ON THE RISE
Daniel Blumberg never imagined himself composing for film. That only changed after he crossed paths with director Brady Corbet, a meeting that grew into a close friendship and an ongoing creative partnership rooted in their mutual obsession with music and cinema. Today, the English composer is widely recognised for his Oscar-winning work on Corbet’s The Brutalist, yet his artistic foundations, as he recently explained to Corbet during a phone conversation, trace back to a band he played in during his school years which he prefers not to name and later evolved through countless nights spent absorbing experimental sounds at London’s legendary Cafe Oto. It felt inevitable, then, that Corbet’s wife, filmmaker Mona Fastvold, would turn to Blumberg again to shape the driving and immersive score for The Testament of Ann Lee, her ambitious musical drama centred on the Shakers movement and its magnetic leader Ann Lee, portrayed by Amanda Seyfried. Once more, Blumberg rises to the challenge, creating a sound world that feels layered, uncanny and true to its period, perfectly mirroring Fastvold’s exploration of faith, collective life, ambition and gender balance. So what is his secret to sustaining this level of work? Corbet likens it to his own view of Japanese cuisine: “It’s four ingredients, and yet those four ingredients are reinvented time and again in very, very nuanced ways.” In the discussion below, the longtime collaborators open up about books, London and how cinema finds its voice.—CHARLOTTE ZAGER
BRADY CORBET: Hey, DB. Where are you? You’re in L.A. still, right?
DANIEL BLUMBERG: Yeah.
CORBET: Oh, it’s early for you.
BLUMBERG: [Laughs] I just woke up. I’ve been sleeping so crazy. We watched 15 minutes of [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder and fell asleep—Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. It’s a good one. I haven’t watched it in ages. It’s the best.
CORBET: It is the best.
BLUMBERG: We should do this more often.
CORBET: Well, I’m going to do my best. I haven’t prepared anything, so we’re going to see how it goes. There are a few things I obviously already know, but I think it’s probably helpful for readers to quickly contextualize. I know you had your band when you were a teenager, but how long have you been playing? Since you were a kid?
BLUMBERG: Yeah, but when I was a child, I was just trying to learn the clarinet and piano and I wasn’t very good at it. I was always in the orchestra, trying to read the sheet music at school, and I couldn’t do it. So I only really started when I was 15, when I got asked to be in a band.
CORBET: Were you primarily playing piano or guitar or both?
BLUMBERG: I was just singing.
CORBET: Oh, you were just singing?
BLUMBERG: Yeah. I ended up playing guitar because we were recording at Edwyn Collins’ studio—you know, Orange Juice, “Never Met a Girl Like You Before.” It was his studio, and he had this massive collection of vintage guitars. And that made me want to play guitar.
CORBET: Who else in your family is musical?
BLUMBERG: My brother and sister are really musical, but my parents didn’t really play music. Did you play music?
CORBET: No, I played guitar poorly growing up. My grandfather played piano and tried to teach me as a kid, but I really didn’t have a knack for it. Ada [Fastvold-Corbet, Corbet’s daughter]’s starting to really hold her own because she’s been doing lessons now for the last four months.
BLUMBERG: Oh, shit. Really?
CORBET: She’s been doing it once a week with your keyboard—the one you were working on Ann Lee with in the office.
BLUMBERG: I think you and Mona are really very, very musical. I mean, in different ways, but you’re very fluent in music without playing it.
CORBET: I should play in the second half of my life. I don’t have enough stuff on my plate. [Laughs]
BLUMBERG: [Laughs] Yeah, exactly.
CORBET: If we jump past the teenage years, when did you go to Cafe OTO for the first time? Was that 12 years ago, 13 years ago?
BLUMBERG: It was when I was 21, I think. So yeah, about 13, 14 years ago.
CORBET: You took me there 11 years ago and you’d already been playing there for years, no?
BLUMBERG: Yeah, I have these three weird moments in my life that were really profound creatively. One was reading [Vladimir] Nabokov for the first time.
