For a documentary about children racing handmade wire cars through the streets of a Northern Cape town, a conventional film score was never going to be enough.
When Cape Town-based Pressure Cooker Studios was brought on to score The Philipstown WireCar Grand Prix, the team began with the sounds already present in the film: the buzz, rattle and rhythm of homemade wire cars racing through Philipstown.
What followed was an unusually hands-on approach to film scoring. Rather than relying solely on digital instruments and existing sound libraries, the studio built eight original instruments using wire, scrap metal and found materials, creating a sonic palette that could belong only to this particular story.
Building the Sound From the Ground Up
The annual Philipstown WireCar Grand Prix sees children race homemade cars constructed from scrap metal over a three-kilometre course through the Northern Cape town. The documentary, directed by Ward, captures both the physical reality of the race and the much larger world that exists in the children’s imaginations.
For Pressure Cooker Studios, that meant finding a way for the music to connect those two realities.
The team built eight instruments specifically for the project, including a traditional San musical bow recreated using tin cans and wire, as well as an instrument made by stretching wire across a large sheet of metal and playing it with a bow.
The resulting sounds were intentionally rough around the edges.
“They’re imperfect and unpredictable, just like the cars, and just like us,” says Pressure Cooker Studios founder and CEO James Matthes, who served as music director on the project.
Rather than treating those imperfections as problems to be corrected, the studio used them as part of the musical identity of the film.
Letting Imperfection Lead
Pressure Cooker Studios had access to almost any instrument imaginable through its software, but recording instruments built specifically for the documentary gave the score something that a conventional production library could not.
“By building and recording our own instruments, with their built-in buzz and unusual resonances, we created a sonic world that feels specific to this documentary,” Matthes says.
That specificity was important because the film isn’t simply documenting a race. For the children taking part, the wire cars represent something much bigger. They imagine themselves as professional drivers, transforming handmade vehicles into Formula 1-style race cars in their minds.
The production leaned into that imagination by combining GPS race tracking with a digital twin of Philipstown, recreating the race in CGI. Formula 1 commentator Alex Jacques then provides commentary as though the children are competing in a professional Grand Prix.
The music therefore had to exist between two worlds: the dusty streets of Philipstown and the spectacular race that exists in the children’s imagination.
Finding the Human Voice
As the score developed, the team realised that something was still missing.
“The score needed a human engine, and there’s nothing that connects you to that sense of humanity better than a voice,” Matthes says.
That voice came from South African musician Muneyi, a former Afropunk Battle of the Bands and Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner.
Originally from Tshilapfene, a village outside Thohoyandou, Muneyi brought a personal connection to the story’s sense of place.
“He comes from Tshilapfene, a small village outside of Thohoyandou, so when we started speaking about Philipstown, it was like he was speaking about home,” says Matthes.
South African Hip Hop Awards winner YoungstaCPT also appears on one of the tracks, adding another layer to a score that draws from different parts of South African musical expression.
Creating a Sound That Belongs to Philipstown
The project forms part of Pressure Cooker Studios’ ongoing exploration of what it calls its “future cinematic sound”, blending African musicality with contemporary cinematic scoring.
For The Philipstown WireCar Grand Prix, that approach became particularly tied to the documentary’s themes of imagination, possibility and hope.
“We spent a lot of time trying to understand their stories and to find ways to represent their imagination,” Matthes says. “We needed a sound that reminded people that hope is still possible.”
The result has already received recognition of its own. Pressure Cooker Studios’ score won Best Use of Sound at The Bookmarks and was nominated for Best Original Score: Documentary Feature at the International Sound and Film Music Festival. It also received IDIDTHAT Craft Award mentions for Original Music and Music Supervision.
The 75-minute documentary has collected more than 20 awards, including a Webby and a Tribeca X award, alongside recognition at Cannes Lions, the Clios, The One Show and South Africa’s Bookmarks Awards.
The Philipstown WireCar Grand Prix is currently streaming globally on Prime Video, while this year’s WireCar Grand Prix returns to Philipstown on Saturday, 12 September 2026.
For Pressure Cooker Studios, however, the project demonstrates something particularly valuable about creative production: sometimes the most effective way to find the right sound is to stop searching through what already exists and build something new.
