The Death of Bunny Munro – Producing the Audiobook

Artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard also direct many of The Bad Seeds and Grinderman’s promos. Nick asked them to film his readings for The Death of Bunny Munro – and it turned into something much, much bigger. Here Iain + Jane talk through how the project turned into what may be the most ambitious audiobook yet.

The original manuscript of The Death of Bunny Munro, marked up for audiobook comments

Producing and sound-directing the audio project for The Death of Bunny Munro has been an epic and intense trip. We’ve never done anything like this before, and doubt we ever will again! We’re artists. We make stuff – films and installations, and over the past few years we’ve been having a ball making videos and films with Nick and the Bad Seeds. And that’s how this started – with filming.

Nick asked us to shoot a series of short video clips of him reading excerpts from the book. We placed him seated in front of the camera, and behind him was a screen onto which we back-projected images that in some way related to the passage being read.

Nick Cave during recordings for the video readings from The Death of Bunny Munro

Once we’d edited these Nick suggested adding some music and Warren provided us with a selection of music that they’d produced together. These were in various states, from complete passages of finished music to more random sounds, noises and Warren’s now-famous ‘loops’ that have played such an important part in recordings by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and Grinderman. We scanned through everything and selected material that we thought worked well with the readings and assembled the video clips that can now be seen on the Bunny web site and have been included with the DVD and this iPhone app of the audiobook.

From the previous projects we’ve worked on with Nick we now felt that we had a good sense of how he would work best in front of the camera. Most excerpts were read only once and, like much of our own artwork, were shot in a single take. The imagery you see in the video was there, live in the room – nothing was added in post-production other than the music. We hadn’t finished reading the book at this point so it was revealing to see how Nick presented certain characters, the vocal inflections and hand gestures that began to enhance the mental picture we were already developing of the characters. Between readings Nick was still frantically editing the manuscript and the process of reading out loud seemed to be having an effect on Nick’s perception of his writing; it certainly was on ours.

Nick and Warren both liked how we’d selected and used the music in the video clips, and a few weeks later asked us to produce the audiobook for Bunny. We knew we had to create a extraordinary listening experience, something that could truly convey something of the vivid trip we’d experienced reading the book, and listening to Nick reading those few short excerpts for the videos. We almost always work with film and video, so the most immediate challenge for us was working without pictures. Warren dug deeper into The Vaults and delivered an incredible library for us to work from – again everything from very complete and finished pieces of music through to strange and experimental sounds, loops, whirs and noises, different layers and textures for us to work with and play with. Incredible stuff. It literally felt like being allowed to poke into Nick and Warren’s minds, and it felt for a split second as if we might have caught a glimpse into their working processes.

The recording of Nick actually reading the book had already been made, so that was given to us basically done. But we also knew that we wanted to introduce some ‘real world’ sounds into the mix. The idea of these was to interrupt and disturb the listening experience, so it was vital to us that they didn’t become predictable. Often clearly described sounds would go unsoundtracked, others would be pronounced even if subtle in the text, some just buried in the mix. These came from a combination of foley library recordings and actual field recordings we went out and made. Understanding that the book was set around identifiable locations in Brighton we had considered trying to hire a canary yellow Fiat Punto and attempting to follow Bunny’s journey, armed with a microphone. Wish we’d had the time, but we didn’t.

The text is incredibly vivid and without doubt we’d begun to construct a mental image of Bunny’s world from our first reading, so we began by sharing those images with each other, and developing a kind of shared non-existent movie. We even selected an imaginary cast for this non-existent movie to help us share our visual understanding of this world and the characters that inhabit it. Working with a film score seemed to us to be the closest relative of what we were trying to do, so we began to try to think in those terms. We identified themes for key characters, for example, or particular types of sounds and instruments that would relate to particular emotions or events, such as Bunny Junior turning to his encyclopedia. But clocking in at over eight hours the soundtrack analogy only really goes so far. The finished result is really something else altogether. Something between a film soundtrack, a radio play and an hallucination.

