Ahead of his show at the Perth Festival, we caught up with Icelandic composer and musician Ólafur Arnalds to discuss his latest album, 2013’s For Now I Am Winter and get a glimpse into his creative process.
How are you, how’s the jet lag?
Not too bad, my head feels a little bit foggy, but I haven’t been waking up in the middle of the night. But it’s better to Perth; it’s only 8 hours as opposed to the 11 hours in Sydney.
Small mercies. How are you finding Perth so far?
It’s really warm! It’s really hot here. I haven’t really done much exploring yet. We had a rehearsal yesterday and we have the show today. But tomorrow we have a day off here, so I’m going to have a walk around and see.
You’re only with us in Australia, with a fairly short time again, do you have anything you want to see or do whilst you here?
We do have a little bit longer this time. After the Melbourne show, which is on Sunday or Monday, I think, we have five days before our first show in Japan. So I’m going with my crew, we’re going to fly to the Gold Coast and have a little holiday on the beach.
Nice. Yeah you’ve just come off tour in Europe as well, you must be due a break.
Yeah, just last week we did five shows in the Netherlands, where we toured with a full orchestra, as part of a touring festival called Cross Links. That was really great.
I saw some photos online just before they looked like they were quite big shows?
Yeah, I think in Europe we tend to do quite big shows, but particularly this one was really beautiful big concert halls and venues; with a thirty piece band on stage. It was amazing.
Do you prefer those larger shows? Or would you rather something a bit more intimate?
No, not really. I like having a mix of both. I mean both have their pros and cons. These big orchestra shows, they are really amazing in the way that there is a big production, great light show and visuals. But it lacks the intimacy of a smaller show. Whilst the smaller shows lack a bit of the production quality of the bigger shows. So I like doing a mixture of both, it keeps me fresh and excited about things.
Now one thing I’ve always wondered is how you went from being a heavy metal drummer to a neo-classical composer – it doesn’t seem the most straightforward of career progressions.
I don’t know if I can call it a progression. I have a lot of interest in many different types of music. And I still do, and I always did. It’s a progression in the music that I make, but not necessarily a progression in the music that I am interested in. I think I automatically got sucked into this, what I’m doing now, because of accident success I guess (laughs) and I ended up doing this as a career. If I got very successful on the other thing, I could have just as well ended up doing that.
Do you ever feel like going back to it? Just for a change?
Yeah, sometimes I get that urge to get back to my drum kit. But it’s not something that I generally miss every day. But I’d love to do a reunion with my old band at some point. It would be a lot of fun. It would maybe refresh my creativity a bit.
You do a lot of soundtracks and scoring as well, do you approach those differently to your own albums?
I have to in a way. When you’re doing an album there’s a lot of things different. I mean you’re making songs, and every song needs to have a build, it needs to have some sort of high point, each song. Whilst in a movie you might be building things up for half an hour before you get even a melody. It’s a much different dynamic because the music is there to support the dynamic of the film. And you can’t take the attention away from the film by creating too obvious melodies.
And I guess, with doing the soundtrack for a series likeBroadchurch, you could be building for even longer?
Yeah in that case you can be building up, even over the course of a few episodes. Which is something I had a lot of fun with. It was a really good opportunity to be able to revisit themes, two or three episodes later. And we had so much time to develop the ideas I had.
Which is something you don’t normally have in a movie. Normally you have about four weeks to finish the whole thing. But with Broadchurch I was working on that for almost half a year. So I had so much time to develop everything and build on those ideas.
How do you approach the songwriting in general – do you start with a general theme? Or a particular melody etc?
It’s different; I try to mix it up for different songs. But yeah generally it starts from a theme, which can be a melody or just a chord progression – or even just a sound. A rhythm, some sort of a red line, which can keep the song together, and then I start trying to build around that.
Twice now you’ve released collections of songs (Found Music & Living Room Songs) written and recorded in an incredibly short amount of time, do you thrive under that kind of pressure?
