By nature, electronic music is a progressive art form that is constantly pushing boundaries into an uncharted frontier and Canada’s tenured EDM professor Sadowick, who is known for his extensive catalogue of music production tutorials, has taken that principle to heart with his latest LP. The Icarus Project is a full length album that he creatively wrote to synchronize with the Warner Brother’s cult classic film The Matrix and the result is beyond impressive. Instead of attempting, and ultimately failing, to explain the laborious process of undertaking such a daunting project, we reached out to Sadowick himself to clarify if The Icarus Project is the work of a mad scientist or an evil genius.
Why did you choose The Matrix?
The Matrix is one of the greatest films of all time and deals with the classic monomyth. I wanted to have an album that relates to the deep symology of the film so that it would have impact. Everything from Alice In Wonderland, dreams, reality, Christ and control are explored in the film and I tried to mirror that. So its safe to say the film chose me.
Tell us about the process of selecting which aspects of the movie to correlate with the music? Was it easier to pick a clip of the movie and find a relatable sound, or find a sound and try to fit it into a scene?
The film has many layers of symbolism to work with. For example the album consists of mostly acoustic and orchestral sounds before Neo is awakened. The dance music aspect of the album starts when Neo awakens in the fields in the real world. Most of the album was made linearly over the last year. The sounds were made as needed, theres over 1000 sound assets used in the album. A lot of sounds from modulated flying aircraft sounds to first nations chants to subway car announcements.
Speaking of sounds for the film, the first part of the album consists of a binaural tone related to delta waves which is associated with sleep. There are hidden messages, sounds and easter eggs you can dig up like that.
A lot of material ended up getting scrapped, some ideas were too electronic and clubby or too acoustic or just didn’t fit. It’s a film and album thats over two hours so I didn’t want people to get bored with the same stuff, so it progresses with the scenes in terms of genre and energy. The other tracks may get released with the EPs if theres interest.
How do you feel the album stacks up as a standalone project independent of the film?
Im not too worried about album longevity or any of that. It was meant to be a challenging technical effort and a tribute to the film. It represents what I can pull off as a producer and I chose to do it because it was hard, not easy.
What sacrifices did you have to make in production while you were writing the album in order to tailor it to the movie?
I had to create audio events and tempo changes to fit and that was it really. I had a vision for what I wanted to do cooking in my head for a long time and I know the film front to back. One of the biggest was dynamics. I didnt want to compress the album to make it loud for clubs because I wanted it to be enjoyed on 5.1 systems and headphones. It is a bit quieter but its really punchy. No one has mentioned that its “too quiet” which is interesting.
The Icarus Project is available for purchase through iTunes and we encourage anyone looking to synch the album with the movie to purchase the LP in order to avoid an inevitable streaming lag. The syntonization is made possible by simply pressing play on the album and the movie at the same time. We want to thank Sadowick for taking his time to speak with us and we look forward to hearing more from this imaginative and talented young producer.
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