The sound of memory: Akinola Davies Jr, Duval Timothy and CJ Mirra on scoring My Father’s Shadow

Akinola Davies Jr’s debut feature, the BAFTA-winning My Father’s Shadow, is a meditation on fatherhood set against political unrest in Nigeria. Its richly layered score by Duval Timothy and CJ Mirra fills the spaces between words unspoken, bringing to life themes of connection, recollection and tarnished dreams.

My Father’s Shadow opens with a solitary, sighing flute as two young brothers embark on a trip with their father from their quiet Nigerian village to Lagos. Demarcated by a bridge the boys can only believe is the longest in the world – for in their eyes, it is – the transition from country to city is a full sensory supernova. Buildings and roads and people stretch out as far as they can see. In comes the flute, gentle and inviting, followed by warm chords and a playful piano melody that dances across octaves. It’s the sound of the children’s universe expanding in an instant.

In Akinola Davies Jr’s BAFTA-winning film, its characters are fighting for connection. Co-written with Davies’ brother Wale, the semi-autobiographical drama draws from their memories of growing up in Nigeria, and follows estranged father Folarin (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) as he whisks his two young sons, Akin and Remi (brothers Godwin Chiemerie Egbo and Chibuike Marvellous Egbo), away on a brief trip to the metropolis. Their outing unfolds against the backdrop of the 1993 election annulment, a day when Nigeria’s unfulfilled potential mirrors the boys’ extinguished hopes of a future with their father. The music, from composers Duval Timothy and CJ Mirra, occupies the space of the unspoken: the sons’ questions about their father’s absence, and the secrets he, in turn, withholds from them. 

Sound has always been central to Davies’ work. During his time as an assistant for Tim and Barry, the creative duo who made their name documenting Britain’s underground music scenes, the former told him that “people will forgive bad picture, they won’t forgive bad sound”. Fortunately for Davies, none of the work he would go on to create as a filmmaker falls victim to either: not Rituals: Union Black, his documentary celebrating the rhythms of Black British life; not the music videos for artists including Klein, Neneh Cherry and Blood Orange; and not the short films that cultivated his artistic sensibilities towards the graceful beauty of everyday communities. 

Davies, Timothy and Mirra have congregated in a Peckham studio, where the trio have spent the day on their Crack Magazine cover shoot. Hand-drawn art lines one side of the room; on the other, Davies and Timothy are reclining at opposite ends of a leather sofa, while Mirra perches on a stool next to them. 

In 2020, film producer Rachel Dargavel urged Davies to meet composer and sound designer Mirra, whose atmospheric soundscapes have provided the backdrop for several films about surfing. Davies visited his studio in Leyton, where they “just chatted about religion pretty much the whole time”, the director recalls. Their first collaboration was the 2020 short Lizard, which follows a young girl in Nigeria who inadvertently wanders into the underground workings of a megachurch. Davies has continued to recruit Mirra for his projects ever since, sending the composer “crazy audio things” for inspiration over the years. “Whether it’s a commercial, whether it’s a short film, whether it’s a content thing, I’m always like, OK, we run this past CJ, because the sound design aspect of it is just something I think is such a rich palette to drill from.”

Timothy and Davies have circled each other for so long they can’t even remember how they met. “I knew you as you,” the director tells Timothy, the Lewisham-born visual artist and musician whose minimalist, vibrant piano sound runs through six solo records. Davies went on to enlist Timothy for Untitled, a Somerset House installation centred on the director’s conversations with his mother during the Covid lockdown. When it came to preparing for Davies’ feature debut, Mirra expressed an interest in co-composing. Klein, who previously collaborated with Davies on the music video for Marks of Worship, was one of the names floated around as a potential partner, but it was Timothy who ultimately landed the gig. “I think it was quite clear that Duval understood what we were trying to do in terms of being open to the process of making music in service to the film,” the director says.

The writing started almost immediately. Timothy visited Mirra in his studio, bringing in piano freestyles for the pair to play around with. “CJ holds you hostage for a while,” Timothy jokes. He had never composed for a film before and threw himself into the process with childlike abandon: “I think I wanted to prove myself,” he says. “I was just sending files, files, files.” 

