Hearing Livber: The Feeling

Livber’s soundtrack… [pause for a second with a bitter smile] …is a serious challenge for me. My brief was “give us a perfect melody that people instantly fell in love with.”

You know… I’m not that sweet melody person, I never was.

ACT1_SQN1

“Melodies, melodies… Alright, I can't do the melodies, so what we have here… okay, I can design sounds! There are uncomfortable things; there's a feeling of ‘something is wrong’. Um… InEv loves Turkish instruments! I have a bunch of that.”

[leaning backwards for a calm moment]

In my previous media projects, I always worked after the visual part was finished. It gave me... how shall I say it... a kind of freedom. You follow me? I had predetermined rhythms, predetermined visual aspects to follow. It must be sound that the visual wants. Visuals have their own feelings, their own connections, their own sounds - because visuals have their own messages. I push behind that.

But when I saw the first illustration of this game... I felt confused, deeply confused. My music was planned to be Turkic - all those Turkish scales and rhythms were so completed inside my head. But the house in that illustration... it felt so German Gothic. You follow me? So European, so some things I can’t relate to.

I paused for a while, hid my confusion, and kept going. Not sure what will happen.

[voice dropping to almost a whisper with pain]

I remember when I first listened to the first scene's soundtrack again - this was maybe a week later. I still could hear the confusion in my guitar work. Every note played with my uncertainty. I put my hands to the sides of my head, staring at my dirty MacBook screen, and I thought: "This is terrible. This is the sound of a person who doesn't know what he's doing."

"I can't bear to listen to my own recordings," I found myself talking with my MacBook. "Can I even handle this project? Nothing feels completed or solid. Nothing sounds like a whole piece. It's all... fragments. Broken things.”

And then... [pause while eyes sparkling] ...then I realized I could use that. [standing, pacing in the small room] That constant uncertainty, that beautiful, terrible confusion - it wasn't my weakness. You follow me?

[pause with the voice of relaxation of having a resolution]

"Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it's not just the wishes of the visual. Maybe the whole project was speaking to something inside of me. Soundtrack needed to sound confused, needed to sound fractured.”

Let's make another track. And another. And another…

[sitting back down with the same passion]

The project told me what to do, and I gave it whatever it wanted. I was like Professor Utonium, you follow me? I added sugar, spice, and everything nice... but my chemical X? My secret ingredient? It was confusion. It was uncertainty. Somehow, miraculously, found beauty in them.

The First Act of Livber came out... well, it came out fine. I'm not proud of all the tracks. But they sound wrong in exactly the right way. They sound like Elbek, which is to say: curiously searching but not sure what to find.

Maybe I can rework some of them after release. Maybe not. It's not a promise - it's barely even a hope.

[leaning forward]

You see, there's something I've learned about creating art when you know you're not a genius. There's something else I want to tell you in our next session. Something… Something about having turbulences between your own rules.

[pause for a second with a bitter smile]

Any questions?