MPSE Wavelength

Winter 2025

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62 M PS E . O R G the British electronic pioneers Autechre that influenced my use of extreme, electrical sounds throughout the film. The soundscape of The Killing of Two Lovers was inspired by musique concrete compositions from the amazing Hildegard Westerkamp and Pierre Henry, whose work the director Robert Machoian highlighted from the very beginning. Having musical references early on in the process can for me be very helpful as it sets a tone and gives me an impression of the sonic feel of the film that the director is looking for, no matter if it's a playlist or a specific album that's being referred to. The director I've worked with the longest, the Danish filmmaker Christina Rosendahl, has always been very much into music and she and I were actually going to concerts together before we started making movies. The two of us have been influenced by a lot of different music but on the last couple of feature films, we've been very much inspired by some of the radical sonic experiments that Kanye West— who is both a madman and a genius—did on the album Yeezus. We sometimes say, "What would Kanye do?" when we're working on a sequence. It's a way of saying: Let's be more bold and crazy and unconventional. There are so many conventions in film sound and it's nice to try and break a few of them now and then. series from recent years, like Sound of Metal, Son of Saul, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Zone of Interest, Hunger, Memoria, Nine Days, You Were Never Really Here, The Quiet Girl, and The Underground Railroad, are all incredible sonic experiences, often because they are more based on atmosphere and emotions than words and dialogue. As Coppola once wisely said: "Remember that the best human moments are expressed without dialogue." Apart from movies, I'm also very inspired by music. In a way, I try to approach my sound design as music and think a lot about rhythms, tonalities, and textures when building my soundscapes. I think it comes from constantly listening to new and old music in many different genres—I draw a lot of inspiration from that. There is so much terrific, innovative music out there. I love how musicians can nowadays release raw, experimental stuff directly and don't need to wait for any kind of big promotion and distribution as opposed to the movie world where the production budgets are much bigger and getting things properly distributed is much more cumbersome. I'm regularly inspired by some specific musicians for certain films and often you wouldn't immediately connect the music with the movie but for me, the connection is clear. For Evil Dead Rise, for example, I was very inspired by the band Low and its radical use of distortion and also by The Idealist sound team at Skywalker Ranch: Peter Albrechtsen, Mikkel Nielsen, Heikki Kossi, Lars Ginzel.

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