“Duval made so much music for the film that we had to stop and have a bit of a break,” Davies adds. “Our enthusiasm got the better of us.”

As is the case for all of his projects, Davies set the energy of the film by curating a playlist: Klein, Arca, Ryuichi Sakamoto. The 1978 film Rockers was another touchstone. “Burning Spear does this incredible, very intimate song at a riverside,” he says. “You can hear the water trickling because they’re by the river, and then you can hear the crickets, and then you can hear the animals.” The cues, they agreed, shouldn’t just be music for music’s sake, but entire soundscapes that colour in the scenery. That ethos carried through to the film’s sound design, which Mirra oversaw as the production’s sound supervisor. In a scene where the family escapes to the beach, the sound of waves against the shore takes a figurative form. “We’re not even necessarily looking at the size of the waves you’re seeing,” Mirra explains. Smaller, fizzy waves underscore a tender heart-to-heart between Folarin and Remi, while a shattering confession from Folarin is mirrored by the sound of a crashing ocean.

My Father’s Shadow lives in a state of decay: the halcyon image the boys hold of their father is called into question, in a film that reckons with how rarely we get to see our parents for who they really are as individuals. Davies wanted the score to “feel like fruit that’s decomposing”, he says. “On one side it looks fine, and then you turn it around, and it’s all organically caving in on itself.” The score disintegrates like a nostalgic, ageing photograph fraying at the edges. Dread creeps in through a bass-heavy drone. Warm piano melodies are warped, then splintered by a sudden discordant note. A perfect day cut short.

Both composers ran with Davies’ framework, sometimes in the most literal sense. “I was quite keen to lean into the piano from quite early on, and just prepare it and use it in unusual ways,” Timothy adds. “I was putting food on the piano. Chickpeas and rice and bananas – all sorts of stuff.” 

Over the course of a year, the composers visited each other in their respective studios to write and experiment. If they weren’t in the studio, they were cycling out to Walthamstow in search of tunnels to play the recordings back and capture the reverb. “Also, my studio is just built to be a bit rotten,” Mirra adds. “It’s full of gear, it’s old, and we really leaned into the age of where the film was set, and the fact that it was shot on 16mm. We leaned into that in terms of processing the instrumentation afterwards, or even how we created some instruments.”

The score is a true marriage of the musicians’ approaches: Timothy’s pared-back instrumentation meets Mirra’s layered production. It’s a cacophony of sounds on sounds on sounds, twisted and altered until the sources are indiscernible. Cues were recorded in the studio, played back outside and recorded again – and sometimes once more for good measure. Flutes were played “deliberately badly”, as if a child were picking up the instrument for the first time, then recorded onto a vintage four-track tape recorder and played back at the wrong speed, turning the abstract sound into its own playable instrument. A high squeak of a whistle in Journey Begins, which plays when Folarin and his sons first venture out of the village, is Timothy’s voice pitched beyond recognition. When they play the score live, they use a squeaky toy.

Surrounded by stacks of gear, Mirra was drawn to the analogue. “I was inspired by William B’s The Disintegration Loops,” Mirra explains, referring to William Basinski. “The idea that you put something in, but the repetition on a format changes how you experience it, and it’s the format going wrong that distorts and introduces noise.”

“Because we worked on it for so long, we started to forget what things were [there],” Timothy continues. “And there’s things that I’m like, is that the sound of an animal?”

“That’s you singing!” Mirra laughs.

Like the film itself, the music takes on the shape of a memory. A person’s recollections are never perfect: there are fabricated additions, forgotten omissions, alterations subconsciously made to protect oneself. Towards the end of the film, then-president Ibrahim Babangida makes a televised address to announce the election annulment, throwing Lagos into a state of chaos. To flee the city, Folarin packs himself and his children into a car. “When I read the script, that was the bit that properly brought me to tears,” Timothy says. His approach was minimalist again: a single note on piano, discordant strings, crackling bass. But the cue is discomfiting in its repetition, like an uncomfortable recollection you can’t shake. Timothy describes it as “memory just disintegrating; I think of it as the way fireworks fizzle out”.