The Soundtrack of ITS
October 17, 2005
| How do you communicate a feeling, an emotion? How do you send vibrations through the spine to touch the right chords at the right time? Apart from using words, which is not a universal media since there are hundreds of different languages even though english is widespread, we have five senses and therefore five roads to reach the brain and leave a message. In a fashion show touch and smell are almost never involved. I don't know if any fashion designer has ever used taste to communicate something of his collection, but I don't think that anyone has ever been asked to taste an outfit...This means that most of the communication runs through two channels: sight and hearing. As far as sight is concerned, we're obviously talking about the outfits, the stage design, the lights, the models and their styling. But when we're talking about hearing, well, it's just the music. And music is a universal language, that can be incredibly powerful. It can rape or cradle your soul, take you to the deepest desperation and then way up to the most devastating happiness. When you feel misunderstood or you're unable to express with words what you feel or what you would like to feel, music can be the solution. Occasionally people are inspired by music before even thinking about a project, and in the same way fashion designers are sometimes inspired by music before drawing the first sketch of the first dress. For a fashion show like ITS, where you have an average of 20 designers showing their collections, the choice of the soundtrack becomes a real tough work: you can't let the designers choose their own music because all songs are mixed and connected to each other, so there has to be a coherence from the beginning to the end. The soundtrack has to be as if it were one, single song that changes its mood and atmosphere according to the collection that is on the catwalk in that moment. If you have 20 collections, you need to communicate 20 different atmospheres. And you also need to communicate that what you are watching is ITS, so before even looking at the collections, songs are chosen according to whether they have the right atmosphere for ITS or not. So as you can now imagine, the job is tough. And there's only one person that can supervise this kind of work, since only who knows every single facet of ITS and every detail of the collections of the finalists can understand which songs are the right ones. Again, our little red-headed girl is asked to stand in the first line and sound the charge... |
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Serious work for the ITS soundtrack begins right after the preselections in April. Before that, there's a general listening of the "new sounds of the moment": you want to start setting your mind on what could be the type of sounds you are going to search for to communicate the ITS mood, and you want to know where contemporary music is headed to be updated on the last sounds. I mean, you can always choose an everlasting Mozart, but what we're generally looking for is new sounds that have never been used (well, we're not so conceited...we want them at least to sound fresh!). The Electrosacher team (those that then play the soundtrack during the show and also make the people dance during the after party) are the unrenounceable partners in this long journey to find the songs that will end up melting together in the ITS soundtrack. Barbara shows them the way, asks them certain feelings and moods, and they start preparing for her dozens of CDs with music from their huge selection (they have a wonderful shop with lots of wonderful music). Barbara finishes the everyday work, goes back home with the CDs, and starts listening and listening. But most of the times she also plays them in her office while working. What she looks for right from the start is shivers, electricity. Whenever she feels her eyes widening and her mouth opening, or looks at her arms and sees the skin filled with goose pimples, she knows that she's walking on the right road. You might think it's a joke but dealing with emotions is no fun park: it's difficult to recognize them, and you never know what can come out from inside of you when you find them. Searching for emotions today sometimes makes you feel an outcast. But Barbara, and she's not alone, feels her heart getting warmer and warmer while the search goes on. Music that will take the people at the show high, far away from the ground... |
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After the preselections, the finalists are chosen, and soon after also the exit order of the collections. With the exit order ready, the big part of the work begins. Meetings with Electrosacher after work in the office are set on a weekly basis. Barbara and the testimony who is telling you this story finish working and, tired from a hard day of work, move to the Electrosacher shop (a 5 minute walk from our office) ready to begin perhaps the best part in the organisation of this event: finding a musical interpretation of the concepts and the clothes of the finalists and harmonizing them all together in one soundtrack. When this begins, most of the times Barbara has already listened to songs that she's learned to love so much she's not willing to leave them out. So at the beginning you have these really amazing songs that you're trying to place on one collection or another until you realise you unfortunately can't put them anywhere, because they've got a mood that no collection has, and you have to leave them aside. But the riskiest part of it all starts when you succesfully find a song that fits just perfect with a collection. Sometimes it happens that the perfect song-collection combination you've found doesn't fit with anything else, in the sense that you can't find a song that goes before that or after that. You struggle to keep that combination alive until you're literally forced to abandon it, to find one that maybe doesn't work fantastic as the one you had to "kill", but works a lot better in the global structure you're creating, because the mix between the song that comes before and the one that comes after is excellent. Sometimes, just like in life, perfect is not the best way to do things. The global framework is more important, and "perfect" sometimes is too much... So you got 4 persons staring at each others eyes at midnight with a slice of pizza in the mouth and a scribbled piece of paper with the songs that have been selected to that point, that suddenly understand that the combination they have found after lots and lots of listening in the end doesn't work with the rest. Damn, damn, damn!! |
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The meetings go on and on while July gets closer and closer. Songs that had been decided dissappear, songs that had dissappeared come back in from the backdoor. The funny part is that Barbara, Electrosacher and me all had their favorites. And when your favorites get "kicked out", you try subtle techniques to get them back in: "since we don't find a song for this collection, why don't we try and listen again to the one I liked that we put aside?...." Sometimes you find the right place for a song that didn't fit in the beginning, sometimes you don't. When you realise you just can't use a song you love it really breaks your heart. We have an entire "graveyard" of fantastic songs that haven't been included. Luckily, songs never die. It's just that sometimes you would love to hear them during a specific moment in your life. Coming from who knows where, as if it were a movie. You listen to it and your eyes widen. You just know. In that moment it's not very important what you know, just the feeling of knowing fills you with energy. And if you have another person close to you that knows also, it becomes recognition. And recognition is perhaps one of the most special moments in life. The ITS soundtrack aims at this incredibly difficult task: 700 faces looking at each others eyes, their minds saying: "yesssss..." Half June. The soundtrack is ready. A final, celebratory meeting with Electrosacher in their shop to try a live mix, which is also very useful to study the timings between the exit of one collection and another, to understand where one song fuses with the next. The final mix is a very special moment. For me it has been the first real visualization, inside of my mind, of the show. I felt the tension of the beginning, I could see the first model coming out. In one single accelerated flashback, my mind ran to the faces of those finalists we first met during the Presenting/Scouting Tour when we still didn't know they would become finalists. When we first touched their clothes, when they first explained to us their concepts, when they took us inside of their dreams. The yells, the anger, the struggles during the year, when uncertainty taps on your shoulder and whispers in your ear: "you will have to fight me to make this event happen". |
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July 16 2005, 9:30pm. Lights out, video. In the chest a heart that starts beating in a different way, expecting something you've lived in your head again and again during the year. You've been a testimony of the birth of the soundtrack that begins to play on stage. You ask your heart to calm down, you tell him please, don't frigthen me, I'm not used to this kind of energy, they're not used to this kind of energy, maybe not all of them feel it, but those who do...I'm worried. But what is there to be worried about when you feel so alive? Why on earth would you stop me from flying away with the music, the show, this atmosphere? I'm going to leave you there on the ground but I hope you'll come with me and watch the show from up here. And when all is over, I'll put my earphones on, press play, close my eyes and listen to it again and again...images and pictures of that night, of that year, will run through my mind until we start looking for new songs, new emotions, new stories... Electrosacher Cakebeat Collective Page |
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