Alex Somers on Sibling Songs

Words by Emma Warren

The sun is filtering onto a brick wall in the backyard of Alex Somer’s place in LA. It’s beautiful, although his neighbour has decided that now is an excellent time to embark on some serious leaf-blowing. Our conversation is thus at risk of being drowned out, in the kind of accidentally insensitive intrusion that sits in direct opposition to the ultra-careful compositions he brought to his scores for Honey Boy or the recent Taylor Swift documentary Miss Americana, or his long collaboration with Sigur Rós. 

We moved inside to his home studio. It’s a fair distance literally and kit-wise from the fulsome recording hub he ran for twelve years in downtown Reykjavík, which he built after graduating in visual art from Iceland’s Academy of Arts. “I was gathering microphones, pre-amps, outboards, compressors, tape delays, new instruments, and eventually I peaked with all that.” He moved to LA in 2017 and pared everything back.

He still incorporates a lot of outboard gear. “Everything I mix has gone through the Thermionic Culture Phoenix for close to ten years. It has beautiful stereo compression.” He has a Chandler Curvebender (‘really delicious’), a simple Clariphonic Parallel EQ. “It sounds good on everything you do,” he says, “it just lifts the top end.” 

He’s as prone to online hype as anyone, having responded to the interest around the Silver Bullet and enjoying what the stereo pre-amp has brought to his recording set-up. “Then there’s the more creative stuff,” he says, citing the Roland Space Echo. “If you need to fuck up a sound it’s just instant gratification.” 

His haunting and beautiful debut solo album is released today in typically idiosyncratic style. It comes in two parts: Siblings and Siblings 2. He tells us about learning tricks from Danny Elfman, how the Siblings albums began life in ice-frozen film reels, and about releasing what he calls ‘music for thin air’. 

Can we start by talking about your score for the 2016 documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time and how this links to the music that became Siblings and Siblings 2?

Dawson City is a two-hour silent documentary. Bill Morrison the filmmaker was scanning old film reels from the Library of Congress. In the 1970s they uncovered 533 reels of forgotten films, buried in the earth. Some of them frozen in tundra, some of them decently preserved. It was a dream collaboration for me to pair my music to this found, decayed footage. I was staring at the footage, trying to get to the essence of what it once was, how it looks now, the thread between that: the imagination thread and the reality thread. I had all these far-out ideas, to bury violins, cellos, double basses, let it go through one winter then dig it up. All these ridiculous ideas sound cool but are not too practical.

Those ideas led me to want to treat the music sonically. I started dubbing the music, sending it through my guitar amplifier, sending it through the Echoplex or the Space Echo, sending it to microcassette machines, regular cassette machines. Doing all kinds of stuff to let the music touch other surfaces. Let it bleed onto it, impact it, whether it’s good or bad. Let it influence it like time had influenced these films. I ended up really overwhelming myself. It’s a two-hour film. I was doing all these processes and I ended up with sprawling pieces that were really difficult for me to collage together into the score. So in the process of collaging together the soundtrack to Dawson City, I had these sibling songs. They didn’t fit perfectly, and they were either loosely inspired or very inspired by the pieces. and sometimes they sound similar. I just took those sibling songs and I was working on them in tandem, adding things. Eventually, I had a lot of them. It was a weird process, it took forever. I was always tinkering with them in the background during my other work. Finally, I unearthed it and remixed it properly at my home studio in LA.

You basically buried the music in the tundra for a few years….

The music sat there. Sometimes I’d open up one of the songs and think ‘oh I can’t do this'. Then eventually I mixed and mastered it and now it’s coming out. 

So the name relates to the family relationship the music has to the Dawson City soundtrack?

I felt they were siblings right from the get-go. I like the word phonemically. I was thinking about my brother and my step-siblings. A lot of my friends have siblings I’ve become friends with and we talk about that relationship. The word conjures the whole spectrum of never-dying love and a lot of strong emotions, relationships that are sometimes difficult. So it was a really nice umbrella for these two albums. 

I was interested that someone of your experience still has that feeling of ‘oh I can’t do this’. Tell us how you dealt with confidence issues around the release. 

With film scoring you don’t have that luxury, you just have to get on with it. When it’s your own work, music for thin air, it’s really hard. When you make music or make any art form, a lot of it is you and it’s often parts of your personality that can’t come out through your everyday life. It accesses a part of you that you can’t share otherwise. I do want to share my work. It feels fulfilling. But there’s the little devil on my shoulder who tells me that it’s not even worth sharing, that no-one cares to hear this long-form ambient music, that it’s boring. In the end, it’s OK if it doesn’t hold someone’s attention. It’s just about being true to yourself, being a bit more punk, and having a little more abandon. Sharing has its own merit.

So your relationship with the little devil is just to reason with it?

You can’t argue with ‘no-one cares’. Maybe that’s true, but that’s not the point. I don’t want to be that attached to my work. I can move on and do other things. It’s a nice feeling to let things go.

What’s your relationship with pieces that didn’t work out. Do you keep or do you get rid?

If I make a piece of music and I don’t love it, I just destroy it. I sonically destroy it. Sometimes it’s just sitting there at the computer in my mix position, putting crazy FX chains on things, re-amping to different surfaces and amps or tapes, re-dubbing until you have some warped fucked up sounds. I use vari-speed a lot, bring it down an octave or five semitones, then you have the ashes of the piece and I’ll build something brand new on that. That’s the way to keep the spirit alive.

