Marius de Vries

While the demands of the filming process forced the chopping and changing of the songs, Marius was in contact with London‑based composer Chris Elliott, who had the job of arranging many of the orchestral parts. "We were emailing back and forth," explains Marius. "This was before the Rocket Networks thing really happened, otherwise I'm sure we'd have been using that. But for a long time I sent him MP3s of the backing tracks and pencil sketches on score paper suggesting where I wanted to go, and he'd send MIDI files back to me which I printed out from Emagic Logic and fed into my JV2080 and S6000s to listen to what he'd done. We built up the orchestrations that way until he came out to Sidney. Alexis Smith was working over here in the UK as my programmer while I was in Sidney, and he would sending over grooves and ideas for drum beats and sound design. By the time we got to the shoot, we had everything developed up to a stage where the orchestrations were coming in a relatively realistic manner out of the JV2080, our rhythm tracks were pretty realised and our vocals were recorded to a stage where they were ready for lip‑sync."

The tenth photo shows his studio and is captioned: "Marius de Vries now does most of his programming work in his own room at London's Strongroom studios. The large rack at left contains, from top, Alesis DM Pro drum module, Korg O1R/W sound module, Roland MKS80 Super Jupiter synth with MPG80 programmer, Studio Electronics MIDIMoog synth, two Akai S3200 samplers, Emu Vintage Keys and Morpheus sound modules, Kurzweil K2000R sound module, Roland MKS50 and JV1080 sound modules."

""The Akai samplers are without question the most musical and best sorted out sampling devices on the planet. I have three 3200XLs now and I am waiting very impatiently for the 6000 series, which will be out in a few weeks, because it has a DOS‑based file system. In itself that's a bit of a turn‑off for me, because I am a Macintosh purist, but what it means is that you can have one huge hard disk attached to the sampler with all your sounds on it and a little laptop on the side with a database on it. It will finally enable me to begin to meaningfully organise a big sample library. At a the moment with my suitcase full of Syquests, it's impossible. All I can do is file everything carefully away by project and hope that one day the technology will allow me to do something meaningful with it. Until you get something where you can easily move large batches of data around and save and group them and manipulate them I don't see how it is possible to keep track of it all unless you spend your whole life being a librarian and forget about music."