Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
128 M PS E . O R G spin around yourself. It's not like the sounds are flying around you. I want you to be more enveloped in the room. So, I like to use multi- channel ambience recordings, because if you just take a stereo sound and spread it out, it's going to sound really strange. I want to be surrounded by sound that has detail all around it. PA: I would like to go back in time and ask you about where your fascination with sound started? MSA: It was probably as a child. I can't quite remember how old I was, but I was probably only 3 to 4 years old. My parents gave me a tape recorder, which I found out could do different things. Slow things down. Reverse things. I played around with that a lot. I also started music school quite early, already at the age of 3. My parents thought I was good at singing, and my aunt discovered that I was absolutely fascinated when I heard classical music on headphones. I started with something called musical playgroup and ear training and then later, I got piano lessons. During my childhood, I also played a game where I made my own radio station. I had several reel-to-reel tapes where I recorded sounds from one tape to another. So, that was a big part of my childhood. PA: Several years later, you got accepted into the Classic Music Conservatory in Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city? MSA: Yes, but before that, I played a lot in bands when I was young. I did almost nothing else. I had this ambition that music should be my hobby, and then I should find something else to do. But I never found anything else. For a number of years, I basically lived in my rehearsal room with a small control room, where I had a mattress under the mixing desk. For a couple of years, I didn't really do anything else but play music. At some point, I decided to apply to the conservatory. I spent two years learning what it took to get in. I remember feeling limited not least by the fact that so much of the music I played in the band had a 4-4 time signature, and when I was making compositions from sheet music, I could experiment a lot more. PA: It seems like you've always been looking for the next big challenge, the next thing you haven't tried before. You played in a rock band, but then went on to the classical conservatory, and when you had been there for a while, you decided to leave behind the classical sound and aiming to learn and explore a more electroacoustic sound which brought you to London to study more. MSA: Yeah, I started making pieces that combined live performance and electronics. Typically, it was something like working with a musician and doing some improvisations. It's actually very similar to what I still do today. I used the material from the musician and processed it and organized it into a sequence. And then it was played by the musician while the electronic elements ran in the background. Although, of course, I was told by the conservatory that you couldn't compose for a particular musician! But it worked out very well. I ended up studying in London for five years. It was a programme where you did two-thirds music and one-third writing. And I never really got the writing done. But I actually ended up studying for almost 10 years in total. I studied with electroacoustic composer Denis Recording session for the game Back 4 Blood–sound goes into the bucket via the transducer so that it is rattling together with the record player