Brian Reitzell

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You might not know Brian Reitzell's name, but you probably know his work. As the music supervisor and composer for most of Sofia Coppola's films, he's worked with the French electronic duo Air on The Virgin Suicides, coaxed My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields out of retirement for Lost in Translation, and placed Frank Ocean and Kanye West alongside Can and Sleigh Bells for The Bling Ring. He's also composed scores for other films, television, and video games that showcase his formidable skills as a performer and arranger of evocative (and frequently unidentifiable) sounds. Amid the ruins of a collapsing industry, Brian is the rare musician who's found a way to thrive, and to do it by making and curating music that isn't bound to pop or Hollywood conventions.

Brian began his musical career as a drummer, playing for the mischievous grunge-wavers Redd Kross, and later for Air, with whom he worked on their album 10,000 Hz Legend. He's kept these collaborations going through much of his film and television work, often sharing credit with handpicked collaborators: he scored Friday Night Lights with Texan post-rockers Explosions in the Sky and Stranger than Fiction with Spoon's Britt Daniel. He also released the first new music from Talk Talk's Mark Hollis in more than 15 years as part of the score for the Gus Van Sant produced TV serial Boss. Most recently, Brian's been scoring NBC's baroque cannibal melodrama Hannibal, which he's turned into an experiment in frightening sonic textures, including bullroarers, bowed percussion, and a bizarre synth called the Swarmatron. His 2014 album, Auto Music, is a great example of corralling different players and setting mood as well.

Entering Brian's studio, in a converted apartment building north of Los Angeles' Griffith Park, is a little like visiting a Solaris-model space station. Towers of analog outboard gear seem at home beside a dismantled upright piano; an adjoining room is piled with stacks of cymbals and ancient-looking bronze percussion. There are days when he enters and leaves in the dark. The studio is equipped for a hermetic existence, with a well-stocked fridge and shelves lined with books and films, one of which is usually playing on the big screen above his mixing desk when he's not tracking to picture. When I visited, Brian started the day by playing Toru Takemitsu's mind-bending score for Rikyu through his surround sound monitors. "There," he said. "What else do you want from music?"

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You might not know Brian Reitzell's name, but you probably know his work. As the music supervisor and composer for most of Sofia Coppola's films, he's worked with the French electronic duo Air on The Virgin Suicides , coaxed My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields out of retirement for Lost in Translation , and placed Frank Ocean and Kanye West alongside Can and Sleigh Bells for The Bling Ring . He's also composed scores for other films, television, and video games that showcase his formidable skills as a performer and arranger of evocative (and frequently unidentifiable) sounds. Amid the ruins of a collapsing industry, Brian is the rare musician who's found a way to thrive, and to do it by making and curating music that isn't bound to pop or Hollywood conventions.

Brian began his musical career as a drummer, playing for the mischievous grunge-wavers Redd Kross, and later for Air, with whom he worked on their album 10, 000 Hz Legend . He's kept these collaborations going through much of his film and television work, often sharing credit with handpicked collaborators: he scored Friday Night Lights with Texan post-rockers Explosions in the Sky and Stranger than Fiction with Spoon's Britt Daniel. He also released the first new music from Talk Talk's Mark Hollis in more than 15 years as part of the score for the Gus Van Sant produced TV serial Boss . Most recently, Brian's been scoring NBC's baroque cannibal melodrama Hannibal , which he's turned into an experiment in frightening sonic textures, including bullroarers, bowed percussion, and a bizarre synth called the Swarmatron. His 2014 album, Auto Music , is a great example of corralling different players and setting mood as well.

Your studio is on fire. You can save three pieces of gear. What are they?

Ha! Well, honestly, my red Noble & Cooley snare drum, which I bought when I was 20. I had to borrow money to get it, and I slept with it in my bed for like a month. It's been so good to me, for so long. Then there's a cymbal I have that belonged to Paul Humphrey, who played with Charles Mingus, Dusty Springfield, and Joe Cocker. It's a Zildjian from the 1940s, I think, and it sounds like no other cymbal I've ever heard in my life.

What's it like?

