EPISODE 38 — Psyché Tropes

Psyché Tropes Episode 38
11pm, 27 April 2026 on Resonance 104.4 FM
Soundtracks courtesy of Invada Resords, Mark Jenkin, and Discreet Machines. Support the artist and label at Invada Records

Presented by Steven McInerney, Psyché Tropes Episode 38 continues downstream to Dronemance IV, our investigation of drone as a cinematic device throughout history. This episode sails toward a single director whose entire body of work is built upon a method that inverts the orthodoxy of synchronised sound. The British filmmaker Mark Jenkin.

A filmmaker who shoots silently on a clockwork camera engineered before the filmmaker's own conception. The Bolex H16, hand cranks and runs at an unstable frame rate emitting a mechanical clatter that renders any attempt at location sound near impossible. Every audible element in his films, dialogue, foley, atmosphere, and music is built from a small studio in west Cornwall, after the picture has been hand-processed and edited.

The drone is not an aesthetic choice in Mark Jenkin's cinema. It is a structural consequence. When location dialogue is void from production, what remains between the elements added in post-production is not the natural silence of a recorded room, but the absolute silence of nothing. The process of adding dialogue back into a silent picture only makes the silences around the dialogue more deafening. Something has to fill the space. The score-as-drone, in his films, is the answer to a problem that the method itself created. Drone not of a composer but of a sound designer working in a studio he calls the analogue room, half-wet for processing 16mm film, half-dry for processing audio. The drone, in this environment, is not music laid over the picture. It is the acoustic floor on which the rest of the soundtrack stands.

Jenkin's mid-length film Bronco's House, released in 2015 and forty-four minutes long, was shot silently on the Bolex and post-synced in its entirety. This was the prototype for a process he had been developing across years of experimental short film work on Super 8 and 16 millimetre. Bait, released in 2019, was the first feature application of the method. A black and white study of class displacement and gentrification in a Cornish fishing village, won the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer.

During the post-production winter of 2018, Jenkin acquired a Korg Volca Keys, a small monophonic analogue synthesiser, intended only as a distraction from the labour of hand-processing the film's negative. The drones he produced on the synth were recorded onto quarter-inch tape and played back in the studio while he edited. He found himself watching silent sequences of the film with the drones unintentionally laid over them, and discovered that the combination worked. The score that ended up on the Invada Records vinyl release of Bait derives from a single twenty-minute drone, titled "the gaps," sliced and embedded across the picture edit alongside the sound of the sea and the sound of the wind. An audience member at a later Q & A observed that the drones resembled a discordant accordion — an instrument with deep maritime associations. The connection had not been deliberate but it became retrospectively, the score's organising principle.

By the time of his second feature, Enys Men, released in 2022 and set in 1973 on an uninhabited island off the Cornish coast, the drone had ceased to be incidental. Jenkin built a quarter-inch tape loop in the studio using two reel-to-reel machines, modelled on the diagram printed on the back of the sleeve of Brian Eno's 1975 record Discreet Music. Tape was passed by hand through a reverb unit and manipulated to slow it down.

Jenkin's third and most recent feature, Rose of Nevada, follows two men aboard a Cornish fishing boat that has returned to harbour thirty years after it was lost at sea. Same camera. Same method. By this stage the boundary between sound design and score has more or less dissolved. Working with the supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer Ian Wilson, Jenkin records dialogue in clean studio conditions and then thins it through reverbs and equalisation so that the dialogue arrives in the picture sounding as though it has come from somewhere other than where the bodies on screen appear. That dislocation is the central effect of post-synced cinema: the voice has not been in the room with the body, and the audience, on some preconscious level, registers the gap. The drone fills that gap. It functions as the acoustic floor on which the dislocated voice can stand.

Robert Bresson, whose work Jenkin has cited as a reference point, held that a film should be felt rather than understood. The drone is the cinematic device most consistent with that proposition. It is not parsed in the same way as melody. It enters the auditory cortex as a continuous frequency. The brain habituates to it and ceases, after a few seconds, to register it as sound — yet its physiological effects persists. Heart rate entrains to it. Postural tension responds to it. The audience feels the film before they read it.

Jenkin's three features are unusual in contemporary cinema for the visibility of their construction. Most post-synced productions go to considerable effort to disguise the absence of location sound; ADR is replaced with such precision that the synthetic acoustic bed becomes invisible. Jenkin's films do the inverse. The bed is made audible. The drone is the flag planted in the sand that says: this was built. Once the audience can hear the construction, the entire architecture of cinematic sound, the assumption that the noise of the world is the noise the camera captured becomes available for inspection.

What Mark Jenkin has built across three feature films is not a soundtrack in the usual sense. It is a hand-made world. Cornwall reconstructed from its silences. The drone is the foundation. It is the frequency at which the construction becomes architecture. The bed on which the dislocated voice can rest. The ground on which the tape loop, the Cornish wind, a buoy bell, and an intercepted Mayday transmission converge, at the rate at which the basilar membrane will allow. The audience does not hear a place. The audience hears a room where a place has been made. And the drone, held underneath, is the breath of that room. A breath that is felt rather than understood.

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