Public speaking is something I fear more than death itself.Collection: Death
When I make film music, I'm a filmmaker first and foremost. It's about serving the needs of the film. You're telling a story; in a way, you stop becoming a composer and become a storyteller instead. You tell the story with the most appropriate themes. How you approach these things is a very personal matter, but your goal is to tell the story first.
Pan Sonic sound like they are playing music of the future made with the electric instruments of yesterday.
I think melancholy is kind of a misunderstood emotion. I don't think it's necessarily an unpleasant or bad emotion.
I am a trombone player, and that was my first instrument.
I'm interested in extremes, in many ways.
I love old industrial imagery and smokestacks belching pollution, maybe because Iceland doesn't have any industry, just mountains and beautiful nature.
Brass has a very distinctive sound. It's delicate but powerful, but it's also melancholic and plaintive.
It's very common in Iceland, this music-making and artistic expression by non-professionals. The brass band tradition is not as big, but there are choirs everywhere. So that's something that is familiar to me.
I have a Yamaha YC-45D organ in my studio. It's actually Terry Riley's favorite keyboard, so if you find old clips of him on YouTube, he's usually playing one of these.
I like the whole Pacific Northwest.
Always really good audiences in Belgium.
I don't watch TV that much, but I like to get series on DVD and watch them all back-to-back.
Melancholy is a state that I very much enjoy being in, actually. It's not the same as feeling sad. It's a more complex emotion; it derives from a tragic view of the world, a tragic view of art.
I think my music is a way of communicating very directly with people and with people's emotions. I try to make music that doesn't need layers of complexity or obfuscation to speak to people.
Music should resonate with people on an emotional level. That's one of the criterions I use for an idea. Does it speak simply and directly without obfuscation and without being unnecessarily complex or obscure?
When I write music for a film, I'm not writing a solo album, and I'm not writing a personal piece. I'm part of a team of artists. So I think like a filmmaker more than a composer.
'Orphee' is, for me, about changes: about moving to a new city, leaving behind an old life in Copenhagen, and building a new one in Berlin - about the death of old relationships and the birth of new ones.
Making 'Orphee' has been a true labour of love, one that has been a part of my life for six years, and yet the music always remained fresh - it was constantly in a state of flux and renewal.
One very early influence was reading about John Cage's experience in an anechoic room where the only sound you are left with is the high-pitched drone of your nervous system.
I think I have a sound or a certain feel in certain harmonies in the way I construct melodies.
I like to have space between the notes. I like to use silence.
Silence can be very effective, and it gives the music space to breathe.
For me, 'Blade Runner' is one of the big influences in my life - I saw it when I was 13 or 14, when it first came out, and since, I've seen it many, many times.
That's one of the hardest parts of putting together an album - finding that concept, that unifying idea. Especially as I write mostly in instrumental music, the idea of having a central concept that unifies the music is very important to me.
I try not to obfuscate or to be to obscure or to be too cerebral. I like to work on a visceral, emotional level.
Music has to be treated in the same way as set design, casting, or choice of location - it has to start at the same time.
Give the composer time to experiment, time to try out ideas. Also, the time to fail. When the composer has very little time, the temptation is to reach for stock ideas - ideas they know will work and have worked in the past.
I'm fascinated by the ruins and remains of industrialisation.
In this post-industrial society, when we're moving away from what was the norm, we have to deal with what it has left in its wake in terms of the impact on people and the environment.
Brass bands are part of my upbringing. Brass band records were among the first records I listened to.
I had three older sisters whose record collections I borrowed, so I was listening to The Velvet Underground as well as Bach and brass band music.
Very early on, I started improvising. I was more interested in the music that came out of me than any music I heard.
Sometimes you write music to a script or while a film is being edited. Sometimes I write without seeing any images, but that's rare. The approach is often based on practical decisions, but I'm interested in the narrative and physical space that music can occupy in a film or play.
I've never been very good at creating absolute music, which has no non-musical dimension to it. I think that is why filmmakers gravitated toward my work.
'End of Summer' expands the way I want to express myself as a composer. It's a piece of visual music that has this narrative and conceptual dimension to it.
I've been sort of playing music since I was probably 8 years old or something like that.
Even when I was studying piano, I always preferred to play around with my own improvisations rather than do my studies. So I've always been interested in writing music from a very early age.
I think it took me until - my twenties were really a time of exploration and experimentation with different groups and different types of music. Then I kind of developed the sound, which first appeared, I guess, on my first solo album 'Englaborn,' which came out in 2001.
I'm far from casual. I'm a huge fan of 'Blade Runner.'
The idea that things should last just doesn't fit the economic model anymore.
Cheap electronics are not built to be repaired. They're just used and then discarded.
There's something quite shocking in this idea that everything is disposable and that people don't care for things anymore.
The kind of industrial wasteland that you see in so much of Europe has a tremendous poignancy to me, especially when it's run down and you see the collapse and failure of this system. And also how nature reclaims it.
I believe that things can be expressed very powerfully through simplicity.
A lot of my music tends to combine electronics and orchestra.
I love 'Treasure.' It's one of my favourite albums.
In my solo work on my own albums, I have used voice synthesizers and vocoders quite a lot in connection with orchestral instruments.
I'm very interested in voice synthesis and vocoders in general.
I always do very detailed demos. I feel that it's better to show the director a demo that sounds as close to the final thing as possible with samples. It takes time to create, but I feel that it's better to get the director on board very early on in terms of the sounds that I have in my head.