‘Traces’, the collaborative album by Arli Liberman and Rhian Sheehan, is a cinematic journey that drifts between sci-fi dreamscapes and the raw beauty of natural environments. Infused with pulsing heartbeats, ethereal vocals and spacious ambient layers, the record evokes both the delicate song of the desert and the all-encompassing intensity of being underwater. Accomplished screen composers, Liberman and Sheehan are used to shaping sound around narrative, and there’s a sense of floating through space, or crossing ancient sands, each track unfolding as a scene from an imagined film. Dasha Koryagina spoke with the pair about what it was like scoring their own filmic story for a change.
Both well-known as musicians, composers and producers, Rhian Sheehan and Arli Liberman first met at Auckland Museum, at a visual display by mutual friend Joe Michael, which Sheehan had scored.
“I remember walking around and being absolutely mesmerised by the music,” recalls Liberman. “And once I found that out Rhian and I hit it off straight away, and I was suggesting like, ‘Wow, I’m so impressed, we should do something together one day…’”
Liberman subsequently played guitar on several tracks of Sheehan’s 2018 album ‘A Quiet Divide’, sparking a creative and personal bond that’s amply evident in the way the pair interact with one another. They performed together at Earth Beat Festival, but it wasn’t until Liberman scored the 2019 film Savage – which soundtrack left a lasting impression on Sheehan – that the two set out to collaborate more seriously.
“I was just obsessed with it,” Sheehan says of the soundtrack to Savage, Sam Kelly’s film covering three decades of Aotearoa gang life and violence. “I listened to it over and over again. I still think it’s one of the best scores to come out of NZ. It was refreshing and unique, and it wasn’t your standard score that had a string section and an orchestra. It’s just really beautiful stuff. Very honest, and very real and intimate.”
Initial plans for a shared live show were derailed by the pandemic, so the pair chose to head into the studio instead. Supported by their label, Loop Recordings, Liberman and Sheehan wrote and recorded ‘Traces’ over just eight days, split between Auckland and Wellington.
“Arli came down to my studio twice in two separate blocks of four days each, and we wrote and sketched most of the album in that time,” Sheehan recalls. “Then he took that material back to his studio in Auckland and kind of finessed things.”
Though time together was brief, they thrived under the pressure.
“Having a deadline is a great thing,” Sheehan smiles, “because it puts this fear into you, and you either achieve the goal or you fail!
“Weirdly, it kind of just came out of us,” he continues. “We were just getting in a room and jamming, which for me was quite unusual. I’m a real slow worker, but Arli’s quite a fast worker, so he was kicking me up the bum the whole time.”
“I’m super hyper the whole time, which must be exhausting,” Liberman admits, while Sheehan jokes, “I’m quite a sleepy kind of guy, and when I’m around Arli I feel even more tired!”
Despite differences in pace and personality their musical instincts evidently synced perfectly, as he describes.
“We both dabble and work in the same area, ethereal ambient music, but Arli… he approaches things completely differently to me. And that’s interesting, you know? When you’re working with somebody who’s just thinking outside the square, and they’re not doing what you would do. And I imagine I’m the same with Arli – that’s the great thing about a collaboration.”
For the two seasoned screen composers, ‘Traces’ provided a rare sense of creative freedom.
“Rhian and I are extremely fortunate that we work in this industry of screen composition and immersive music – and music that is not designed for the charts,” Liberman acknowledges. “We’re kind of working through the back door of the music world, which allows us to express and push our boundaries. And here, we found ourselves trying to create very ethereal, and emotional, and very potent sonic worlds – but this time, we were serving what we wanted to express.”
“When you’re working on somebody else’s vision you are just there to fulfill it,” Sheehan adds. “Writing an album is a different thing, because you’re writing music for yourself. You’re simply doing it for the joy of it.”
With no preconceived ideas or expectations, they approached ‘Traces’ with a sense of adventure.
“There was a lot of anticipation for jumping into that void without knowing where it’s gonna take us,” says Liberman. “And also not putting too many expectations and restrictions of where we should or shouldn’t go.”
Surrounded by endless equipment in Sheehan’s Pōneke studio, the pair intentionally chose not to use virtual instruments – opting for a sound that builds from layers of live instrument playing, as opposed to programming or pre-existing samples.
“We wanted to use real gear, Arli’s guitar rig to generate rhythms, my synths, running Arli’s ethereal vocals through some effects – that kind of thing. We wanted to utilise the gear that was around us and make something that sounded really organic, and like you could reach out and touch it in a way.”