One area of sound we have previously explored in our own work is Ambisonics. Essentially this is a series of techniques for the recording and playback of sound that exists on multiple channels that can then be presented back in a multi-dimensional soundfield. More simply, it can be thought of as ‘3D sound’. We first worked with Ambisonics in 2006 when we produced a work called Silent Sound for A Foundation during the Liverpool Biennial. It began as a live performance with an original score by Jason Pierce (Spiritualized) and was highly visual, but the gallery-based installation that opened the next day centred on a pitch-black listening chamber, designed to focus your mind on the sound. This immersive technology essentially played back sound in a true three-dimensional space using a 12-speaker array. So visitors to the gallery would sit in a space measuring less than twenty feet wide and hear the sound almost exactly as it was heard by those attending the live performance, which took place in an 85 feet wide classical concert hall. We later recreated the same installation at Art Basel in Miami inside a shipping container on the beach little more than 8 feet wide.

The team that made all this technically possible was the remarkable acousticians who we’ve come to know and love at Arup in New York. Principally an engineering company, their acoustics department focuses on the acoustics of buildings, with projects ranging from creating some of the world’s finest concert halls to reducing the impact of airport noise. But like all good people they have a rebellious streak, and undertake projects with artists that take them to places their core business simply wouldn’t. We immediately felt a connection with these guys, not least because they shared our passion and commitment to constantly pushing things, trying to look beyond the edges. We also over time and whiskey unearthed a shared past; during our teenage years we’d attended many of the same London gigs as Raj, who heads the team (although based in New York he grew up in the UK). Another story, for another time… But should you ever meet him, don’t get him started on Bauhaus unless you have an awful lot of time to spare.

We’re used to working with museums and art galleries. Bureaucracies. Red tape. Health and Safety. Yet every time we work with Raj and his team we only ever talk about how something can be achieved, never if it can be. They have a unique and creative approach to solving even the most pedestrian of problems. We’ve got to know the team pretty well and have worked with them several times since Silent Sound, including Radio Mania, a big project we did recently for the BFI with multiple screens of 3D video and full Ambisonic sound. As soon as we began talking about working on Bunny we just knew we had to get them involved. We had an initial meeting with Raj and he immediately shared our excitement and saw the same potential to take this into radically new direction if we were to produce the audiobook in full 3D sound. Ambisonics requires precise control over the playback equipment so it’s not really a practical solution for something being widely released to the public, but by using similar techniques and creating a binaural mix a similar effect could be created for listeners using headphones.

So – after completing work on the stereo mixes of the complete audiobook we began work on a process known as “spatialisation”. The whole team at Arup got involved, but the project was very much led by Terence Caulkins, who was assisted by Anne Guthrie. We went back through the eight hours of stereo mixes that we’d produced and began to make what we imaginatively called “spatialisation notes”, essentially a script that stage directed the three-dimensional space for the sounds to be placed in.

Example notes supplied by Iain and Jane to Arup

We took a wide-ranging approach to this; directions would range from the literal and obvious (seagulls would be heard high above your head) to the more emotional (a piece of music suggesting fear might be placed so that it begins in the pit of your stomach and rises to your mouth over the course of a passage) or completely esoteric (the horned killer ‘theme’ creeping up behind you like a Scooby-doo villain). These notes would be sent over to Terence and the team along with the multitrack parts from our original mixes. They would then begin work on spatialising each chapter. It was an epic task that culminated in a solid month of heavily timetabled work on both sides of the Atlantic. With the New York/London time difference we would usually have a conference call around 9pm (GMT) that would allow us all to agree on a plan for a particular chapter. We’d then wake up the next morning to find new mixes waiting for us to listen to and feed back on. We’d review, type up comments, requests, suggestions and fire it all back to New York, ready for our next conference call. The Arup team would review and provide their feedback in the same timeframe. And together we slowly wound a path through each chapter, almost chronologically.

It was an intense journey. But an incredible one. And almost certainly something we’ll never experience again. Within a few days of the spatialised mixes being finished and approved they’d been mastered by Will at Sterling Sound in New York and we had in our hands the masters that would make up the CD/DVD edition, iTunes/Audible download and iPhone app edition of the book. Job done. Looking back, our only regret is that we didn’t get to take a ride in that canary yellow Fiat Punto. Maybe we’ll hire one anyway, and cruise the streets of Brighton listening to The Death of Bunny Munro.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, August 2009