How the ‘SIRĀT’ Sound Team Made Oscars History by Honoring Moroccan Desert Raves

From Sinners’ record-breaking nominations haul (16) to K-pop finally getting a seat at the table, this year’s Academy Awards are heavy on history. For SIRĀT composer Kangding Ray and Oscar-nominated sound designer Laia Casanovas, achieving Oscar firsts came second to nailing an authentic portrayal of an incredibly niche corner of the electronic dance music scene.

Helmed by Óliver Laxe and set against the backdrop of a fast-brewing global conflict, SIRĀT follows a father (Sergi López) and his young son in search of his missing daughter alongside a group of ravers in the deserts of southern Morocco. After picking up both the jury prize and soundtrack award at Cannes last year, SIRĀT earned a pair of Oscar nominations for best international feature film and best sound. Not only is SIRĀT the only international film recognized in best sound this year, Casanovas, alongside Yasmina Praderas and Amanda Villavieja, are the first-ever Oscar-nominated all-female sound team.

From the immersive, hypnotic rave scene that opens the film to the harrowing silence of the dormant minefield near its close, the emotional intensity of SIRĀT hinges on both its score and sound design — something that was clear to Laxe when he first began contacting collaborators.

“My first albums are very glitchy and ambient and melodic, and my later work is more textured and intense and physical,” Ray, who was an architect and rock guitarist before finding a home in Berlin’s avant-garde electronic music scene over the last two decades, tells Billboard. “Those two parts are present in SIRĀT, with the spiritual approach and connection to Sufi philosophy and mysticism and death, but also the physicality and euphoria of the rave and its chest-rattling bass.”

Laxe tapped Ray nearly two years before filming began, which allowed him to begin developing cues based on the script, which the director co-wrote with Santiago Fillol. In addition to drawing from location scouting reference images that “showed the unforgiving nature of the desert,” Ray also looked to his past collaborations with renowned sound artists like Ryuichi Sakamoto, Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) and Ryoji Ikeda. In fact, when he was at the Golden Globes celebrating his best original score nod for SIRĀT, Ray called Nicolai (who was nominated in the same category alongside Sakamoto in 2015 for The Revenant) to gush about the “full-circle moment.”

Although his idols toured the awards circuit with a more traditional, orchestral score, Kangding doubled down on his dance music origins for Sirāt. Laxe’s film operates as both a tender father-son story and a larger, more spiritual odyssey, but it’s also one of the most balanced and faithful on-screen depictions of the free party movement. Emerging from the U.K. in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the free party movement was essentially “a meeting point for new-age travelers and ravers that incorporated Jamaican sound system culture,” according to Ray. Their full-scale raves would last days, and governmental repression pushed the ravers further south until they hit remote parts of North Africa, illuminating the seemingly endless desert with a more raucous take on techno rhythms that “evolved parallel to the more institutionalized dance music scene.” To ensure the opening scene felt immersive rather than voyeuristic, Ray momentarily stepped back into his DJ bag.

“The rave party is not a set; it’s an actual rave made by a true free party collective who was appointed by the producer to make something happen on the condition that they could be filmed for three days,” Ray explains, also noting that he played in the Moroccan desert in pre-COVID times. “But once it started, they couldn’t stop it. We made the line between film and reality as blurry as it could possibly be. I even went there and played as DJ, and they knew my music! That was a big win for me to connect with them because I don’t come from the exact same culture.”

With Ray curating an authentic ambience for Laxe to capture, Casanovas and the rest of the sound team were tasked with making sure everything still felt and sounded like a narrative film. “That music is a ritual on a dance floor; it pushes you,” muses Casanovas. “You feel it in your skin, and the beat matches your heart rate. It’s that kind of experience that we wanted to have in the first minutes of the film, so we recorded the music through a sound system to have the texture of speakers on the dancefloor.”

For Casanovas, “music” doesn’t simply refer to what’s blaring through the speakers; it’s also the speakers themselves. It’s the sound of the wooden boxes, the grunts and exhales heard while carrying heavy equipment, the rustle of different fabrics against the wind and the soundwaves bouncing off the surrounding cliffs. Treating the music in post-production proved incongruent with how realistic the rave scenes looked onscreen, so Casanovas sourced a supplier in Barcelona who had the same sound system they used during filming. She and the sound team then recorded all the music through that sound system with the mics from production to capture the music the way it would be heard on the dance floor.

From its Moroccan setting to its title (an Arabic term that roughly translates to “path”), SIRĀT is a truly international production. So much so that Casanovas opted to use Icelandic wind recordings for the desert scenes in the back half of the film. “[Those winds] have low frequencies,” she says. “We had to account for how the wind interacts with the desert and how the characters interact with the landscape. We needed to hear how the clothes move and how the metal rattles. We also recorded different textures of sand and dust to have layers of all the elements, but the most challenging thing was figuring out how to maximize the three-dimensional space of Dolby Atmos.”

Ahead of next month’s Academy Awards (March 15), SIRĀT opened in New York and Los Angeles on Feb. 6, with a nationwide rollout to follow later this month. Though Ray’s score didn’t make the leap from the Oscar shortlist to the final nominee line-up, he’s still in disbelief at “getting this much recognition for a work that is so avant-garde and uncompromising… it means a lot to a lot of my peers and the originators of these cultures.”

As for Casanovas, she’s proud of the nomination because it gives visibility to all the women working in sound, “but the three of us have a whole career in Spain!” she says with a chuckle. “I’ve been working with Yasmina for 12 years.”

Whether or not SIRĀT brings home a golden statuette (or two) next month, it remains part of a larger wave of dance music-rooted scores, like Challengers (Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross) and Heated Rivalry (Peter Peter) that, culturally and critically, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with more traditional film music compositions.

“There is something about the zeitgeist that demands exceptional answers to unsettling questions,” muses Ray. “That status quo isn’t working, and it’s time of change and turmoil, for better or worse. People need new solutions. And maybe [these kinds of scores] are it.”