When you hit every other cymbal, there's always a fundamental note , an overall tone, that's kind of there, regardless of how hard you hit it. But with this cymbal, every time you attack it, the fundamental is slightly different. It's the most living -sounding piece of metal I've ever heard in my life. It can be the funkiest ride cymbal bell or the most wonderful white noise wash, all at once. The third object would be my Linn LM-1 drum machine. It's a monster. They only made 500 of them, and I have number 40. I'd have to save it.

You've answered this from a museum's point of view. Maybe I should have said that you have to make a record tomorrow.

That's a very different question! If I had to make a record tomorrow and I could only use three pieces of gear — from here? And only those pieces?

Well, not necessarily, but the things that would be most important for you to make the sounds you wanted to be able to make.

Well, again, it would probably all be instruments, because as much as I love technology, I think all that stuff is replaceable. Or, if you lose it, maybe you're not meant to use it anymore. I try not to be too reliant on any one effect, one sound, or one process — or I'm screwed, you know? Though if I could leave here with my Trident Fleximix console, my Nagra 2-track, and one of my Neumann mics, then I guess I could actually do the record.

How did you learn to listen to music?

As a kid I used to fall asleep to music every night. I took the heads off a bass drum and I mounted two car stereo speakers inside. I put my pillow inside of that so I could sleep with this stereo image above me.

How old were you then?

Twelve.

What were you listening to?

Led Zeppelin, Queen, Black Sabbath, and my parents' records... The Beatles, Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed ; the one they did with the London Symphony Orchestra. The Who's Tommy was the first record I remember really loving.

Do you remember what drew you to it?

Well, come on; it was "Pinball Wizard." And the artwork. I didn't see the movie until much later, and I didn't like it as much. The stories are actually quite appealing to kids, with the wacky uncle and cousin Kevin; all that stuff was really funny to me. It was way more interesting than, you know, The Jungle Book . Which I love — don't get me wrong!

A lot of the music I loved as a young teenager had a frightening, but alluring, quality to it. Like Pink Floyd; their music hints at a spooky world of drugs, depression, and violence, but it's almost never explicit.

I think children are very enticed by dark, seedy things they don't really understand — but they know there's an energy there.

Speaking of darkness, you've made a lot of scary music, certainly for Hannibal , which you're doing now, as well as for 30 Days of Night . What makes music scary?

I don't think we get really scared all that often in our lives, but when it happens it's such a rush. There are a lot of ways to do that with sound. Sheer volume can be scary — of anything, even the prettiest chord — because it's so physical. There are high-pitched sounds that hurt. And there are sounds that create an image in your mind of something that's sharp, steely, and scratchy, like barbed wire. Distortion can do that; it can be like teeth. Dissonance, in varying forms, is the most cliché way to make things scary — though I find a lot of serenity in certain kinds of dissonance. But the main thing, for me, is that for something to be truly frightening, you can't really put your finger on the sound source. I think the instrumentation needs to come from a place that doesn't say, "Hey, I'm a guitar! I'm a piccolo! I'm a snare drum!" If it comes from, "What the fuck is that?" — that's scary. Orchestras can be used to do that too.

I remember talking to you when you were scoring Red Riding Hood . You were on the way to record some crazy number of upright basses.

Twenty basses. And twenty cellos! A giant section of the low stringed instruments. It was really fun for all of the players, because they hadn't done a session like that before — not quite that extreme, at least.

Was the result what you hoped it would be?

No. What we got was fine for the film, but I wanted to push things about 300% further into a darker, heavier dimension. That involves moving microphones, and having the players being properly instructed on what to do. It's hard to write that on the page, in traditional ways. Since then I've studied more; now I know I could walk into that same situation, grab the reins, say, "This is how we're gonna do it," and it would work.

That's a very expensive instrument to have at your fingertips. I imagine it's pretty nerve-wracking when the clock's ticking.

It's the best one, but if you can't properly control it, it's useless. Having a hundred pieces is great, but I made the entire percussion section sit down for ninety percent of the cues because their percussion was just not interesting sounding. So I did it all later myself.

You've put a lot of work into making your own sample libraries. Is that normal?

I have no idea. I just don't like to use other people's sounds; I like to have my own. I've created my own kind of orchestra so I can get the results that I want, while being able to do it on the budgets of the films and the shows I work on.

