Gadea In The Beginning

Gadea’s original soundtrack to In the Beginning, the new animated short film by director Ala Nunu, unfolds across three surreal, yet surprisingly real stories about people and the world around them: a lunar probe’s tardigrade cargo, 16th-century myths surrounding birds of paradise, and Hong Kong’s pandemic-driven hamster cull. The film is a tonally absurd documentary-fiction essay on anthropocentrism and the human need to control narratives.
This is Gadea’s first musical accompaniment for animation. Collaborating with Marina Herlop on vocals, Gadea’s sonic palette sits somewhere between field-recording minimalism, chamber electro-acoustics, and the more fragile end of speculative composition.
Tardigrades opens the record with an almost depressurised stillness — though not an empty one. Beneath it are real birds: field recordings gathered across years of travel, traces of organisms that predate every mythology the film goes on to invoke. Here, tones behave less like notes than like living matter.
The spine of the score is a triptych: Legless, Bestiary, and Paradisaea Apoda — three movements circling the same creature, the greater bird of paradise, and what was done to it. Marina Herlop’s voice runs through all three like a nervous system. Her register is operatic but spectral, layered across pitches to produce a choral shimmer that reads less as song than as haunting, as if the birds themselves were singing back through slaughter. Threaded beneath her, Gadea deploys percussion lines that do not so much keep time as trace movement: the flicker of a wing, the arrest of flight. Synth lines coil around them, carrying the emotional weight of a species misnamed, mythologised, and massacred. Legless establishes the world; Bestiary scores it from the inside — archaic, strange, and texturally saturated; Paradisaea Apoda, the bird named “without feet” because Europeans could not imagine it ever landing, arrives as the most lush and grief-stricken of the three. It becomes a piece about the unbridgeable distance between what something is and what we need it to mean.
Interlude 1 and Interlude 2 function as the score’s pivots, holding the triptych’s aftermath before the record turns toward Hong Kong. Night Walk closes that movement with field recordings Gadea made in the city itself — the actual sonic fabric of the place where the hamster cull unfolded — beat-driven and threaded with rhythmic, fraying pulses.
What ties these movements together is the way the film grants each creature its own atmospheric sovereignty, quietly dismantling the narratives created around them and refusing to subordinate them to the human gaze. That sensibility reaches its final form in In the Beginning, the closing track, where momentum builds through rhythmic propulsion and a looped melody that never quite resolves, while Marina Herlop’s voice appears as ghost-detail — cropped phrases and refracted syllables — as if the film’s three worlds were being forced to breathe inside the same frame. It’s the piece that brings everything into relation. Rather than offering neat closure, In the Beginning keeps the tension in motion, ending the record in a gesture that feels slightly uncanny, yet strangely whole.