In Short Scores, Eye on Sound playfully pushes at the boundaries of film music. We asked a new generation of musicians and composers to create new mini film scores to accompany a short piece of film of their choice from Eye’s collection. Tammo Hesselink chose Upside Down Boxers (1899).
By Thijs Havens29 September 2022
I'm Tammo Hesselink, producer & DJ from Amsterdam. I have mainly made club records and released them on Nous'klaer Audio, but in the past I wrote a soundtrack for the short film Ballet Mecanique (1924) for Eye's RE:VIVE project. Here I have tried to write a soundtrack that mainly focuses on rhythm, as opposed to the harmonic nature of many soundtracks.
I chose this specific film fragment because this fragment was quite rhythmic. Similar to Ballet Mecanique for which I have previously made a soundtrack, I think this is a good starting point for making soundtracks because my music emphasizes rhythm more than melody and harmony.
In this score, I wanted to highlight the rhythmic aspect of the fragment. Since this fragment is not synchronized with a metronome, it felt important to me to incorporate percussive loops of various time signatures here, so that there are multiple rhythms in the music for the eye to link the images to. Because the fragment is quite short, with a hectic atmosphere, I mainly looked at fast polyrhythmic percussive music.
I started looking for different sound sources that I was able to transform into percussion. I prefer sounds that can be used as percussion but don't necessarily come from an existing percussion instrument or drums, in order to create a non-obvious percussion sound. In the end, I came up with samples where different things are done with both metal and plastic, which I shortened to form a more percussive sound. With these sound sources I made different rhythms, looking at which rhythms seemed to synchronize best with the individual parts of the fragment. In the end I decided to start with a specific rhythm and gradually add the other rhythms later on. After that, at quieter moments of the fragment, I added silences to the rhythms and created an atmosphere that amplifies the rhythms and the fragment.
Every three weeks, we will add a new clip accompanied by fresh new music to the Short Scores collection, which will therefore keep growing.
