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Molek FMÓlafur Arnalds: Winter is Coming
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What about your music videos, are you involved in them heavily? We sense some auteurship to them…
Oh, yes. Very much! I like to keep my hands in everything. The idea is not always necessarily mine, but I always try to oversee the whole process and try to keep it as closed to me as possible so that the music video can seem like it’s coming from me even though it’s not my music video in a way.
Everything coming from you is personal in that way…
Yes. I think that’s important that the music videos don’t seem like I just hired someone to do it and they just did something. I have a lot of music videos, they need to feel like they all belong to the same work.
You were quite the rock’n’roll kid growing up and you played the drums for a few metal bands before going back to classical music. Ever thought of doing that again?
I’m not planning it, but never say never.
Curiously, why were you in metal bands before this? Was it out of convenience or did you love the genre?
It was something that I love. I really a lot of types of music and I like to experiment with all kinds of music. I’m fascinated by these extreme genres just as much as I am fascinated by classical music.
Beyond film scores, was there anything else that pulled you back into making classical music?
Well, I had always been doing classical music even when I was playing in metal bands, I was still writing and being interested in that music. I guess after I made the first solo record a few years ago, it became a little bit successful, then this – what I am doing now – just took over and I had to leave the other things behind to concentrate on this. I started touring, there was pressure to make more records, and I had a record label and all that.
The album was recorded with a full orchestra, but when you do your music live, there’s much less people on stage to perform with. How does the album’s sound translate from a full orchestra to 3, 4 people on stage?
I just bring the song back to their basics. All those songs were small before I started stacking stuff on top, I added an orchestra, this, and that. If you go backwards in time, in their bare essentials, the songs are very minimal. It’s actually not such a difficult thing to translate them live with a small band. Also, I don’t believe when I’m playing live I should be trying to make the sound like on the record, because it’s not the record, it is a live setting. It has totally different rules. When we are in a room with all those people, the most important thing is to connect with them and play a set that has a nice buildup and arc rather than playing a collection of songs that are on the album. I don’t hesitate to change the songs if I have to make adjustments [to fit the set], and I think that’s okay.
Fair enough. You mentioned that the songs were minimal in their bare essentials. Why did you choose to maximise them instead of keeping with the minimal route?
In this case, I don’t know (laughs). I just went for it. I had written the album, it sounded quite minimal, but the thing is it sounded like everything that I had done before. It did have vocals, it did have some new things, and it did have more electronic sounds, sure, but it didn’t sound like what I wanted for my next record. I wanted it to sound like a new chapter in my life. And that’s why I decided to bring the orchestra, to change the sound completely. The orchestra really does that, it has a totally different character to a string quartet or a small assemble. With the orchestra, you have the tools to create very crazy textures and sounds, not only playing melodies, y’know. I really wanted to add that to the album to give my creativity a new life.
Not sure if we’re stereotyping based on you and Sigur Rós, but is there something about Iceland that contributes to its output of moody, ambient music?
There are a few sides to this question because Iceland also has all the pop music that all the other countries have. It also has punk, it also has techno. Ambient music is actually not very big in Iceland (laughs), indie music is a lot bigger here. I think it’s more the way the outside world chooses to see Iceland, they seem to focus on the ambient music that’s coming out of Iceland, maybe because it fits with their ideas of the image of Iceland and the nature. However, this place definitely has a lot of special music, maybe because it’s a very small place, the music scene especially, so we need to collaborate with artistes who are totally different from ourselves. Like I’ve worked with pop people, rock people, techno people, because the place is so small that there is barely any other modern classical composers here for me to work with. So the fact that we have to collaborate with people who are doing such different things really affects how we are influenced by each other.
One of our readers sent us this question: You and Nils Frahm are quite similar musically, what would you say differentiate the two of you?
(Laughs) Nils is one of my best friends, we talk every week. We have a very similar way of thinking but also very different. We come from completely different backgrounds. I think with my music, I’m more structured, I like to plan everything. When I write, I like to write everything down with a pen, and everything has to be exactly [what I wrote]. The way I structure my chords is not like I just play them like normal chords on the piano, I have to really plan out where is the line within the chord that is leaving and why it’s leaving there. But Nils comes from a jazz background, he’s a jazz pianist. He used to work as a jazz pianist, he’d play at hotels, y’know, dinner music (laughs). He’s a lot more free in his way of writing and there’s a lot more improvisations with him. But when we work together, it seems like a perfect combination. We seem to help each other out.
It’s been a some months since your current album’s release, anything you’re working on in the offing?
Well, right now I’m working on a movie score for an Icelandic film. It’ll be out next year and it’s called Life in a Fishbowl. Apart from that, I’m just touring and travelling around the world to promote the record, still. I won’t be thinking about my next record until next year.
Released under Universal Music, For Now I Am Winter is available at all good record stores. Ólafur Arnalds is set to perform at The Bee, Publika for their Upfront series tomorrow (Thursday 12 September ’13).