I gave the track a listen and felt like it was missing something like it was somehow weightless. I realized there was nothing much happening on the low end so I quickly wrote a bass track starting from the middle of the song which I loaded into an instance of Spectrasonics Omnispehere. I ran the bass through Output Thermal – a multiband distortion plugin, gave the song another listen, and decided to wrap it up. I chose the title IHLTIMYIS – an acronym whose meaning I’ll never reveal. After I wrapped it up and rendered it, I downloaded the YouTube clip and put everything together in Microsoft’s Video Editor which was more than enough for this type of situation and for my level of video editing skills. I watched the final product and it really doesn’t sound that bad. Is the scene worse though? Yes. Definitely. It almost gives it a cartoonish feel, but I do know I gave it my best shot, and answered the question “Would non-diegetic sound have made the movie worse?”. Again, the answer is “Yes”.

For the main 50 bars of this track, I used an old Kontakt Library called Kinetik Metal, which I still think sounds amazing to this day, and which I’ve been using for the past nine years. I just loaded a preset called Blue Meth, linked the Forge and FX parts so that they move together, and tweaked the Forge’s metals and waves until it sounded weird enough. Then, just to keep it fresh throughout the track I ran it through Portal for about 16 bars, then through After Image by Curtis King Plugins, which basically does the same thing as Spaced Out, but for this kind of track I prefer a little bit of diversity when it comes to delay and reverb effects, just to give it some extra depth.

After I felt confident about my piano tracks, I decided to layer them with some synthesizer sounds. For the intro I played around with an old plugin called Alchemy by Camel Audio (now Logic Pro Alchemy), which features a very neat granular engine. I loaded Spaced Out by Baby Audio, a wet effects generator, and my go-to plugin for spacey reverb and delay, commonly used for vocals but I found it can also give any instruments a lush and dreamy quality. Also, for the first 16 bars I ran the piano track through Portal by Output, an incredibly powerful granular effects plugin, just to set it apart from the main part and keep it interesting.

It took me a while to find the right tempo. I started out with 96bmp but ended up slowing it down to 84 as the 68 bars wouldn’t have covered the whole clip. I also added an extra piano track on top of the original one, a couple of octaves higher, just to keep things interesting. I always found mixing piano into a track a thorny issue to tackle but for some reason making a small 2db cut around 300hz did the trick on this one. I used Spectrasonics Keyscape to run the midi signal, a very powerful plugin, so that might have something to do with it sounding almost perfect right off the bat.

Since Balanta has a somewhat surrealistic quality to it, from the western audience’s perspective at least, I wanted to capture that on my track. I decided I would go with a piano composition layered with synths, all drenched in reverb. I started with a simple two-chord piano progression, F – C, to which I added a two-chord bridge, F – Em. I kept playing around with this progression until I developed it into an odd-feeling composition by throwing an Fm chord in the mix. I don’t like to brag but I have no choice, this is one of the best piano pieces that I’ve written.

Now I’m not saying by any means that the film or this particular scene would’ve been better if it had a soundtrack. On the contrary, I think it would have “burst the bubble, break the charm” to quote one of my favorite artists of all time, Björk. Background music would only alert the viewer to the fact that he’s watching a film, they would snap out of the state of belief the actors, writers, and director are building with their hypnotic craft. And even though I know music would only make a scene like this worse, I can’t help but wonder how bad could it get?

I found the characters in this scene to be very daring. Mitica, the doctor, tells the Securitate agent to come by the hospital the next morning to collect the diary because he wants to finish reading it first. Furthermore, he tells the agent that he’ll only part with the diary on the condition that photocopies will be made and the original diary will be returned to him. The agent agrees to convey Mitica’s request to his superiors. This type of behavior in the presence of a Securitate agent was uncommon back in the day, especially coming from a member of the oppressed “intellectual class”, a label that was attached by the Communist party to anyone with a higher education diploma. The state was extra suspicious of this type of people, as universities were generally seen as a breeding ground for dissidents. Intellectual types were often locked up without any real evidence so it would’ve been a really bold move for a doctor to dictate terms to a Securitate agent.

I really love this scene I found on YouTube from The Oak – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsW1sbWUZaE – it depicts a conversation between Razvan Vasilescu’s character, Mitica, a doctor, and Nela, a school teacher played by Maia Morgenstern. Mitica is reading to Nela from a diary of one of his former patients, Titi. He entrusted his diary to Mitica before undergoing surgery knowing that his chances of survival are minor. Among a series of utopian ideas, and plans to start a cult-like organization, there’s also a note for Mitica in which Titi asks to be buried in the small village where he was born in a traditional Christian ceremony. The conversation is cut short by an agent of the state’s secret police, the Securitate, which is after the diary, as he fears it may contain ideas that may become dangerous is spread.

So here’s why Balanta was my choice for this assignment. Using comedic irony to conduct a political analysis of Ceausescu’s regime from the point of view of two representants of the oppressed “intellectual class” (a doctor and a school teacher), it shares a peculiar characteristic with many early post-Decembrist Romanian films – the lack of non-diegetic sound. I’ve discussed this aspect with some friends and some believe that the lack of soundtracks on most Romanian films keeps the scenes grounded in reality even when things tend to get a bit surreal, while others think it stems from a Rennainscence type of situation, where the directors are trying to define a new wave of cinematic styles separating themselves by all means from what came out before 1989. Whatever the reason, the lack of music, along with my love for early ’90s movies, drove me to choose this as my project.

For my personal creative project, I chose to compose a track for a short clip I found on YouTube from a 1992 Romanian film called Balanta (The Oak), one of the best pieces of Romanian cinema in my humble opinion. Directed by Lucian Pintilie and boasting an amazing cast, with Maia Morgenstern and Razvan Vasilescu in the main roles, Balanta was among many critically acclaimed films that came out of Romania after the fall of the communist regime. It received quite a few awards and nominations, with Maia Morgenstern winning European Actress of the Year at the 1993 European Fim Awards. An amazing film overall.