“[The book] 'The Art of War' is much more of a philosophical work than an actual manual for generals on the battlefield,” Max explains, “so Annabel and I are sort of in between making commitments about a certain musical style. Of course one option is Chinese, Chinese percussion particularly, with its accelerating and decelerating rhythms and the various tambours it can be warlike and it can be theatrically dynamic, but because there are a few strands to this play based on the invasion of Iraq in 2003 I've been listening to a whole lot of recordings of Shiite music as well. But when you make the choice of using clear genres like Iraqi/Iranian/Persian music or Chinese music you're almost asking the audience to think about the music as representing the situation rather than going for a more psychological feel, or you ask them to sort of half believe that the characters on stage may be allowed, where they are, to be hearing what we, the audience, are hearing.”

Instead, Max and Annabel have been working on approaching sound design for the piece more like you would imagine an approach to a film soundtrack. “Like lighting design it's not really part of the action or the situation on stage,” Max continues, “it's just feeding and underscoring. It's all these musics, sounds, soundscapes and designs that are in the atonal or abstract field and they aren't classifiable into ready-made genres like jazz or rock or for a particular instrument. It's more psychological, it's more theatrical, and it’s more like what you'd expect a soundtrack to be. But at this stage we're leaning towards Shiite music playing a big part in this as well.”

Similarly the music Max is developing with Stefan for 'Othello' has a Middle Eastern tilt but, in contrast to the dense, complex, pre-recorded nature of the 'Art of War', is shaping up to make use of the performers themselves in the role of live musicians. “'Othello,'” Max continues, “is set in Venice at a time when Venice was the cultural gateway to the Moorish and Ottoman empires from Greece and the south of Italy and the south of Spain. It's interesting to me that a lot of words, food and music, particularly in Spain these days, is derived from Moorish influence. In fact, you could argue that Flamenco is a combination of Gypsy and Arabic styles and is not really Spanish at all. So in 'Othello' we're investigating how we can create an organic effect where, through actors who aren't really guitarists at all, with use of multiple guitars and (hopefully) clever orchestration, we will create a free-form soundscape that provides the soundtrack to the play.”

A Pianist at heart, Max tends create his sound designs using a ground up approach rather than relying solely on electronic means. He acknowledges a definite place for MIDI and electronic reproduction but always tries either to record his source material himself, or to sample and tweak material recorded by other musicians. “Electronics is not very interesting to me when it's trying to emulate acoustics,” Max explains. “Whereas 'sound guys' can do a very, very convincing copy or a very convincing amalgamation of stuff, the truthful way of recording and composing music, i.e. to get real human beings to play it, still belongs in the domain of musicians and composers who have some kind of understanding and knowledge of music making. Up until a couple years ago I only used computers and digital equipment for post-production. I would always record or sample real musicians and then fuck that sample up – I would detune it, I would process it, I would multi-track it with other samples, both acoustic and electronic, and diffuse the purity of what it is. The end result would sound quite electronic but all the elements in the recipe would be absolutely organic. These days it's not so different apart from a couple times when I've loved using a sine wave because it's so blatantly digital and engineered, like putting a piece of metal in your food. But there's two things I don't do: I don't create compositions with MIDI and I don't create source electronically.”

There’s Annabel and then Annabel – which one?