Daniel Blumberg Talks Nextones Performance, New Live Album and More

In a conversation with The Quietus, the British composer and artist Daniel Blumberg reflects on his distinctive artistic path. Last year Blumberg won the Oscar for Best Original Score for his music for Brady Corbet's film The Brutalist, and he is now one of the notable names among film composers. What makes his work interesting is the way he connects different artistic disciplines. Blumberg says he draws all the time, often for no particular reason, and that when he first encountered improvised music, he found it very much like the way he looks at a blank page. In his visual art he uses silver, which oxidizes and changes as it interacts with its environment, and he pursues this same relationship between a work and its surroundings in his music. For one documentary directed by Gianfranco Rosi, for instance, he played sounds out into the sea and re-recorded them, so that the sea, the air, and the waves seemed to collaborate with the music. Blumberg also discusses his score for The Testament of Ann Lee, a film about the Shaker religious sect. For this work he drew on singers, many of them not trained musicians, because he was imagining what the sect's earliest communal prayers might have sounded like before they became organized. In his view, those early expressions were likely more wordless and exploratory. What makes the conversation instructive for other composers is his account of the timing of writing music. According to Blumberg, on The Brutalist he started during pre-production, on The Testament of Ann Lee he needed to be present throughout the shoot because the songs even determined the length of filming, and on Rosi's documentary he came in after the edit. He says each project brings ideas for the next. Blumberg, who has loved cinema since he was 17 and first saw the films of Krzysztof Kieślowski, says that at times the film matters more to him than the music itself. He is now reuniting with Brady Corbet for a new film titled The Origin of the World. A live performance of his album GUT, recorded at London's ICA, will be released on vinyl next month, and he is set to perform at the Nextones festival in Italy.

Read the full story at The Quietus →