For release day on Bandcamp, we unveiled the music video for 'Autumn Song' by David Cordero and Anthéne. It was created by Beirut, Lebanon based cinematographer Ralf Moussa who has created superb visuals for the likes of Tides, Henrik Meierkord & Knivtid and Odnu to name but a few.

Ralf is an active member of our community; a member of the Inner Echo and someone who regularly joins us at listening parties. We've chatted on this very blog before, almost a year ago in fact - check this out HERE. In this latest post, Ralf and I catch up on his thoughts on Ambient music, the album and how he approached the visuals, as well as what it's like to be a cinematographer working in Beirut.

You can watch the video below which is now available in HD on YouTube and if you like what you see and hear, there's a Bandcamp link at the bottom of the page where you can also check out the album.

LET ONE BIRD SING: THE FILM

You worked on this film over a period of 7 months. What drew you to use ‘Autumn Song’ in particular for your film?

RM: First of all thanks for having me here for the second time - it’s always a pleasure sharing insight with you. Ever since you put me in contact with David Cordero and Anthéne who happen to be some of the artists I regularly their material and revisit, I gave the album few listens and started sketching things in a random manner.

The whole album presents a palette that I could relate to fall under an autumnal sound to be fair. I kept changing my mind about the track to use as I progressed with the edit. When I applied the last colour palette that I’ve proceeded with, I found Autumn Song to cover the overall feel I got from the album.

The film presents a very poetic juxtaposition - the caged birds and open spaces. Could you talk about what these visual elements represent to you?

RM: Well, to say the least and not spoil it much, it is some kind of juxtaposition that’s taking place between these elements, as you pointed out first when I sent you the teaser, "There’s a million metaphors for birds in a cage". In parallel I wanted to take these birds into places one can’t expect, like throwing them in the street as songbirds usually communicate calmness.

Besides the very cliché of autumnal feel to be made with the earthly colours varying between oranges and yellows, there's something about the autumn feel that I could relate to the notion of film texture. The texture of an autumnal film is never in full glow; you could see the hues in different degrees of luminance or exposure, but something in them is so well blended that they look a bit hazy. Autumn here is a very intricate and poetic time of the year because you know for a fact when it rains, a huge amount of dust and sand and pollution comes down to sit on the floor. It's as if the atmosphere wears a new filter.

The title Let One Bird Sing speaks to hope and freedom. How did that idea influence your approach to shooting and editing the piece?

RM: I kinda spent the last few years living in Lebanon in a pretty much troublesome notion on terms like hope and freedom. Wearing these words here will not matter how wandering and dreamy your mind and work might be; they stand in opposition to the actuality of the situation. Simply when editing and shooting the piece, I was in an attempt to balance myself on a thin wire. Afterall hope and freedom aren’t like boxed attributes that one could buy intentionally, but they’re moreover tiny spaces of relief in a gauntlet’s run.

You know, I tend to feel betrayed by the very notions of freedom and hope in this place. As I attempt not to wear the identity of the suffering visual artist, and let things expand from those two words in seamless kinds of display...

On the other hand putting these two attributes on a city that is constantly being under a normalised state of collapse is like falling into an abyss with a number of fluffy mattresses you hit into during the fall. Once you see "two birds in a cage" you'd imagine a garden or a park or a tiny Beiruti house, or even a mansion. The places that could cross one’s mind when imagining such situation could be a bit defined. What I was trying to do or accomplish in this juxtaposition was, first of all, experiment with my visual vocabulary; how could I react to two creatures in a non-controlled environment? Taking into context David Cordero and Anthéne’s work.

When you put two creatures in a cage and you start with the hypothesis of them having free will, but paradoxically putting them in a cage, I hypothetically look at these birds as if I gave them free will to exit, as if I've left a gate in the edit where these birds could exit, but they didn’t. Working with animals usually is one of the best tests for a camera operator because you can't predict anything. Nothing is staged with animals as we know them. Falling to the smallest size of the quantum or molecular perception, like maybe the dilemma of what is a bird in a cage and who’s watching it?

