Hewn from a series of intense live sessions with the phenomenal cellist, Emmy Nominated Composer, Rob Lewis, Kings Without Kingdoms started as an experiment in pushing the human voice and cello to see how far they could go, has been crafted into a richly detailed, spatially immersive world. A movie you can only see, if you close your eyes. Foley elements and music merge into one immersive, musical narrative structure rendered in customised binaural spatial audio. 

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The piece explores themes, which when we started writing, were simply playful concepts. But as the piece came into focus, the narrative emerging from the music became eerily prescient, an almost clairvoyant way to peer into our future. 

 

Every moment has been painstakingly crafted to evoke the scenes in the movie, with sonic elements and binaural spaces that fool your ear into thinking you’re really there, each repeated listen unveiling more detail. 

 

Kings Without Kingdoms is a movie that you must close your eyes to see. . . much like a book I suppose. It has a cinematic trailer, and the track titles hint at the story depicted in the music, but I won't over explain what is happening in this invisible movie; I want everyone to see what ever ends up appearing to them in their own unique mental depiction of the music. The world of Kings Without Kingdoms has been quite an emotional journey to create. The whole way through the process I have been squinting in the dark, straining my eyes to see the future, and letting my ears be my guide when I couldn't see. We are all heading somewhere new, and despite the uncertainty, we can be sure of one thing: All empires fall. 

 

And so the question arises: What are we leaving to our distant descendants? The ancients left us pyramids, standing stones. And yet we know little of them. The silicon gods we are busily building are literally thinking sand, that leaves no lasting trace. 

 

In the world the album explores, it is not clear what happened to our civilisation. But it is clear enough that our met it’s end civilisation, and has left an empty legacy. Seemingly nothing recognisable remains. All our precious knowledge is gone. 

 

In the piece we meet Kaira. She 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 one unlike any she has ever 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. Our story follows Kaira’s journey. But I’ve already said too much, no more spoilers. You can fill in the details as you listen. And you can see what you wish to see. Perhaps you’re in the Dreaming Chamber right now. 

 

 

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Recording process

 

Technically the album has been a delicate, involved and hugely enjoyable challenge to make, integrating multiple experimental recording techniques. The vast majority of the sound you hear on the record is actually my voice and Rob’s cello, processed through our live rigs in real time and in then embellished and refined in post.  

 

Some time in late 2022, Rob and I met to jam and compose together. We did a few sessions together, each of which had a distinct mission and 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. What comes out of all this is a fairly coherent sound world of which we are very proud, one which unveils a world with a unique character. The resulting album will not fit neatly into any particular category. At times it is deeply meditative, and at others precisely crafted and programmatic, even diegetic. It’s sound is informed as much by classic film score and cinematic sound design as by experimental textural sonics and abrasive glitchy textures. Whilst weaving a detailed story and keeping you guessing as to what might be coming next, it is still a cohesive and satisfying listening experience. It is both an album of deeply expressive music and a film you have to close your eyes to see. 

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Immersive Sound

 

For a couple of years before starting Kings Without Kingdoms I had been researching spatial audio, in terms of both it’s creation and it’s various diverse delivery end points, and originally I had wanted to make an immersive interactive world for the music to inhabit. 

Having met the team at Womad festival where I was fortunate enough to play  experimenting with various spatial audio techniques and ended up doing a session in D&B audiotechnic’s lab in Reading UK where 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 smart 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 will be fairly transparent on speakers (which technically would do best with transaural encoding which is a sightly different algorithm. But this is an album designed for headphones. It is a spatial audio mix. But most people do not have access to a good dolby system so I declined to generate a dolby compatible mix. When a dolby system is set up well it can be breathtaking. But very few people have this in their home. What is more. Apple’s delivery pipeline for spatial audio adds a rather distinct spatial colouration in the form of a simulated listening room, (the bane of all surround mix engineers benighted lives). Do not turn on spatial audio on your airpods, It will not improve the spatialisation of Kings Without Kingdoms. The binaural spatialisation in the album has been carefully crafted to depict the spaces i 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 realtime user head tracking. But this endpoint delivery quirk is anathema to the needs of the mix engineer to create and maintain a consistent sonic experience for the listener. When our protagonist is in a cave, you, the listener are then in that cave. So when you listen to Kings Without Kingdoms, just leave it in normal stereo and leave the magic up to the static stereo file playing back in your ears, with all my pain staking sound design choices baked in to the audio file. Unlike apple’s head tracking real-time binaural encoding, it will not track your head movements, but I personally always find this very distracting anyway. 

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The Imagery

 

As I progressed through the editing and refinement and the iterative composition process of the project I found that iterating, crafting, experimenting and immersing myself in the feel of the world as it emerged graphically, ended up re-informing the music. It has been a weird synergistic whole. As it unfolded, there grew a poetic and rapidly deepening irony to the notion of making a piece warning about what happens when sand can dream, using the very tech about which the piece itself conveys it’s warning.

 

I hope you enjoy it as much as I’ve enjoyed making 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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Kings Without Kingdoms will be on all streaming platforms eventually, but initially it will be available for patrons only.