CORBET: Me too. That’s why my daughter’s named Ada.
BLUMBERG: I thought maybe that was why. The second one was walking into a charity shop when I was 17 and buying [Krzysztof] Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Killing. And then the third one was going into Café OTO, because my friend took me and I saw Keiji Haino play solo.
CORBET: The first show you saw at OTO was Keiji Haino?
BLUMBERG: Yeah.
CORBET: Oh, wow. That’s quite an introduction to the space.
BLUMBERG: Yeah, it was the first time I saw improvised music. And that’s why I always love London, because you can just walk 15 minutes into a different world.
CORBET: That’s what I love about London too.
BLUMBERG: And New York as well, I guess.
CORBET: I mean, they’re two of the only cities I feel like I can really function in. And then, I feel like you and I have been speaking about films and film scores for as long as we’ve known each other, but at what point did you think about actually—
BLUMBERG: Making them?
CORBET: Yeah.
BLUMBERG: I never thought of making film scores, ever. I was introduced to film scores by you, because when I met you, you were making your first film with Scott Walker. We started talking and then haven’t stopped talking. And I remember even just going to visit the set, I thought it would be this really high-pressure environment, but you were chatting about what was going on really calmly. And when you took me to the Scott Walker sessions for the brass—
CORBET: In Chicago.
BLUMBERG: And that was where I met Pete [Walsh], who I worked with for seven years after on every project really, until Ann Lee. So that was my introduction, and I remember the whole process made me think it would be interesting to score films and put the two pieces together: music and film.
CORBET: Are they entirely separate for you? Because to me, somehow, whether you’re working with Keiji Haino in Japan or working with Mona [Fastvold] or me in New York, it all seems like it comes from the same place. You seem to really enjoy collaborating in that way.
BLUMBERG: Yeah, that’s definitely it. It was really interesting working with Gianfranco [Rosi], because that was someone I hadn’t worked with, but it’s the same thing as getting together with Seymour [Wright], the saxophonist, and working on something together. It’s just the two of you sitting, talking about things, and then sometimes making things. It relates very closely to collaborating in other mediums.
CORBET: Can you just talk to me a little bit about how both projects came together? Let’s maybe start with Gianfranco, because I obviously know more about the process on Ann Lee.
BLUMBERG: I’ve known him for years. We met quite randomly, and the day after I met him, I went and saw Fire at Sea and it was one of my favorite films I’d ever seen.
CORBET: Yeah, it’s a masterpiece.
BLUMBERG: I was just so impressed by it and intrigued by the way he was working. And I love that sort of thin line between documentary and narrative. I loved it with [Werner] Herzog, where there’s a real voice bringing us through these stories. So I just followed his work, and then he called me earlier this year to say that he wanted me to help with music at the end of his film—when the camera goes underwater.
CORBET: Exactly.
BLUMBERG: I was sort of relieved that he wasn’t asking me to do anything score-wise, because I love the fact that his films don’t have a score. But then when I went to Rome to see a cut of it, and we started to talk, I just noticed there was actually sound design in there already at various points, sounds that weren’t diegetic or from his recording setup with his camera and stuff. So I thought there was a space to try some things. And as we started working, more and more opportunities for score came up until it actually spans the whole of the film. It’s very subtle, but it was really interesting doing something so sparse. And it’s really, really different to The Testament of Ann Lee, which is full-on musical numbers and everything.
CORBET: Yeah, it’s hundreds of minutes of music and dense melodies and stuff. And to get to Ann Lee and the vocalists and collaborators that you work with—do you want to just speak to that for a few minutes?
BLUMBERG: Well, I have my drawings as well, which is a big part of the way that I work and a big part of my life. I sit down at a desk and I do a drawing and sometimes it can take 30 seconds, and that is the totality of that. That’s the full work. And one of the things with the scores, I mean, you were making something epic, and I definitely extended myself into this. The score from The Brutalist, and obviously now with Ann Lee, it was these long projects and that kind of scale. And I think that’s something that I’ve really appreciated and learned from you—working on a bigger scale. And it was crazy going on to Ann Lee after The Brutalist because it was a really epic musical project for me in terms of just the amount of people, the amount of singers, just the scale of it.
