Words by Anton Spice

Sam Slater hands me a small porcelain cup. We are drinking sencha in a light wood studio on the ground floor of an old piano factory in North-East Berlin and discussing the conceptual armature of his new album. I Do Not Wish To Be Known As A Vandal is split into two parts - ‘Darn!’ and ‘Kintsugi’. Both hint at forms of visible mending, and the scarring that occurs with recovery. In this most serene of settings, I look down at my cup and consider the breakage Slater is grappling with.

UK-born, Berlin-based musician Sam Slater has accumulated credits as a film composer, score producer, sound designer and engineer over the last ten years, which speak not only to his versatility but his curiosity. He is drawn to intense narratives and “undecided spaces”, building sonic worlds with found sounds and electro-acoustic manipulation as his materials. Work for Jóhann Jóhannsson, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Mica Levi has placed Slater within a constellation of daring experimental composers, but it is alongside his wife and creative collaborator Hildur Guðnadóttir that his work has reached a wider audience. Together, the pair have won numerous awards for the HBO series Chernobyl and 2019 blockbuster Joker, and recently completed an impressive score for video game Battlefield 2042.

On I Do Not Wish To Be Known As A Vandal, Guðnadóttir’s doraphone - a self-made, self-oscillating cello - joins the remote improvisations of a close-knit group of collaborators. These shards of clarinet, bass and brass were then assembled and glued back together with the words of a climate scientist warning of stark choices ahead. The resulting work is both fragile and robust, feather-light and rough-hewn. For an hour we inspect it from all sides, locating the cracks and mends that have given it form.

Later that night I see Slater again, nodding his head to rapid-fire kick drums at the back of the main room at Berghain. It is CTM Festival and his audio-visual companion piece “Vandals”, conceived with visual artist Theresa Baumgartner, is showing downstairs. Like the album, it is made of two halves - a naked figure in a state of slow-motion descent on one side, and that same figure heading in the opposite direction on the other. Slater is excited and nervous to see how it lands within the architecture of the cavernous techno club.

In the half-light, people are laid out across the floor, propped against concrete pillars and fully suspended in the moment. With vibrations shuddering down through the skeleton of the building from above, it feels like “Vandals” has created a pocket of quiet in a space known for its noise. It has a restorative quality and one which offers a response to the album’s central question: how do we begin to repair a world that feels like it’s in a state of irreversible, glacial collapse?

Did you have a guiding principle or a starting point in mind for the album and its accompanying installation piece?

The album was composed around this idea I had of a body falling. I wanted to make one side of a vinyl that is a body falling, and one side where it's getting back up again. It started as a sort of Brexit metaphor, a self-administered faceplant, and the feeling that it was happening really slowly. I wasn’t quite sure at what point of the process I was in. Pain is about to happen, but you're not sure when and how much. However, once we started talking with Theresa Baumgartner who is the visual artist I was working with, that gesture actually seemed more available. It's all over the place. So we removed it from a specific context and just made it into this broader gesture.

The work is slow, it is emotional. It was a deliberate aim to not rest in heavy, abrasive sounds. Sometimes I think that feels safer. After the last two years, I didn’t really want to make something loud. It felt more interesting to see if I could work out how to make something really introspective and genuinely moving to me that still occupied the world of experimental composition, but without relying on smashing kick drums.

I’m interested in the idea that it would be safer to make something that sounds abrasive. Could you expand on that a little?

I don't think the world needs more safe music, so that's the starting point. There’s this feeling to a lot of the experimental stuff that I go see in Berlin that, if in doubt, you can just throw some kick drums at it. Deconstructed heavy sound design, with punchy highs and punchy lows. It will sound great on a sound system, but I don’t leave it feeling anything. And to me, there's a safety in that because you know it is effective. Whereas the thing that I don’t know when making something like this is if the audience is OK to feel sad. That's the thing that feels unsafe to me. Can you put emotions in this context? That feels terrifying, honestly.

There’s a double-sided vulnerability too. You have to take the risk and the audience needs to be receptive to it.

I suppose that's also to do with the title, I Do Not Wish To Be Known As A Vandal. In 2022, do you really want to be the loudest voice in the room? I don't know. I've been studying a lot of Buddhism over the last few years and I have slowly come to terms with the idea that maybe one should listen a bit more. This idea that you should be sensitive, open and receptive is part of the compositional process as well. To not stand around and say, “you do this, you do that”, but instead force me to respond to this input where I can't control every variable. I have to be a receptive, open and kind voice in that, rather than being someone who is micromanaging the details, and I think the result is better for it.

