I did a pretty rush job at work. Due to the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, there was a charity concert in Helsinki, which YleX was a part of. The sound work for the radio and TV spots and the YleX Areena web-TV broadcast fell into my lap.
The first thing that was decided was the tone of the sound. None of us working on this project wanted to have the sound feel too solemn or downcast. We wanted to give people a good feeling about the concert. In the end they're going to see their favorite artists perform and the side product is them helping out. How can you do that if they get a dark mood from the sound? On the other hand we didn't want to go with something overly energetic since that would give out a wrong signal as well.
I started with the beat. I didn't want it to be too in your face but it still needed to have a driving force. I took the human heart beat and built the basic beat around it. Over this I built a mix of dub and downtempo drums that rolls forward slowly but steadily. I made the drums sound quite dark to give them a more dramatic tone.
I didn't want to use your traditional Japan clichés so I steered away from your normal goto Japan instruments: the shakuhachi and the koto. Instead I focused on getting the feel of Japan into a set of modern pads. I gave them a lot of air to contrast the dark tones of the drums. I also layered some electric guitar licks into them.
The final touch I added was the sound of a geiger counter ticking. For me this was the most dramatic part of the sound of this project. The geiger counter is such a regocnizable that it really drives home things. It's a simple touch which doesn't underline the tragedies too much.