CORBET: And just the fact that it’s musically driven. I think that it’s a different responsibility to make a musical for a composer than it is to do a more traditional film score. There’s a lot riding on it because you’re part of the narrative thrust of the film. I mean, I suppose you are anyhow, but in a more literal way on this one. And what drove you to bring in Maggie [Nichols] and all these extraordinary vocalists?
BLUMBERG: Well, when I read your and Mona’s script, initially I was thinking about Phil Minton and Maggie Nichols and these two improvisers that I’d always go and see when they’d come and play at OTO. They’re seminal, legendary vocalizers. And I always like looking into the Shakers and their formation. They were praying with singing and their voices, but before they’d written all their hymns. So I was excited about that transformation. And Mona spoke about it really early, how they get from their formation to this really amazing, organized—
CORBET: Songbook. Yeah, exactly. Mona and I talked about it a lot, the fact that it must have begun as something absolutely improvisational until it turned into the songbook of gift songs in the 19th century. But it was an interesting thing because even though some lyrics didn’t come around for another 100 years, some melodies feel like sea shanties and stuff. They feel even more ancient than the 1750s.
BLUMBERG: Mona was encouraging me to approach it like I approached my song records. And with my song records, I always try and distill what the song is into as simple a form as possible so that when the improvisers come, I have the most simple core of what the song is for people to bring themselves to it. Obviously with Mona, she’s so calm and just… It was this massive expanse of work in front of us, but she’s very good at focusing on—
CORBET: Brick by brick. She’s good at that with me, too.
BLUMBERG: I felt like it was training for our future work as well, because just being alongside Mona on the set or in the sound mix, I was learning about the problems that you encounter as filmmakers.
CORBET: Yeah, that’s interesting. Because on both The Brutalist and on Ann Lee, you’re a lot more embedded in the process of the movie. But I also think that’s the reason that the scores are so accomplished, because they’re so intertwined. I would imagine, as much as possible, that we’ll continue to work that way in the future, because the scores don’t feel grafted onto a finished piece. They’re really inside of the films. And there’s a lot of work in the mix and a lot of work from you, just conceptually, to make sure that that happens. But I think that’s why it’s important that you’re actually on set, because most composers are not.
BLUMBERG: But it comes back to when I started, when Mona invited me to do my first score for The World to Come. And I remember speaking to you—I think it was late in Romania—we were drinking, and I said, “Should I listen to some scores?” And you were like, “No, no. The important thing is you understand the language of cinema.” And that was a big encouragement for me, because trusting the director, trusting the language of what you’re doing, is more important. You create these parameters and then trust the world that you’ve built for that piece of music.
CORBET: Because I know you’re a real cinephile, and we have many of the same favorite films and filmmakers. And just to jump back to something you were talking about a couple of minutes ago, one thing I think is so interesting about the Shakers’ hymns is that inherently they have something in common with a lot of your work and songs. What I love about your records is that, for me, it’s great minimalism. It’s how I feel about Japanese cooking: it’s four ingredients, and yet those four ingredients are reinvented time and again in very, very nuanced ways. So I thought you were sort of uniquely well-poised for this.
BLUMBERG: I remember speaking to you about Minus, because that was a big record for me. It was a bit of a turning point for me as an artist, and that was the first one I did with Pete Walsh, who I met through you. And I remember sending you the lyrics before I’d completely—
CORBET: Yeah, I remember that too.
BLUMBERG: You were saying how much you loved these mantras. And for me, it was because I left songwriting. I left it for five years and just made purely improvised music and then came back to songs. Quite naturally, I just heard a song that just reminded me how powerful songs could be. But I was really thinking of what made me allergic to songs for those years. And one of them was pressing the listener into a really small tunnel and just pushing the lid down, because you’ve got all these words telling you to think this, and then the strings come in, and it’s just pressing the listener down. But I like poetry and films where you can come away reflecting. I mean, the obvious one is [Andrei] Tarkovsky, where you’re left to think your own thoughts as well.
