School of Sound

Earlier this summer I attended the excellent and very well organised School of Sound, a four day conference at the South Bank Centre in London. It's aimed at anyone interested in the use of sound in film - whether music or recorded sound.
Many of the speakers were at the top of their profession, and ranged from practitioners like Jim Webb, who developed the multi-track system that made many of Robert Altman's films so distinctive, and Nathan Larson, who wrote the music for Boys Don't Cry - to academics and writers like Maria Warner and Michel Chion. To cap it all, on the last day Ken Loach turned up.
One of the speakers I particularly liked, because she was so unaffected and down to earth (and fun), was Ann Kroeber. She and her husband Alan Splet pioneered the technique of unusual close micing of ambient sounds (mostly machines) that were then used to create the eerie sound tracks of many of David Lynch's films, from Erazerhead to Blue Velvet.
She has brought out some of the recordings on a set of CD's called Sounds of a Different Realm, and I have used some of them in How Soon (you can also play it in the mp3 player above)
It all reinforced my sense that people working at the very top of whatever they are doing are often very devoted, but making things up as they go along, prepared to try anything to get the effect they want, not following the norm or bothering too much about how things are 'supposed' to be done.