It’s layering, building, and working with material you have?

It’s material and control. I love computers for that. Everything is just coloured rectangles on the screen and you can mould it however you want. I love it. It’s so fun. I don’t know how I would have fared in the pre-computer area. 

You just mentioned your mix position… 

I use Barefoot MM27, really good speakers, really loud, sitting in the sweet spot, and just zoning out and making decisions based on instincts.

Can you take me back and tell me how you first began making music?

My first recording experience was getting a Tascam 424, which is a four-track tape machine. Now people really adore them, but they weren’t adored back then. They were considered junk. I taught myself how to use it by reading the manual, there was no Google, and it was like argh this thing is weird and confusing, and then it blew my mind, the potential of multi-tracking and flipping the tape over and reversing it and bouncing three tracks down to one. I could make music, making it up as I went along. It was revolutionary to me. My first ambient music experience came when I got this Boss GT5, for my guitar, which has a million effects, and that’s when I started making ambient sounds. Then my brother and I got some synthesisers – the ESQ1 synth, then we got access to the Alesis Andromeda. Then we got a computer and got an early version of Logic Pro, 8.1. That blew our minds.

Even though we were experimenting with really long guitar effects chains and synthesisers, once we had Logic you could go crazy with plug-ins, play one note over and over, try these FX chains, layering new things. I worked with pretty primitive means but I was lucky to have an older brother who was paving the way, digging into new music and passing it down. The first ambient record I ever heard was Aphex Twin’s Ambient Works Vol 2. It gave me permission to make this kind of music. It’s a valid form of creation. It blew the doors open: you can be ambient, simple, repetitive.

OK, so I can imagine your teenage set-up. What about now, what’s in your studio apart from the stuff we’ve already discussed?

I have a really beautiful guitar amplifier that has a spring reverb, a Swart. There’s a lovely feature where if you turn off the volume, put the spring reverbs all the way up, it still passes level. I emailed the company, saying this sounds amazing – is it intentional? They said we don’t advertise it but it is intentional. It’s inspired by a really old Gibson amp from the ‘50s. That’s a very cool sound, like a really ghosty reverb. I used it a lot on the Sigur Rós album ‘Kveikur’. I’ve got some glockenspiels, upright piano, good old Yamaha VSS-30 which is a really crappy 8-bit toy sampler. If you’re ever fucking about and there are no good sounds in your head and no good sounds are coming out the speakers – that will always lead you to a good place.

You recently made some music for a Sean Baker fashion short, KHAITE. It sounds like it was a fast turnaround…

If I have a deadline and a frame around something I work really fast. But if you leave me to my own devices I’ll be a total weirdo and you won’t hear anything for years, literally years. The Sean Baker collab was great. He got in touch, ‘hey I’m working on this short film for a fashion brand, I had a placeholder song but it fell through. Is there any way you can write a song tonight or tomorrow morning at the latest?’ It was ten o’clock at night. I did it in one or two hours. It was a short piece, not much music. I think fast is good. Just don’t give yourself the chance to second-guess it. 

What are you tuning into when you compose for film?

It’s slightly different when you’re writing to picture. When I’m working to picture I’m not trying to do anything. I’m watching the scene and deciding – do you want to play it true, or show restraint, or be heavy-handed? You’re curating the audience’s emotional journey through that scene.

Do you have a system for making a musical palette?

It’s normally a conversation with the director. Are they really into certain instruments, is there anything they don’t like? I tend to work with acoustic instruments. I don’t really use synthesisers. I’m not against them, I just love the sound of acoustic instruments being treated and processed like synths. You can always fuck it up and make anything sound more synthy. I do have a couple of collaborators that are really good modular system nerds like Sidney Satorsky, in Toronto, who produced the Jónsi & Alexalbum Lost and Found. He’s totally under the radar, and he’s really really good.

Tell me something you learned about motifs or how you transition aspects of the story or how to move a scene on. 

Every time I do a film I learn a few new tricks. I tend to make music that’s slow and repetitive and that’s hard with a film score because you have to keep things moving. They’re like, ‘we love it but it’s too slow and repetitive’. I scored a film with Danny Elfman [Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot] which is crazy to hear myself say because he’s so great. When we were working on it, it was the same thing. He was like, this is too slow and boring. Those weren’t his words but I knew that’s what it was. He was like ‘there are no key changes’. I never change the key in my music. Not intentionally, I’m just in a world and I’d never think to remove myself from that world. That’s the trick I learned from Danny, every time there’s a beat in the cue and if you want the change to be subtle, just change the key. Now I do it all the time. I go up a fourth or down a fourth, right on the moment, they want that shift. I do it at least a couple of times in every film score, literally because Danny Elfman taught me that. It really works. I landed on the fourth with my own ears because it was the most harmonious way for me to change keys. It’s a good trick.

What can you tell me about the recordings you made recently with Rob Ames and the London Contemporary Orchestra?

Oh, that album is not coming out for a little bit. I’d made masses of music that’s quite formless and had this idea to work with Rob Ames to make orchestral arrangements. We recorded in a huge abandoned fridge, which has a 12.4-second delay. Spitfire came with 29 beautiful mics. I was in really good hands. It was an amazing experience.