“Dupha” is what we considered to be the most excorsistic side of KHURUKSETRA. It’s a sonic torment experimentation heavily influenced by the abrasiveness of the old school industrial culture in combination with the Study of Sound Design in Psychological Horror film by retracing back some prominent classic film such as The Exorcist, Eraserhead, The Silence of the Lambs, and even some modern example such as The Passion of the Christ, and 30 days of Nights.
“What would happened if Whitehouse or Boyd Rice is doing the sound design for The Exorcist? And what would happened if the film was set in Indonesia?”. That is basically our fundamental thought that triggers us to record “Dupha”.
Day by day we spend most of our time not only experimenting with different sonic possibilities, but also doing some Psychoacoustic Research in Horror films, either academically or simply in a direct case study. We situate our self as making a dub music production, where the studio is not only a place to record, but also as an instrument. It involves lots of room resonances recording, Foley recording, ADR, and definitely mixing, which is things that we normally do in doing a sound design for a film. We set up various microphones in every corner of the studio floor, where Andra our main vocalist is locked in that room with a headphone in his head listening to the extreme sonic waveforms that is being playback from the monitor room. Through that claustrophobic acoustic environment, Andra reacts it violently by screaming, grunting, and whispering for almost 30 minutes. The microphones capture his voice from every corner of the studio floor.
Meanwhile in the monitor room, we create a noisy texture of drone noise using a vintage analogue modular systems manufactured by Doepfer. For those who don’t know what is an analogue modular is, is basically a rack of synth where you’re creating a different waveforms of sound by patching cables to the rack. So what we see basically is a live collaboration between the monitor room and studio floor that is all mixed in Pro Tools. At the ends, it creates a sensation of listening to an old-school power electronics music with the sound design of the exorcist on the background.
Filed under: Experimental Music, Khuruksetra
