Collaboration | Cherie Lynae & o’Wisp (Preview)

©2022 Michael Raven

Something a little different is on its way from the minds of a few folks I’ve gotten to know and joined up with on a collaborative effort. It’s a bit more involved than most of the collaborations I’ve done with people in recent years, but the effort is starting to take shape.

I met Cherie via Twitter some time over the past few months and she did something like I’ve done here: a call-out for collaboration. You know me… If I like what you write and you are willing to collaborate, then chances are I’m going to raise my hand and try it on for size — for the experience of trying something new and exploring new challenges, if for no other reason.

Cherie sent me a few pieces she thought might work to build from and The Point was the piece that felt most compelling to work from. I hadn’t engineered sound and music for a short story before and I had a few futuristic ambient music ideas based on what she presented to me: a post-apocalyptic piece in a dead and dangerous world. Below is a teaser Cherie posted on Instagram.

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A post shared by Cherie Lynae Cabrera Suski (@clcabrerat)

The guitar work by Neil Young for Dead Man was some of the influence for the sound for me, except I substituted a guitar sound that found its genesis a Nirvana vein of sound. While I’m no Neil Young, I was influenced by that random guitar feel, mixed with similar voiced patterns that repeated intermittently for the sake of cohesion. I added some sound effects and some futuristic textures and did a slice/dice job with Cherie’s reading to add breathing room or to clean up her very minor flubs (she was a champ in that she would stutter or trip over her tongue, pause for a moment and repeat where she had left off, so I could trim out nearly everything that wasn’t meant to be part of this).

Cherie was looking for some artwork to add to the piece with the intent of making a full multimedia production of the collaboration and didn’t get any bites, but I recalled that Miriam’s partner, o’Wisp, had offered to do some artwork for me previously, so I inquired about potential interest. While the teaser does not include her artwork (or my instrumentals), I think she is a great addition once I’ve seen the early art, as it will give it a cool storyboard vibe once Cherie produces it as a TikTok video (as I think is her current intention; it may have evolved).

Not only are the a lot of moving parts, which is a new experience for me, but we decided early on that this needed to be broken down into bite-sized chunks. The Point is, in the end, a 5-episode serial.

And I’ve only just recently finished off the first episode for my portion, which clocks in at just under six minutes for roughly ten paragraphs (if you lump some of the dialog together with similar word counts for narrative paragraphs).

Anyway, I think the first episode will be ready in a few weeks. Keep your eyes over here to see what we have put together.