Though they didn’t go in with a set concept, the album gradually began to feel like a soundtrack to a film of their imagination.
“Rhian and myself both gravitate to sci-fi patterns,” Liberman says. “All of a sudden we found ourselves almost scoring a film that doesn’t exist yet. It’s our own little soundtrack!”
That freedom gave rise to the instrumental album’s distinct tone – the idea of an ancient future – a sound that belongs equally to a distant past and an impending future. Liberman’s sonic approach in particular helped shape the tonal palette. Originally from Israel, his modal sensibilities and diverse influences introduced a different musical vocabulary, which the duo leaned into together.
“Arli has a different approach, melodically,” explains Sheehan. “He thinks modally in a lot of ways. I was really open to that, I wanted to do something that was a bit different and didn’t sound like it was from this part of the world.”
The first single, Immaru (Samaritan for ‘light’), was chosen to introduce the project.
“It’s covering the widest range of dynamics. It starts sort of ambient, and then it has a massive explosion,” says Liberman. “We are here to present tranquility, but also quite powerful ructions. It demonstrates that you’re not here just for a blitz-out meditative album. You’re here to go on a journey.”
“It also feels very collaborative,” adds Sheehan. “In the sense that it’s what we sound like when we’re smashed together. It’s got Arli’s guitar playing textures and rhythms. It’s got lots of synths and Moog, and this instrument I have called a guitarviol. It’s just a bunch of stuff thrown together, which permeates throughout the album in different ways. Sonically, it feels like the most artistically cohesive.”
Second single, Sentio (Latin for ‘to sense’), reveals the album’s more ambient, atmospheric side.
“That’s one of my favorite moments,” says Sheehan. “We’re not afraid of dropping a piece of music that’s really ambient and textural and just takes people away to another place. Most people expect from a single that it would be a song or an upbeat piece of instrumental music, but we just wanted to showcase some highlights on the album that we enjoyed making.”
“We wanted to show that there’s a more tender and quite vulnerable moment too,” Liberman adds. “Immaru is still very active throughout the whole thing, and it’s moving forward. And this one is much more still, and much more observing ourselves.”
The third single (and the album’s opening track), Myths, pushes the journey along with colossal intensity, aiming to create a sensation of takeoff that ends with melting into the sun.
“We created one of the biggest sounds that I have been involved with,” says Liberman, a serious statement given his proven guitar prowess.
That massive sound came from stacking layers – guitars, deep synth bass, and the secret ingredient of one of Sheehan’s music boxes, With a melody punched in by hand, rolled manually, and put through Liberman’s guitar rig, resulting in an enormous wall of sound designed to lift listeners up.
There’s a bonus track, Plateau, included on digital and CD versions, that closes with a haunting monologue – a passage about going on a vessel towards the abyss, written by 1800s French author Victor Hugo. It is spoken by Arli’s partner, French photographer and director Jen Raoult.
“Being so close to the end of the album, we wanted to feel like you were flying into another planet, and all of a sudden, you find an old recording that’s been left there. Almost like a secret scroll,” Liberman enthuses.
After pushing themselves to make the mix work on just two speakers, the pair took the album into surround sound – where they usually live when it comes to cinema – mixing it in Dolby Atmos at Roundhead Studios for a truly immersive experience.
“It’s the perfect album for that,” says Sheehan. “You’re really in that space.”
The sonic world of the album is further tied together by its visual counterpart – the cover art by Dunedin-based light artist Sam Caldwell.
“Sam uses paints, water, and lights in a big tank to create these incredibly primordial, cosmic-looking visuals,” Sheehan helpfully explains.
The cover is a still taken from one of Caldwell’s water tank experiments – completely organic and, according to both musicians, a perfect visual representation of the music. Encountering Caldwell and roping him into the project was one of the many “happy accidents” encountered along the way, according to Liberman.
“Good projects come with a healthy bag of happy accidents. And that can only happen when you have trust and mutual respect, and good times and good banters!”
The pair say they’re keen to collaborate again, calling ‘Traces’ their chapter one.” But for now, ahead of the launch, upcoming Atmos listening parties where they’ll share the album in its fully immersive form are the focus. A chance to not only showcase the music, but to share the vision behind it.
“Essentially we want to create self-observations – moments where people can just observe themselves and their environment and be here,” says Liberman. “It’s almost like when you go and see incredible nature, something that takes your breath away. We want the album to feel like something that belongs to the ecosystem – but it’s our own kind of sonic ecosystem.”
