Hewn from a series of live sessions with Emmy Nominated Composer, Rob Lewis, and crafted into a richly detailed, spatially immersive world, Kings Without Kingdoms is a movie you can only see if you close your eyes.

 

Foley elements and music merge into one immersive, musical narrative, rendered in deep, binaural spatial audio. ​

 

The world of Kings Without Kingdoms has been quite a journey to create. The whole way through the process I have been squinting in the dark, straining my eyes to see our future, and letting my ears be my guide when I couldn't see. 

 

In the piece we meet Kaira, a tribal warrior girl who lives in a world set in the far future, in which we are the forgotten ancients. Her village elders have taught her to fear the relics left by our civilisation. Overgrown and mysterious, they speak of a world unseen and remembered only in myth. But Kaira does not fear the relics, and we meet her running from a hostile tribe. She hides and ends up stumbling on a relic unlike any she has seen before, one she knows she must keep secret from her village: The Dreaming Chamber. Was it some sort of esoteric military installation? Was it used to commune with the gods? Did the ancients mean it to be discovered? Its power is awesome and terrifying. It shows you whatever you wish to see. 

 

 

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Recording process

 

The album has been an engrossing challenge to compose and produce, integrating various experimental recording techniques. The vast majority of the sound you hear on the record is my voice and Rob’s cello, processed through our live rigs in real time and in then embellished and refined.

 

Some time in late 2022, Rob and I met up for a few sessions together, each of which had their own unique vibe and sound. Some were more free-flowing, and instinctual, some directly attempting to score an imaginary scenario we had prescribed before starting to play, and some thematically led, letting the scenario we were depicting emerge through discussion as we iterated a composition.

 

The resulting album doesn't fit neatly into any particular category. At times it is meditative, and at others precise and programmatic, even diegetic. It’s sound is informed by classic film score and cinematic sound design as by experimental textural sonics and abrasive glitchy textures. It is both an album of music and a film you have to close your eyes to see. 

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Immersive Sound

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Having met the D&B audiotechnic’s UK team at Womad festival, we ended up experimenting with various spatial audio techniques and doing a recording session in their lab in Reading, UK. There we experimented with porting their acoustic spatialisation tech to a static binaural mixdown with such success that when we left the room with the headphones on we kept forgetting we were wearing them. It was spooky. So some of the sounds recorded there emerge on this record and I’m immensely grateful to all the lovely people at D&B who allowed me to conduct tests and record on their amazing gear. I have used a variety of spatial audio techniques on the record to make a more immersive experience for the listener. For the most part, where stereo is used, it is binaural.

 

This is an album designed for headphones. When a dolby system is set up well it can be breathtaking, but very few people have access to one. What is more. Apple’s delivery pipeline for spatial audio adds a distinct spatial colouration in the form of a simulated listening room, (the bane of all surround mix engineers lives).

 

Turning on spatial audio on your airpods, will hamper the spatialisation of Kings Without Kingdoms. The binaural spatialisation in the album has been carefully crafted to depict the spaces we have curated for the listener. Apple’s pipeline, well intended as it is, gives you a convincingly spatialised facsimile of a small, somewhat echoic listening room. It does this to enable real-time user head tracking which we have deliberately eschewed for this project. When you listen to Kings Without Kingdoms, just leave it in normal stereo and leave the magic up to the carefully crafted file playing back in your ears. 

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I hope you enjoy experiencing the world of Kings Without Kingdoms as much enjoy it as much as i have enjoyed crafting  it. Over the past couple of years, the world of Kings Without Kingdoms has been the place I’ve happily gone to hide from the madness of our modern world. It’s a place you can visit too, if you dare to dream. 

 

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