On the road again

A sound designer by trade and an adventurer at heart, creative director Simon Lister co-founded the award-winning music and sound house Nylon Studios in 2002.

When he's not recreating catapult effects or laying down orchestral scores, though, chances are you'll find him riding a Royal Enfield motorcycle through the world's most breathtaking landscapes.

The Royal Enfield, known as the oldest motorcycle brand in the world, was heavily used by the British during both World Wars.

"It's a fantastic road bike," Lister says. "It's got a very simple engine - a 500cc single cylinder engine. There's no electronics on it. It's basically a piston, a carburator and a muffler, so if anything goes wrong, it's pretty easy to fix."

Lister, who rode motorbikes around his family farm starting at age 11, has journeyed to regions of India that are harrowing enough on four wheels, let alone two. In February 2008, he cruised more than 3,000 kilometers around Rajasthan in northern India, navigating the region's notoriously chaotic roads.

In June of this year, he returned to India with his brother to tackle the unforgiving roads of the Himalayas. On their Royal Enfield bikes, they traversed some of the tallest passes in existence.

The 18-day trip got off to a daunting start, with cloud cover that rendered Lister virtually blind. "We could not see 10 feet in front of us," he remembers. "There were really steep cliffs, a mile drop on the sides of these mountains, and we couldn't see where we were going. It was absolutely crazy." On top of that, the road was littered with unexpected obstacles: cows, upturned buses, school kids, bicycles, not to mention a neverending caravan of diesel-spewing trucks.

As Lister quickly learned, unexpected obstacles are par for the course when you're trying to make your way through the mountains of India. At Baralacha Pass, which rises to an imposing 4,900 meters, he encountered a massive traffic jam on the one-lane road: An avalanche had caused a backup of more than a hundred trucks.

Diggers were removing the snow by hand - a formidable task that would take all night, at least. Thanks to the narrow girth of his motorcycle, though, Lister was able to laboriously make his way through the dense trail of trucks and ice walls.

When they emerged, Lister, his brother and their two guides rode to the next stop, Serchu - "the end of the world, as far as I was concerned. It was desolate, barren, freezing cold." However, their support vehicle - which carried oxygen that was essential at that altitude - was still stuck behind the sea of trucks. With no heat or hot water, in minus-five-degree temperatures, it didn't take long for the altitude sickness to take a toll. The next evening, the support vehicle finally emerged from the pass. Behind schedule, Lister and his troop pushed forward on their bikes for 12 hours straight, surviving on four hours of sleep in three days.

Over the course of the next two weeks, Lister conquered mountain routes at mind-boggling heights - Khardongla Pass, the highest motorable pass in the world, was an impressive 5,600 meters high.

When the going got rough, he stayed motivated by meditating on the stupendous views that surrounded him. His most breathtaking moment arrived in the Nubra Valley, where desert landscapes and sand dunes collided with mountains, cascading waterfalls and green oases.

After all was said and done, Lister biked over 2,200 kilometers of severe terrain - on a motorbike that offered little protection from the perpetual bumps on the road. Though he had physically trained for three months before the trip, it took him 5 to 6 weeks to mentally and physically recover from the high altitudes and the bumpy rides, not to mention the diesel fumes that had invaded his lungs.

"We were absolutely exhausted because we were riding 6 to 8 hours each day," Lister recalls. "You're riding these road bikes in off-road conditions, you don't have fancy suspension, so it's very rough and demanding on the body." (Ironically, after making it through the wear and tear of his journey unscathed, Lister sprained his ankle after falling down some stairs in Australia.)

Though Lister is a master of audio, he has nursed a passion for visual art ever since he's been able to pick up a camera. His website, www.SimonListerPhotography.com, showcases an array of arresting photos from his travels. An admiring fan of Steve McCurry, Lister often toys with the idea of some day turning photography from a hobby into a profession.

Lister's passion for life is evident in his work at Nylon - he brings images to life through the use of sound. The "Pure Waters" spot for Boags beer won the Gold Lion at Cannes this year. "It was basic sound design, but it was a big job to make it feel right," says Lister, who frequently returns to this idea of making it "feel right." In other words, intuition is key to doing his job well, to creating an emotion that matches the images on the screen.

A three-minute ad for Herringbone, titled "Henri's Hands," tells the fictional story of a man who was born with abnormally small hands. The challenge of this spot was making it as real as possible, even though the man's hands are absurdly small.

"I'm making the viewer believe that what they're hearing and seeing matches together. I love doing that. You get these pictures, and you've got to recreate all the ambiences and the foley." For a Gatorade spot, "Heroes," he had to imagine what a player's mind goes through when he's concentraing on scoring a goal. For a Lexus is250 spot, he used synthesized sound effects to imbue a completely stationary car with a seductive personality.

One of Lister's most visceral memories from a job was shooting ex-convict Chopper Read for a Pedestrian Council advertisement against drunk driving. The spot, which won a Gold Lion at Cannes in 2001, entailed going to Read's house and filming him as he proceeded to get drunk - with axes and knives within reaching distance.

"I was standing there with this boom mic and going, 'Okay, the window is open about 12 feet away. If I have to do anything, I can run and jump through this window.' This guy was really insane."

At the end of the day Lister loves his work, but he works to play. Then again, "play" might be the wrong word when describing his world travels. "I'd rather exhaust myself, trash my body and get into these areas that nobody goes to and experience a culture that's so different from my own," he says. Lister once helped a friend shoot documentaries in Bangladesh, Mozambique and Tanzania.

The dissonance of traveling between Australia and such devastated countries was astounding. "I remember coming back from Africa and sitting in the studio. Everyone is freaking out, going, 'Where's that tape? We've gotta get that to the client!' I'm sitting here going, 'I've just seen death, war and poverty, and there's people freaking about the most little things."

Lister's next Royal Enfield trip will likely be Morocco, riding from the Atlantic Ocean to the Sahara Desert, where he'll visit the Berber tribes.

"When you're on the motorbike, the adrenaline is running the whole time. You see amazing things on the road, especially in India. You see funerals, people on the roads, thousands of trucks, elephants, camels, dogs, dead dogs, dogs eating dead dogs, cattle, what you smell, what you see, what you taste, everything. It's an explosion of all your senses."