CORBET: They mean different things to you in different periods of your life. I think that the reason I struggle with narrative, and the reason I’ll struggle with songs is that it’s not usually the first thing I listen to. Whenever I’m alone, it’s very rare that I put on a verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus track, and it’s simply because I feel like when you’ve seen a narrative film once, or you’ve listened to a song a few times—once you fully metabolize it, once you understand it—it sort of dies. If I’m listening to Mark Hollis or something, the songs are pulled apart in such a way that I always discover something new about them. And that’s something I really feel about your albums since Minus as well. It’s something that you’re really tapped into.
BLUMBERG: There’s something about a chorus—that waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, and then the chorus hits, and that undeniable thing that just switches in your body when the chorus comes in. Trying to find that in our work is something we share, I think.
CORBET: Totally. Well, I’m so sorry, but I have to go on a work call.
BLUMBERG: Can I come?
CORBET: [Laughs] I really wish you could, but I love you, pal.
ON THE RISE
I've sometimes felt as though every piece of music is an exploration of our perception of time. What sparked the idea of focusing on time as the main focus for your new work?
The focus on time in this work emerged quite unconsciously.
What actually happened is that the title came last, after I received an email from John (Benedict ndr) regarding the production timeline. In the middle of that email, those two Latin words appeared, and for me, as an Italian reading them in an English context, they had an almost striking, illuminating effect.
At that point, I went back to the pieces I had written, listening again to how they had been developed and recorded, and also considering the broader time span over which the entire EP had been composed. It became clear to me that Tempo Fugit was the most fitting title to represent the work.
I've been listening to Tangerine Dream's Zeit a lot recently but that album is based on a very specific concept of time, as pioneered in the West bei Parmenides, that time does not, actually, move. What are your own reflections on time?
Time is perhaps the most objective construct that exists in nature, and yet the most paradoxical aspect of it is that it is entirely perceived in a subjective way.
At times, time seems not to pass at all; at other times, it rushes forward, or even feels as if it stops. But this sense of flow, its rhythm, its pace, is not determined by time itself, it is determined by us.
This is precisely why I see it as such a fundamentally objective dimension. It is inescapable, it is constant, and yet our perception transforms something absolutely objective into something deeply subjective.
Time is not just the medium through which music flows, it can also be a musical tool in its own right. How did you work with it for Tempo Fugit?
For this EP, I worked with time in two main ways.
On one hand, there are pieces built around a very clear and explicit temporal reference, a metronome. On the other, there are works that were recorded almost entirely without any fixed time reference. This applies both to the piano pieces and to the electronic ones.
In some tracks, the presence of a grid allows for a very precise perception of construction, almost as if the composition were being built brick by brick. In others, there is a deliberate need to remove any external reference and instead follow what I would describe as an inner sense of time.
These two approaches reflect the way I usually compose, and they are both clearly present and articulated throughout this EP.
Many contemporary composers have tried – or are still trying to make – time transparent by opting for extreme lengths. Your music, however, is quite to the point, on your earlier van Gogh EP even radically so. What is satisfying about concision for you?
I don’t usually approach composition by asking myself how long a piece should be.
When I work on immersive projects, of course, there are specific durations dictated by the storyboard. In those cases, the shorter the piece, the greater the risk of it sounding like a jingle. It becomes more difficult to preserve an emotional depth rather than just leaving behind a catchy motif.
At the same time, I find it very interesting to impose, in a way, constraints of brevity. I have written pieces that last twenty minutes or more, though they are often less suited to streaming platforms, and in some cases they have not even been officially released, as they belong to installations or more experimental contexts.
On the other hand, I also created a collection of one hundred one-minute pieces as part of a creative exercise called “100 days.” The idea was to repeat a creative act every day for one hundred consecutive days. My approach was to sit at the piano, even before having my coffee, and write exactly one minute of music.