Beirut is such a layered, emotive city, full of history and contrasts. How does its atmosphere influence your cinematography and did the setting shape this particular work?

RM: Whilst I live in the capital city of Beirut I like to regularly shift into a more or less rural environment. When working in the visual field or doing cinematography in such a chaotic place, you could see a skyscraper next to a tiny traditional Beirut house; the architecture and urbanism are very messed up. Beirut's skyline represents a very accurate graphic shape of the city’s situation. I think Beirut resembles its skyline to quite an extent. I was actually at a friend’s some days ago looking at a huge panoramic view through the living room’s façade, when I took notice of that graphic representation which embeds all of the turmoil in architectural differences.

In terms of it affecting my cinematography, when working with a camera in an environment like Beirut things are never too stable, too composed or arranged. They’re more likely to stand on an edge between composition, and I will let these things be. There is not much order or symmetry, but things could be likened to a Rococo mosaic, where some parts of the mosaic are embossed yet others are debossed. It’s for the person behind the frame to find these like a puzzle. While noting that during the work process I was constantly visiting traditional Japanese bird painting techniques on papyrus.

Autumn by itself represents a period of renovation, or regeneration to me. It's a very regenerative season where things in summer dry out to their extent, and the plants dry to the last breath.

The film’s pace and texture seem to mirror the music’s softness and patience. Did you storyboard your visuals to the music, or was it a more intuitive process?

RM: I’ve somewhat criss-crossed the two ways of going around the film. Because all of the material was planned to be filmed while letting the arrangement and form take place in the edit. I didn’t decide while preparing in what chronological direction these ideas will be put into the timeline. When you adapt to that vision of observing the micro and macro aspects, in cinematography there are different hot sizes including a "large shot", a "medium shot" and a "close up".

What makes cinema different from painting or sculpture is that you can change the size of your subject along the piece. You can change the size of the very same subject during the very same piece. So briefly I tried to play around with notions of planning a handful of elements that I found to convey my take on the album, then let the rest of the process take unspoken states. When talking about the seasons and the cycling of seasons it’s one of those things where feelings can't be collected or learned from the outside nor projected on from the inside. Thus, all the dealings and agreements with the image are unspoken.

Finally, what kind of stories or emotions draw you personally to Ambient or instrumental music as a filmmaker?

RM: Subtlety. Well, most people don't know that I have my own musical endeavours. I like to keep them labelled as sound endeavours. Once I decided to put my whole focus on cinematography and visuals, something kept drawing me towards my connection to sounds, and I started collaborating with sound makers and musicians, Ambient artists in particular, who aren’t just straight-ahead musicians; they are sound makers. They are people who'd like to play around the notions of sound more than just creating music, so to speak.

Usually, Ambient music has no percussive element, so the viewer could feel free to put the bar syncopations wherever they like. The element of rhythm is freed by the filmmaker using Ambient music to let the viewer put in their own sense of rhythm or timestamp on the pacing of a given picture. For me personally, sound and image aren't in sync. For one given reason: light is way faster than sound. But since both elements, sound and light, are outside our human perceptive ability of measurement, we find them in sync. Both are way faster than our human perception but light is way faster than sound.

I'd like to imagine this cosmic relationship between light and sound not to be synchronic. This light-sound status of un-spokenness could give things a new form. A whole new field of looking at how I like to craft the image in motion in the function of time. Without deliberately pinpointing an emotion that’s found to draw me to Ambient or instrumental music, besides liberating harmony from lyricism or words in particular. Which brings me back to repeat the same sentence as the previous question "all agreements with an image are unspoken".

Explore more HERE on Ralf's website
Follow Ralf on Instagram HERE

'Let One Bird Sing' is available in a limited repress of 100 gatefold vinyl-effect CDrs, as well as a digital option in a range of high quality format options. You can take a listen to the album in full or buy a copy HERE!