Having worked a lot with image in your career so far, was it important to have a visual motif as a starting point?

Yes. Finding a starting point for a solo record is really hard. I find myself needing an idea, and I like that a framework to write into doesn’t have to be purely musical. The question then is, why does this piece feel like a Sam Slater piece, and does this piece feel like a cue? In order to claim something, or mark it as my own, I need to just really love the idea.

I suppose if you're writing cues, you are very much determined by the form and the narrative of the film. Does that require a different mindset?

I think that whatever it is, I try to understand the broad sound world that I'm working into. Whether it's a solo record or a cue, that's the main question. Is this supporting the world I'm building?

And then within that world, there are tones and textures or other sonic elements that constitute its architecture?

Exactly, or a concept can also be the architecture of the world. I think it's ultimately quite a simple way of working, but what I tend to do is build a large library of sounds that I think might contribute to the world, and then test. Does that actually work? And then after a couple of weeks, you begin to see what kinds of sounds are holding into that picture, which in this case was of a body falling through space.

What then specifically constitutes the sound world of I Do Not Wish To Be Known As A Vandal?

There's very little synthesis. Dare I say there might actually be no synthesis in this record. The entire architecture of the record is actually two different sounds which are computer-generated, being re-orchestrated by various instrumentalists. The one on the first half is this granular synthesised viola. I found this sound and adored it. There is something in the particular inflection of what the string player is doing that is beautiful, melancholic, sad. For the first half of the record, I took that sound and gave it to Sam Dunscombe, who is the clarinet player, and vocalist Jófríður [JFDR] and asked them to return something. The same goes for the second sound, which is an alto voice on an old chorale that's been pulled out and processed. I then worked with Hilary Jeffrey, who is this wonderful brass player, and Yair Glotman, who is the double bass player. He is playing all of the string parts, but they’re in the viola register so they've been pitch-corrected to make sure they're in tune. You get all of this wonderful fragility and sensitivity, and I'm hoping that you just get hooked on that.

This way of working, and the concept you’re building into also seem to make the most of the form.

I was raised on 1970s prog records and I was just really curious to make something that doesn’t work well on Spotify playlists. It's a record. It's a 15-minute long piece in one direction and a 15-minute long piece in the other, and you can start at either point. I like that. We can't really promote this piece on social media because there’s a lot of nudity, and it's a challenge to ask audiences to sit down and spend half an hour or an hour watching something. To me, that's more exciting than just banging out a three-minute track.

You have worked across a lot of formats, including video games, TV, film and installation. If there's a theme to the content of your work it feels almost dystopian.

The sound design that I do does seem to lend itself to these darker environments. I think the thing that has attracted me to various projects or collaborations has definitely been about finding ways to articulate genuinely intense emotion. I don’t know if dystopian is quite the right word. With Battlefield 2042, the thing that we were attracted to in the first place was the idea that these worlds were on the threshold between something truly dystopian and something that has possibility. The Earth is going to enter that state at some point, and there is a really interesting creative approach to be taken in these undecided spaces.

There is often a tension in work that deals with intense or difficult subject matters in an aesthetic way. A sound can be really quite beautiful and yet refer to something terrible. How do you reconcile those tensions?

I think that's one of those archetypal philosophical joins. Horror requires an element of beauty. For something to be truly horrific you almost have to love it. I think that's definitely one of the reasons that Chernobyl is terrifying because we didn’t dramatise it. It's almost one-to-one. The sounds are sourced from the place where it's made. There is a real closeness there. You feel a sense of horror because it's so interwoven with the actual context it’s recorded in.

For Chernobyl, I know you, Hildur, and recordist Chris Watson spent time capturing sounds in a nuclear power station in Lithuania. It feels like this connection between sound and place is something you value in your work.

Absolutely. The story that I always mention is a teacher of mine in Leeds, who used the expression: “I don't want the sound of someone biting an apple, I want the sound of a president biting an apple.” Same crunch, but the president is the desirable recording. I became quite obsessed with that idea. And yet at the same time, when I tried to see whether the idea in the new album would hold with some form of environmental sound, it watered it down. The fragile moments became less fragile simply by putting them in an environment, and I liked how naked it felt. This totally dry voice and a single clarinet note. You just can’t hide from it.

Sam Slater’s I Do Not Wish To Be Known As A Vandal is out now on Bedroom Community.