In the Beginning is the first original soundtrack for animation by composer and sound artist Gadea, written for director Ala Nunu’s new animated short of the same name. The film threads together three stories that feel both surreal and uncomfortably plausible: a lunar probe quietly ferrying tardigrades into space, the 16th‑century European myths that insisted birds of paradise floated without legs, and Hong Kong’s pandemic‑era decision to cull pet hamsters in the name of public safety. These narratives, spanning centuries and atmospheres, converge into a tonally absurd documentary‑fiction essay on anthropocentrism - the habit of placing humans at the center of every story, even when the evidence points elsewhere. Gadea’s score does not simply illustrate these vignettes; it slips between them, exposing the fault lines where scientific ambition, colonial imagination and bureaucratic panic all reveal the same need to control the narrative.

Working with vocalist Marina Herlop, Gadea builds a sonic world that hovers between field‑recording minimalism, chamber‑scale electro‑acoustic writing and the more fragile edges of speculative composition. Small sounds carry unusual weight: a close‑mic’d scrape, a distant hum, the grain of breath, the creak of an unseen room. These details sit alongside carefully placed piano figures, soft electronics and sparse strings, suggesting a chamber ensemble that has been half‑absorbed into its environment. Herlop’s voice appears less as a lead instrument and more as a shifting presence - wordless, sometimes processed to the point of translucence, sometimes close enough to feel like someone singing just behind your shoulder. The vocals act as a kind of emotional barometer, rising into uneasy clarity or receding into texture as the film’s perspectives tilt.

Each of the film’s three strands finds its own quiet resonance in the score. The tardigrades, blasted into lunar exile as experimental cargo, invite a music of suspended motion: long tones that seem to hang in zero‑gravity, tiny percussive clicks like instrumentation checking itself in the dark. The Renaissance fantasies about birds of paradise - animals thought to be too perfect, too distant from earth - are undercut by harmonies that never quite resolve, hinting at the violence hiding beneath ornate description. For the Hong Kong hamster cull, Gadea does not resort to melodrama; instead, the music tightens almost imperceptibly, rhythms constricting and sonic space narrowing as the logic of containment closes in. Across all three, the score keeps returning to a quietly insistent question: what happens when human stories overwrite the lives they claim to describe?

As a first venture into animation scoring, In the Beginning finds Gadea translating an already distinctive practice into a new medium without losing any of its delicacy. The music respects silence and negative space, trusting that the smallest shift in timbre or register can pivot the viewer’s understanding as effectively as a cut in the image. Rather than offering thematic “motifs” in the traditional sense, Gadea develops families of sounds that recur in altered forms - a particular rustle, a harmonic smear, a vocal interval that reappears in a new light. This approach mirrors the film’s own structure, in which very different stories echo one another in strange, revealing ways.