Words by Jim Ottewill

Creative composer Yair Elazar Glotman’s musical travels have taken him through a rich array of styles, all ablaze with wild creativity and eclecticism. You can hear it in his experiments with the classical double bass to electrifying soundtracks with the late Jóhann Jóhannsson on films such as Mandy and Last and First Men.

“I’ve enjoyed a very non-traditional path, full of many chapters,” he says, sitting amid a Berlin studio stacked with instruments. “Each one has been almost contradictory in terms of what happened before and afterwards.” 

Yair’s musical roots might well have taken hold in the classical world but a healthy love of alternative sounds has always bubbled alongside it. The discovery of Warp Records’ ‘intelligent dance music’ proved to be a destabilising epiphany.

“It was a new language I had never heard before, full of different words and sounds,” Yair explains. “It was only logical to itself. Compared with jazz and classical music, Warp Records had and continues to have its own unique aesthetic.” Yair’s new album, Speculative Memories, a record rippling with ambient drones and beautiful orchestration, is born out of this confluence of inspirations. Ostensibly disparate, the record lives and breathes in the collision of these creative beams.

“What’s interesting for me is how nothing is linear,” laughs Yair. “Now I find myself working as a film composer as I understand string arrangements. I’m familiar with improvising and production through electronic music. All those things which, for many years, felt so different have all come together to reveal themselves as a brilliant toolkit.”

Yair began strumming a guitar when he was a young kid, brought up on his dad’s record collection and obsessing over the psychedelic rock of bands such as The Doors. The world of jazz opened up to him via the extensive library of music in his parents’ home.

“I’ve always been music mad from as early as I can remember, recording songs from the radio, making mixtapes, listening to my dad’s old vinyl,” he explains. “Originally, I started playing bass guitar, then jazz. That’s when I found an upright bass and I just fell in love with it.” It was from here that Yair “reversed” his way into the classical music sphere. But the limitations of his chosen instrument sent him down another warren of discovery.

“As a bass player, you’re often dependent on others and I found that really frustrating,” he states. “I wanted to create on my own, unrestricted by the instrument. That’s when I ran into electronic music and began experimenting with computerised sounds.”

Stemming from Yair's childhood, Speculative Memories comes close to his real sense of self from different periods of his life. Originating from recollections of his time growing up in a small village in the Galilee, but from the perspective of a contemporary inhabitant of Berlin, the record’s themes have blurred into something more abstract. Yair used these views of memories to dream up a hue of different musical moods and mindsets.

“For me, it happened organically through reflecting on how I make my compositions,” he says of the album’s themes. “A lot of the time, the projects I work on are process or research-based. But this album is far more personal than anything I’ve ever made.” The upright double bass sits front and centre of the new album; a presence that looms not just over the record, but over Yair himself.

“Many of the original ideas at the foundations of the tracks are related to the upright bass. It’s a companion and like a friend to me,” Yair says. After he finished studying classical music and shifted to electroacoustic landscapes, he tried to put the instrument aside. But its sheer size meant he was unable to escape its presence.

“If it was a violin, I could chuck it in a cupboard and not think about it. But it became this furniture of guilt in my room that I couldn’t ignore,” Yair states. “It started this path of trying to find new ways of exploring the instrument and simultaneously breaking free from it. Classical music usually involves ways of gaining power. If you’re surprised by your instrument, then it’s deemed negative. But I was really interested in approaches that would lead to me losing control.”

The record’s cast of contributors is a highly skilled and impressive one. The likes of Sara Fors (vocals), Viktor Orri Árnason (violin, viola), Mats Erlandsson (bowed guitar), and Haraldur Þrastarson (trombone) all helped Yair wrap a deep and ethereal universe around the album’s eight tracks. He used this idea of memory as a springboard to tap into musical worlds, some real and others imagined. 

“I like to look at memory as this elastic form and a concept that continually changes the closer you get to it,” he explains. “Perceiving it as dynamic and shifting was a real source of inspiration.” In contrast to these visions, Yair incorporates elements of the world around him into the album, using field recordings he made in the village where he was raised.

“Every evening when the sun sets there would be these 10 minutes when jackals would come out and howl and dogs would bark back at them,” he says. “I’d always taken this for granted as a kid but it was part of the blueprint of the sonic environment I grew up with. It was important for me to try to embrace this in the music and uncover different emotions by looking back.”

Recording using analogue tape allowed Yair to play with an intriguing take on the concept of time and opened up questions about his decision-making process as a composer. Rather than locked in the DAW, he found himself deeper within the music’s tracks and their duration.

“There is often a strong disconnect between a perspective and how much time you spend with the material,” he states. “You can make a two-hour track in three minutes so you’re not experiencing it in real-time. Alternatively, technology means you can work on 10 seconds of music for a whole day.” The tape process raises questions about how much Yair values his ideas and material. It forced him to interrogate the rigour of his sketches and if they were strong enough to carry fuller forms.

“If I wanted to add four layers of material, each of 10 minutes in length, it would take 40 minutes and led to me really questioning the value of the music,” he says. “It made the recording a performance and documentation of the decision-making process.”

Speculative Memories might well be Yair’s latest release but it comes in the wake of myriad well-received film scores. From A24's False Positive (co-composed with Lucy Railton) to Last and First Men, he’s also collaborated and contributed to soundtracks for composers such as Hildur Guðnadóttir, Ben Frost and Geoff Barrow.

“Working on artist material and film music involves different processes but they do inform the other,” Yair states. “There is still a clear distinction between the solitary art of composing your own work and being part of a team whose job is to serve a wider narrative.” 

There are also more mundane realities when contributing to a film score. His experiences have shown him how the composer’s role is as a cog in a greater film-making machine far bigger than any individual.

“Music composition in film isn’t as big a priority as other elements,” he says. “The less exciting aspects of communication, file management, budgeting and working to deadlines are more important.”

Last and First Men is a 2020 Icelandic science fiction film directed by Jóhann Jóhannsson and one of Yair’s favourite film projects to be a part of. The film, the only one directed by Jóhannsson, was inspired by the 1930 novel of the same name by British science fiction author William Olaf Stapledon, narrated by a figure from humanity’s final evolutionary form billions of years in the future.

“It was such a unique and challenging experience and a situation that I will never find myself in again,” he says. “Most of it wasn’t necessarily about music but learning about human connections and how to work with collaborators to expand my skills.”

With a career spanning between film, TV and artist material, Yair has numerous projects under his belt to draw on and share advice with those attempting to break into the compositional world. 

“Everyone has a totally different journey,” he says. “What helped me was when I was able to find and develop my own voice so I could understand my strengths and weaknesses.”

Yair’s journey has spanned over a decade of creating over time and he feels that making the most of the various projects has all fed into where he is today. Everything he puts his name on is part of an ongoing process of discovery.

“It takes a long time to refine your artistry and you need to avoid shying away from listening or experiencing new things,” Yair explains. “I always try to discover different sounds and music to challenge that. It is an arc as I always want to evolve.”

Traditional perceptions of the role of the composer are also something Yair has worked against. At his heart, thrums an intuitive urge to push against the status quo and challenge preconceptions about what artists are about. It’s demonstrated by ‘Speculative Memories’, a record that flits between identities, styles and sounds. 

“There is this romantic notion of the composer being someone on their own who has sat down with a paper and pen at a piano,” he says. “But there’s so much more than this - the essence of composing is about decision making and is based on your values and aesthetics and intuition. In that sense, everyone has different ways of making decisions - my goal is to do what I can to refine this process as much as possible.”

'Speculative Memories' is available to listen to now.