ArtistRack catches up with Michael Klubertanz for an exclusive interview and insight into his latest music:
Where are you from?
Germany
How long have you been making music?
I have been drawn to music since my childhood, picking up on piano and organ during my school time. I´ve been studying orchestral conducting and have worked in that capacity for over twenty years. On the side, my love was always with the movies. MUSIC FROM CLOUDS is my first non-soundtrack album.
How many songs /albums have you released to date?
I have written music for 60+ films for screen and TV, webisodes, commercials and sample instrument demos. To date I have released seven albums with my film scores.
Can you tell us about your latest release and the background and inspirations behind it?
The sounds of this album are derived exclusively from photographs of clouds. Optical synthesis being a rarely used device, this makes it a one of a kind experience. No synths, no presets, handcrafted sound! (An additional binaural headphone mix is scheduled for release later this year.) Carefully crafted slow noises mingle with ethereal and gentle tones and rhythms. Among the many inspirations that went into these spacious and delicate tracks, the most prominent are the ambient and drone genres, as well as musique concrete and soundscape / field recording. It´s a trip!
How did you first get into music, and what inspired you to pursue a career in it?
Music was always with me and inside of me. I was memorizing melodies of TV title songs and tried to play the piano without having learned it. There was never a question about if I should pursue music professionally, but rather in what field exactly. The work of a composer fits me perfectly, I love to bring things together and play with the possibilities of sound.
What do you think of the present music industry?
The present music industry presents a quite diverse picture. You have the really big names and the businesses behind them as well as a flourishing independent scene. If you are looking closely, you´ll find something to your taste. It´s difficult however to succeed when you don´t tick the boxes that put money into a label´s pocket. We have technical production means at our hands like never before and can literally produce great music in the confines of our bedrooms. Getting that music out and heard is the difficult part.
Who are some of your biggest musical influences and how have they impacted your music?
Being a film composer primarily, I of course grew up with all the iconic figures like John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith and all the other classics. Hans Zimmer is always a technical influence nowadays. Carter Burwell in his minimalism. And then there are the composers which go a different way, what we call contemporary in classical music, exploring the fringes of possibility. Messiaen, Penderecki, Boulez and many others have become classical in their own right.
For myself, I incorporate many techniques into my style and try to apply them as good as possible to the task at hand. With MUSIC FROM CLOUDS, I have set myself the task to go from scratch and develop my own sonic realm.
What have been some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced as a musician and how have you overcome them?
Staying motivated throughout repetitive work. Keeping inspiration fresh. Trying to play a piece that I play for the n-hundreth time as if I was discovering it just now. Not sacrificing your artistic identity to the demands of decision makers.
How has your music evolved over the course of your career, and where do you see it going in the future?
Haven´t we all learned through imitation? I started out trying to sound like famous composers. Possibly all filme composers go through the “I want to write the next Star Wars” phase. You learn a lot from that of course, analyzing and recreating. Finding your own voicee is a different thing though. I find myself increasingly interested in what is really inside of characters and situations, which led me for example to record forensic instruments for a pathologist in a famous German TV series. My favourite expression here is “finding the musical DNA”. With my cloud album, I have been looking for this in the transformation of cloud photographs.
Who have you collaborated with so far in your career?
Oh, lots of people from the classical sector, the most popular possibly was Philip Glass. Concerning film, it´s a one man show mostly, so there´s me and myself.
Can you describe your creative process and what goes into making a song or album?
I love to prepare excessively which takes up a lot of time. When the “sound palette” is there, when fragments of melodies, motifs and patterns get more and more real, the remaining job of putting all together is much easier and faster. I like to read up on my subjects, get inspiration from other fields of art and also from science and history. I cannot just sit down and doodle without meaning.
Dead or alive, who would be your dream collaboration?
Tom Waits and Augustin Hadelich. An unlikely team… but imagine!
What was the first album you bought?
That must have been the E.T. score, second hand from a school comrade. Didn´t leave my turntable for months, sharing the duty with Richard Strauss, Queen and Supertramp. A real 80s thing!
What’s your favorite song at the moment?
The grass does not grow faster when you pull it.
If you had to sell your music collection tomorrow, what album would you leave in your draw?
Can I cheat and put it all onto a large USB drive…?
What is your favourite saying?
The grass does not grow faster when you pull it.
What other hobbies or interests do you have?
I am interested in all forms of art, literature, painting, sculpture, film. The big counterbalance for me is nature, hiking and admiring the beauty of little things. And I love to cook, especially dishes from other countries I visited.
Tell us more about your upcoming project or this new project?
MUSIC FROM CLOUDS started as a vague idea conceived when looking at big scale abstract black and white drawings in an art exhibition. I remembered having halfheartedly dabbled in optical synthesis a while ago and decided to test these drawings as a source for sound. The results were interesting enough to motivate me to do more research. When I made a cloud photo with my mobile while hiking, the connection clicked.
As I like to do my homework, I first researched about clouds which made me come up with five rough categories corresponding to the layers in the athmosphere. I organized my sources (representative photos of the respective cloud types) and transferrred them to black and white after finding that this resulted in a far better and clearer sound. It also turn out to be useful to mirror the photos along their vertical axis in order to avoid harsh and abrupt
cutoffs. Ten types of cloud were then synthesized. (An optical synthesis software interprets the vertical and horizontal axis of a picture as frequency and time axis and produces sound by feeding these data into oscillators.)
I influenced the result insofar as I selected frequency ranges that corresponded to the idea of athmospheric layers as well as determining the number of oscillator layers applied to the picture.
What’s in the pipeline after this project?
There is more to come in this vein. I am at the moment collecting material for a very unusual space album, where I want to transport Johannes Kepler´s old idea of “Harmonices Mundi” into the 21st century. So, no more singing planets but rather the actual stuff we recorded out there (in so many more wavelenghts than just the acoustic range), making music out of the scientific reality of our solar system.
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