Ethan Gold is a performer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist with little time for categorization and…
Are the visuals also important?
Certainly. In this case, it was particularly the look of the lake and the way water drips off the trees in the morning in some of those beautiful shots of the forest and the lake in the film. There's also a flavor that comes through the lake itself that was a wider perspective that the characters don't necessarily know and maybe the songwriter, that I'm essentially playing by writing the songs, doesn't necessarily understand. But the imagery of the lake has a kind of aspect of the wisdom of nature as well as the characters' struggle to find their presence. So, it's a combination of nostalgia and nature.
Do you visualize music in general?
For me, making music is its own three-dimensional five-sense experience, so I would hope that the music evokes visuals. That if a blind person were to hear the music, they would hear the mornings and the lake and the yearning and the nostalgia and pain for the characters just through the music. I see the music, in a sense, as a visual medium.
For this score, you collaborated with lots of great artists. Can you tell me what impact some of them had on the final work?
Probably the person I should mention the most is Jenna Leishman who did arrangements for the two songs. She's an English jazz composer-arranger who lives in New York and she was very helpful with hooking us up with players in New York as well. Then there's a guy named Steven Bernstein who contacted the players that I hired for those song recordings, so Jenna and Steven were instrumental for getting those songs right in the studio and bringing in players they knew could get the right jazz tones that we were going for.
Particularly for the John Grant version, that tone was a slight thing. There was a specific late thirties sound that my brother was very keen on capturing. And John was brilliant. We flew to Iceland to record him. he came on after the track was recorded and we had been searching far and wide with somebody we thought could bring the wonderful energy he did to it. I think it was exciting for him to be able to do something that was somewhat out of his normal wheelhouse as well.
I would say another important player for the score was John Hassell, a trumpet player who has a completely unique approach to the trumpet and I liked the slight resonance of jazz that the trumpet would bring. There's an otherworldly quality to what he does that was very much a part of the color of the score. There's also a lot of piano as well, and a lot of atmospherics and strange instruments that I was playing, and other contributors. Like Fred Frith, whom we brought in at a session. He doesn't show up a lot, but there's a couple of moments of tension in the score that Fred did some strange things. It was like he played his guitar with a paintbrush. Both he and John come from the experimental side of music so it was a pleasure to get them to do sessions that ended up in the score.
Would it be fair to say that the music for this film is quite different from your previous work?
Yeah. I did a synth record over the summer, I did an indie covers record before that, an indie rock record before that, and the prior soundtrack was deliberately cheesy eighties rock. As a songwriter, I don't think about genre as much as maybe other musicians. For me, it's all music. I have a fairly broad range of interests. Working on this film certainly meant going for a wider experience in terms of what the filmic experience would be. But the music-making itself was not any more challenging than anything else I've done. Finding it a meaning and getting this film right with Ari was the challenge, and an interesting and explorative process.
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