How Archipelago Entertainment Translated Tires, Gravel, and Adrenaline into Music for Red Bull Rampage

Every year, the world’s most intrepid mountain bikers converge on the mesas and gullies of Zion National Park for Red Bull’s Rampage. They freeride over terrain and topography that makes the heart skip a beat. 

Looking to capture one of its capstone events, Sounds of Red Bull’s music team wanted to create a soundtrack that conveyed the full story of Rampage—the emotion as well as the sonic intensity of the event. They tapped Archipelago’s Ross Lara to tackle the challenge. An adventurer himself, Lara leaped at the challenge. He embraced an approach that combined his musical sound design and production skills, immersing himself in the event and the athletes’ lives to capture the story.

Lara and the Sounds of Red Bull team knew Lara needed to be at the event out in person to do this, to grab sounds before, during, and after the action. Lara climbed slopes and ducked under “rock waterfalls,” the cascades of gravel bikers careen over, to get the sound of a thousand tiny rocks showering down around him. “I had to keep my head covered to get that rock waterfall recording,” Lara recounts. “The pebbles and dust had this amazing texture, that I eventually granularized and treated with time-based effects.” 

Sampling the sounds of the event was just the start. Lara wanted the tracks to follow the arc of energy and activity at Rampage, playing with the actual sonic moments and music-driven emotions to bring it all together. 

“We had this vision, that we could start with a race or event that would give us the inspiration and the sounds, and then produce them, so that at the end you have the score of the event itself,” notes Archipelago co-founder and COO Brian Shenefelt. “We pitched the concept to Red Bull. They thought it sounded incredible. Though it wasn’t the way they usually approached things, they decided to push their boundaries a bit and do it.”

Lara took his on-site experience and spent several months in post-production. His vision was to do more than plop samples from the event into tracks; he wanted to blend them with compelling production techniques to craft an entire narrative arc that reflected the event, from athletes waking up at the crack of dawn to the celebration at the finish line. 

“Even when I was scrambling down a slope, I was writing chords and melodies in my mind and taking in the energy of the event that would help me produce musical textures,” Lara recalls. “For ‘Dawning,’ the opening track, for example, I pictured the riders waking up at 4 AM, brewing coffee. I took the sound of pouring coffee and used it as a musical crescendo, drenched in shimmering reverbs, unison with synth pads in the studio and timed the pitch rising in the sample to a triangle bell rising at the same time.” 

Listeners can hear the sound of wrenches in “Mechanics of Gravity,” but can also experience the exhilaration of feeling the air in your shocks. The tracks peak to the cinematic, raging “Gradient” and then resolve into the crowd noise-infused “Victory,” the perfect end to a wild, musically rich ride.

This hands-on scoring approach, one that encompasses the entire lived experience of a big event, draws heavily on Lara’s relationship with nature and the outdoors. “There are so many sounds out in nature, but most of them are percussive. The trick is to find tonal recordings to sample and play melodies with, and then to make them tell a story, not just sound cool,” reflects Lara. “To find that, you have to dig deeper.”