Over time, this became a fascinating process. In the beginning, I relied on a timer, constantly checking the clock. But toward the end, I developed an internal sense of that one-minute span. Despite differences in tonality, meter, and tempo, I could almost instinctively feel when to begin and when to end each piece.
That experience taught me that duration is not something I impose from the outside, but something that can be internalized and shaped from within.
I understood that the process on Tempo Fugi was very different from piece to piece, with some finished quickly while others taking a lot of time. What is it about some works, do you feel, that makes them harder to nail down – how would you describe the sensation that something is “done”?
In this case, it was not really about how long it took to finish each piece. The tracks were written at different times, sometimes even years apart.
What happened later, when I listened back to them, was that I felt the need to create a stronger sense of cohesion across the EP. By “cohesion,” I mean introducing elements that could give more consistency to the role each track plays within the overall narrative.
So I revisited older demos that had been sitting in my archive for quite some time, pieces I still considered valid, and approached them almost as a form of rearrangement within the context of the EP. It was not about struggling to complete a piece, but rather about shaping it so that it could fully belong to this specific body of work.
For me, a piece is finished when I feel a strong coherence in the message I want to convey, when every sound has found its place, and when the musical discourse flows naturally and feels complete. It is not something I can define in purely rational terms. It is, above all, a sensation.
Since the process for Tempo Fugit was quite extensive, were there possibly overlaps between tracks composed for this project and the Van Gogh show? If so, how similar do pieces composed at the same time but for different projects tend to be?
There was no overlap. The music for the Van Gogh project we are referring to was written before the pandemic, whereas the material for Tempo Fugit dates back, at most, to about two or three years ago.
If we talk about similarities between pieces, I would distinguish between two different aspects.
From a purely musical perspective, meaning harmony and melody, it is actually more likely for similarities to emerge over time rather than within the same period. When you develop a certain awareness in your musical language, it naturally creates a kind of continuity, almost like a diary of melodic and harmonic ideas that evolves over the years.
On the other hand, pieces written within the same timeframe may resemble each other more from a sound design perspective. For example, if you are exploring a particular instrument, a specific synthesizer, a new effect, or even a certain way of miking the piano, these elements can shape the sonic identity of multiple pieces. Even choices like register or tonality can be influenced by those explorations.
So, if there is a form of resemblance within the same period, it is more likely to emerge from the sound and the tools being used, rather than from the underlying musical writing itself.
The release opens with a piece called “Repetition,” which called to mind a sentence by Ryoko Sekiguchi: “Time doesn’t pass, it returns.” How do you see that yourself – and how do you use repetition and variation in your work?
I see repetition as a beautiful form of communication, where the reiteration of an idea actually allows that idea to emerge more clearly.
The presence of a pattern becomes almost a kind of subtle game with rationality, with perception, with the listener’s intelligence. It invites a process of recognition, almost like solving a riddle.
This is what I find particularly compelling about minimalism. An idea is explored, listened to, gradually exhausted, then transformed, and the cycle begins again.
Since one part of the project seems to have been to use music to capture specific moments in time – how do you see the relationship between the moment and the music created in it? Quite often, sad music gets written in happy times of an artist's life and vice versa, so it seems like a complex relationship.
I agree that it is a complex relationship, and I would even extend it beyond the idea of writing sad music in happy times, or happy music in sad ones, as a way of balancing or compensating.
For me, it also involves the relationship with instruments. My work moves between acoustic instruments, like the piano, and more electronic forms of production, and I often experience this dialogue between emotional states and sound through them.
For instance, I might be drawn to more experimental electronic instruments during a more rational phase, while in a more instinctive or emotional moment I might turn to something structurally more defined, like the piano. In this sense, the contrast or interplay between different emotional states becomes symbiotic with the choice of instruments.
So yes, I would definitely describe this relationship as complex, but also deeply fascinating.
Luca Longobardi Interview Image (c) the artist
“I see repetition as a beautiful form of communication, where the reiteration of an idea actually allows that idea to emerge more clearly.“
