Reuben Cantacuzino Levy
(he/him)
I am a Producer and Sound Designer specialising in electronic music.
My work seeks to uncover emotional resonance within dance and club music, bridging digital and analogue synthesis with atmospheric, ethereal textures. I tend to explore darker, more uncanny themes across subjective and experimental sonic landscapes.
I have experience in synthesis, mixing, studio recording, field recording, video recording and video editing. I am also equipped in using Ableton Live, Pro Tools and Logic.
Club Gothic: A Sonic Haunting
Club Gothic: A Sonic Haunting is an audiovisual EP presented as part of a Master’s Project for MDes Sound for the Moving Image.
Comprising of three audiovisual works set across different sonic/visual landscapes, Club Gothic seeks to contextualise my personal fears in various dance and rave environments. The dance floor provides a setting for these uncanny, dark feelings to be explored due to its own declaration as a liminal, mind-altering space which mirrors the very understanding of the uncanny itself.
Each piece was composed incorporating a variety of analogue synthesisers from the Glasgow Library of Synthesized Sound, as well as using digital synthesis in Ableton and original vocal recordings. The tracks were mixed in third-order ambisonics, highlighting the use of spatial audio in parallel with 360 world to create a truly immersive audiovisual experience. The use of ambisonics enables intricate details of sound act as objects that can move or be located freely within the 3D space.
‘VACANT PATHS’ explores a personal fear of the future depicted in an empty field. This piece sonically bridges rave music, synthesised naturalistic sounds and temporal motifs and effects to present this uncanny mood.
‘Can you see me dancing’ frames my fear of loneliness within an unfilled club dance floor. The contrast between lively club sounds of dancing and laughter with hollow visuals and club music seeks to capture this lonely feeling.
‘Imgonnavanish’ depicts a fear of death in a desolate warehouse with no natural phenomena existing in the visual scene. Using mechanical/industrial sounds alongside club music and death motifs such as organ synthesisers provides the viewer with my internal reflection on this fear.
These pieces are presented in 360/VR video with first-order ambisonics (decoded from third-order ambisonics) to immerse the viewer into the world of Club Gothic.
For optimal viewing experience, use headphones and view directly in YouTube as this will enable you to experience the ambisonic sound field and explore the 360 world by the touch of your mouse.
Uncanny Sounds
Uncanny Sounds is a project which looks at the tropes in music and sound we find scary, and seeks to situate these traits within specific themes relating to horror/Gothic genres.
The sounds of death, the horror in a voice and the eeriness of space/echoes are all deeply explored across the horror genre, and these three sound pieces investigate these themes using a combination of digital and analogue synthesis, sound recording and audio processing.
‘Death’ combines a variety of atonal, drone-like ambient noises created from analogue synthesis, with a lot of these ambiences having ghost-like frequencies incur the uncanny tone.
‘Voice’ uses atonal synthesised ambiences as a blanket for the base of the track, and incorporates various disturbing vocal samples that have been composed to unsettle the listener and instil a fearful psychoacoustic experience.
‘Spatiality’ focuses on the eeriness of echo and reverb which establishes a confused, uncanny sense of space. I used various industrial sounds and samples over a bed of almost still ambient drone noise to explore such ideas.
The term Uncanny Sounds was adopted for this project to instil the feeling of uncertainty and eeriness for the listener, hoping to achieve true evoked feelings of fear purely from sound alone.
The uncanny sounds of death in horror
The uncanny sounds of the voice in horror
The uncanny sounds of space in horror
Radio Buena Vida: Community and Music
This documentary highlights the intersection between community, music and radio at Café Buena Vida, home to Radio Buena Vida in Glasgow’s Southside.
Through video recording, sound recording and mixing, this documentary showcases interviews with DJs, volunteers and staff members at Radio Buena Vida, exploring how the space enables community engagement and action as a core social enterprise.
Documentary exploring the intersection between community, music and radio at Radio Buena Vida, Glasgow.
In the Midst of Winter
In the Midst of Winter is an audiovisual generative supercut film made using Max MSP.
The video features audio and videos clips being generated in unison using Max MSP to programme various triggers relating to time and sample length.
All musical elements were created in Ableton and feature original compositions using a variety of digital synthesisers. The music seeks to emphasise moods of coldness and stillness, and highlight the icy bleakness of winter.
The supercut includes a recurring vocal recording featuring a quote of Albert Camus, “In the midst of winter, there was within me, an invincible summer.”
Alongside these elements, natural field recording sounds of the wintery scenes accompany the music and voice over to add depth and richness to the sonic environment.
This video features an 8 minute running of a generative supercut patch created in Max MSP
Show Me The Way
Show Me The Way is an electronic piece of music produced, mixed and mastered entirely in Ableton Live 12.
The track exclusive explores digital synthesisers, making use of Ableton’s MIDI instruments such as Operator, Meld, Collision and Wavetable.
Audio processing on this track included equalisation, compression, various layers of distortion and automation.
The inspiration of this track was to incorporate dance music motifs such as punch bass lines and high-energy drum patterns with emotionally resonant melodies and textures.
Funeral
Funeral is a spatial audio sound-only piece produced and mixed in third-order ambisonics and rendered into a binaural mix.
This piece sonically explores themes of grief, spirituality, requiem and death. The soundscape leans into the abstract potentials of spatial audio rather than depicting a true or natural funeral scene, as a means to convey the artistic potentials of surround sound.
Funeral incorporates digital synthesis, sound effects and self-recorded ambisonic sounds from a tetrahedral microphone.
Listen with headphones to experience the sound in binaural audio.
