done out of the video recordings we’ve done, from which the pictures are taken out of.

Subscriebsscrubscriebessubsiscriebens if you want to play with a tuned clothes airer in your DAW right next to sick af pads of pipe organs.

Thank you for your support!

Performers:

Roberta Daugėlaitė – Pipe organ of The Church of Vytautas the Great.

Romantas Daugėla – Flute, other wind instruments.
And for lending us his studio for a day.

Saulė Paulikaitė – Shakuhachi, Erhu.

Milgedas Aleksandravičius – Vocal, Harmonica, Accordion.

Ema Silvija Bojadžian – Grand Piano.

Agnietė Baltramonaitytė – Cello, Violin.

Giedrius Balbieris – Baltic horns, digeridoo.

Remigijus Paulikas – Lip Harmonica.

Vilmantas Balynas – Trombone.

Greta Žilinskaitė – Lullabies.

Jonas Bulota – Voice drones.

Kristupas Keller – Violin.

Lithuanian Army Orchestra – Performed Pieces, recorded during the Lithuanian Army Celebration in 2022.

Equipment, other:

Vytautas Budzejus – Behringer X32 and other equipment.

Svajūnas Ilčiukas – microphones.

Arūnas Periokas – help during the recording in the church.

Photos by:

Danielė Arštikytė
Roberta Daugėlaitė
Tomas Petkevičius
Andrius Žemaitis
BTS footage screenshots.

This project was partially funded by LATGA.