Deadlines. I like deadlines. I mean I say I don’t like deadlines, and that they give me stress and a miserable time. But in terms of creativity I think they can be really good for you. Setting yourself limits can do the opposite to what people think it does. I think it was Brian Eno that said that “Freedom inhibits creativity”. Like if you have too many choices, it’s much harder for you to pick the right one and stick with it.
I really like putting those limits on myself. And in the case of those two albums I think I was trying to get rid of my… I always tend to spend too much time on music and I always want it to be perfect, but there is no such thing as perfect. And when you spend too much time on it, trying to polish every little detail, the music can end up losing a lot of the essence and the soul of the music. By doing something in a day it is much more intuitive. Even though it’s not perfect.
I can barely listen to any of those songs on those albums, because I want to change everything about them (laughs) but for some reason they are some of my most successful songs. I think it’s because they have some of the pure soul in them, or whatever you call it.
So when it comes to playing those songs live, do you find yourself polishing them up, doing some of the things you might have done if you had more time?
Yeah I do actually. Those songs have definitely developed through touring. I don’t change the songs, but there are little bits that I would have probably done in the studio, if I had spent another day on it. It’s little things like expressions or maybe a tiny bit longer ending. It’s little things that you end up doing when you spend an extra day in the studio.
And with your new project Kiasmos you’ve remixed one of the songs of you’re latest album, is this something you want to do more of?
Yeah I think this year I’m going to focus a little bit more on that project. It’s a collaboration project between me and a friend. I’m thinking I want to take a little bit of a break from the classical thing and try and get inspired by different kinds of music this year. It’s definitely something I want to do more of.
For Now I Am Winter has been out for about a year now, what has the reaction to the album been like so far? Mostly positive?
Yeah. Mostly so I think. I’m pretty happy with the reaction. It’s more polished and crafted than my previous albums. It’s the opposite of Living Room Songs and Found Songs. I was a bit worried. It can take a few listens to really get the album. I’m happy how people have taken the effort to listen to it with full attention, and I think then you can really like the songs.
I must admit, one of the best things about preparing for this interview, was getting to listen to the album again and rediscovering some of those songs.
Did it stand the test of time?
I think so, it’s definitely still one of my favourite albums of last year.
Great. Happy to hear it.
What was the inspiration behind the record? What was it that started it all off for you?
It took quite a while to start it all off. I was quite lost at the beginning thinking about what it was that I actually wanted to do. I think the main kind of inspiration behind the decisions I took when making the album; the decision to bring in the orchestra, the decision to try working with vocals, was this need for me to do something new in my career. To reinvent myself in some small way. And in the process to learn something new.
I’d been doing so many soundtracks in the meantime, and the album before this, that I felt like I was starting to repeat myself a bit, and that I needed to step outside of the box and learn something new. That was the idea behind pretty much every decision on that album: What would I not usually do?
Was there a long gestation period before you can get started then?
Well it doesn’t really work that way for me. I don’t usually write first then record. I have a studio and I write in there, so I usually record as I’m writing and then re-record at the end. But yeah it was quite a long process of writing it. I think perhaps with recording it and mixing it, it was nearly a year. Which is very long for me, compared to these seven day recordings (laughs).
When I listen to it, I do hear that mixture of the classical elements and then the more electronic moments – was that something you were always aiming for? And is that the direction you’re moving in?
I think it was something I wanted to do more of on this album. I wanted to break up the sound of it. I had been working on a lot of electronic stuff in the previous months, starting this Kiasmos project, and producing a lot of artists that use electronics. So at the time of starting to write this album I was very interested and inspired by electronics.
What’s next? Are you going to finally have a break?
That was my plan, but then a few interesting projects came up. Broadchurch is going into Season 2 next year, so we’re working on that this year. And there are a couple of movies that we are working on this year as well. A few interesting shows in the summer as well, so a little bit of everything I guess. But I hope to be able to take some sort of a break sometime this year. It’s been almost two years now without a break. But I like it.
Well I’ll leave it there, thank you very much for having a chat with me, and enjoy the show tonight.
No worries, my pleasure, enjoy the show.
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Catch Ólafur Arnalds at the Melbourne Recital Centre on Monday February 24.
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