"The Soundtrack" by Simon Stockhausen was released on February 28th as a double CD together with the "Remix Album".

The sound composer Simon Stockhausen accompanied the journey with his microphones to be inspired by the original sounds of Asia and to compose the film score. Here, every noise becomes a tone, every tone becomes music. The result is like a maelstrom: Impressive and of great atmospheric impact. The score by Simon Stockhausen guarantees a memorable, sensual journey. Close your eyes and start your trip into the exciting Asian world.

Order "The Soundtrack & The Remix Album"

Here you can listen to two exclusive tracks from “The Soundtrack” by Simon Stockhausen:

The first track is the "theme" of TRIP TO ASIA: "Beijing Bells" creates a maelstrom-like impact, trembling the movie-chair and creating the prevailing mood for an overwhelming cinematic adventure.

The second track “Children’s Prayer” (track 12 of the soundtrack) impressively absorbs original tones of Asia – in this case a praying class – and transforms them into completely new and unique music.

Painting with sounds, and with sounds that have been extracted from their original context, is sound art. It calls for the desegregation of “sound” and “music” – everything is music, every sound has a pitch progression and a rhythm that can form a framework for a composition. In making sound art, the recording process is just as important as the dubbing process, because microphones are music instruments that can hear better than the human ear.

For many years now I’ve been following the principle of original recording. Therein, I try to leave the recordings as I “found” them, and after preparing them for audio manipulation, to compose them. The rhythmic and harmonic characteristics are analysed, and all composition follows the guidelines laid out by these attributes.

For instance, I take a five-minute recording of nuns singing in Taipei and underlay the pentatonic canto with electronically produced, constantly modulating accords and rhythmic elements extracted from the recording to give the song a new harmonic direction. The singers’ erratic rhythm is carried over – as opposed to being broken down into individual parts and arranged in a tempo specified by me – and the nuns’ melodies are accompanied, or supplemented, by natural instruments.

A second example is to extract from sound recordings those frequencies that are not normally discernable for the human ear. The use of filters, temporal dilation or compression, and transposition opens doors to music that – even after all these years of sampling and sound manipulation – still seem like magic worlds to me. It’s like using an acoustic magnifying glass to make hidden notes in the microcosm of found sounds audible.

A few of the layouts for Trip To Asia were born on sleepless nights in hotel rooms during filming, though they were primarily sound collages with very few additions. The first recording I processed upon our return was of a school group I encountered on the Great Wall of China. With their teacher’s urging and the motivating influence of the highly visible directional microphones, theses girls and boys recited a poem for me.

The piece is called Children’s Prayer, and was my starting point for the film score. Afterwards I elaborated on endless subtleties, rejected some, and provided Thomas Grube with the result. By the summer of 2006, I had around 30 different pieces, a substantial number of which ended up in the film after being adjusted to the image editing, or even being completely redone.

In Hong Kong I came upon a beggar in an underpass. My directional microphones picked up her innocent melody long before I reached the subway tunnel. I carefully approached, and there she stood: A petite, middle-aged woman with a microphone connected to an old guitar amp. When she saw me, she gave me an endlessly friendly smile, even danced a bit, and sang so beautifully… After around four minutes, I tossed a couple of coins into the cup in front of her – she said “thank you, thank you” over and over, an ostinato that will appear at the end of the beggar music on the soundtrack CD – and departed as she resumed her song. I left the tunnel and the thunderous urban din of Hong Kong flooded over her delicate voice.

I visited the tunnel again the following day, only to find another beggar, both legs amputated, who shook his cup containing a few coins. This recording (Becherostinato) also found its way into the piece as the rhythmic foundation for Hongkong Beggar. Later I modulated an electronically produced arpeggio sequence with this “cup ostinato,” lending the track an unusual rhythmic structure. With one exception, all of the recordings were composed according to the original recording principle. And I would give anything to find that sweet-singing beggar again and invite her to the film premiere.