What's the scariest-sounding instrument you have?

Well, I have quite a few... there's an instrument that a guy up in Oregon made for me, and I'm not sure what it's called.

Even you don't know what it is?

I don't even know how you're supposed to play it; but I play it with a bow. It's a big block of steel with a pickup in it; it has these three blades mounted on it, and when I bow them it sounds a bit like three violin players. Then I do some things that add to its character, with delay and tremolo, and it sounds really scary. The other thing I have, that might be the scariest instrument ever, is this little thing I call a crankophone, which looks like something a kid would put on their bicycle. It's got a horn on it, a little round resonator, and a wire crank; As you turn it, it turns something inside that's up against a thin piece of metal. It's so loud, it's like someone is just breaking your bones into little teeny pieces — ghrrrrkkk! It's the most intense acoustic instrument I've ever heard.

Here's a quote from you: "Who needs Adrian Belew when you've got a chopstick?"

Ha! Well, I love Adrian Belew, but you can get some of those elephant squeals and rhinoceros sounds he did by bowing a chopstick.

Just bowing a chopstick in the air?

No; I put them on drums, or on a piano, or on the back of an acoustic guitar... any resonator. A lot of the what I do here involves using a resonator of some kind to add sustain and life to another item that I'm going to strike, or bend, or bow. The resonator I use most is a 40-inch Leedy & Ludwig bass drum with two calfskin heads on it.

40-inches?

Yeah, it's huge. I set it on the floor and put things on it, and then I play them. It adds this tremendous weight.

What's it like to live in the sonic and visual world of Hannibal for months on end?

Excruciating. It really takes a toll on you. That's partially due to the constant sound world that's so dark , all the time — and for me to be happy with every moment of music in the score means I have to work very long hours. The last season, after six months of that, the characters in the show started appearing in my nightmares. I haven't started back up again yet, but it'll be interesting to see if they're back.

That's not exactly work you want to take home with you.

Yeah, but I do. I can't help it.

Can you tell me about an approach or technique that worked, in any circumstance, that really surprised you?

I can tell you a lot more about the ones that didn't work. We tried to use a watermelon as a drum by floating it in a giant tub of water and striking it with different mallets, while using an underwater microphone — we didn't get anything out of that. Which was a shame, because I know that it works. I think you just have to have the right kind of melon.

I've heard of the wrong preamp, or the wrong mic, but never the wrong melon.

I think maybe you need one that's slightly overripe, so that the inside isn't as dense. I don't know! But every day that I'm doing Hannibal I try to find a new sound, or a new way to make a sound, and most days we achieve that. Which is really lucky, because we don't have a lot of time to turn these things around.

What's a typical day for you when you're working on a show?

It depends on which day it is in the show. If I'm just starting or finishing something, it's quite different. But everything in the middle is me looking at a scene and then scoring it, right then and there. For Hannibal I don't read the scripts, because I want to be right there with the audience in real time. I'll sit down at an instrument and capture my gut responses as I'm watching the show, and then I'll go back and build on those pieces.

How long is an episode?

I make roughly forty minutes of music for a 43-minute episode. Sometimes I actually make more music than the entire episode, because the music pre-laps the image. I've done entire episodes where the music never stops.

I'm assuming that when an episode comes to you there's already some temp score placed in there. Do you provide that music to them?

Yes and no. I have a music editor, Lee Scott, who's worked with me for years now on films and TV, and he starts before me. So he'll "track" the entire show, which means he'll drop in other music I give him, or pull from stuff that we've already created for the show. I like to give him odd things that interest me, like '40s avant-garde orchestral music, or '60s weird percussion records, so that I can try to play music in that style. But I work with the picture first, to get my gut reaction, and then I'll listen to what he did and think, "Huh, maybe this is a good way to go."

What's a good example of one of those that worked especially well?

There was a great one in Hannibal where I gave Lee an avant-garde church organ improv record that came out in France in the '60s; this really fantastical freak out music. Lee put it in, in this one scene, and it was so good — and I wouldn't have thought to have a church organ there. So I started there, and then went deeper and further. It's a great way to work, because the thing about this job is that you're creating with a gun to your head. I'm turning around forty minutes of music in seven days, and it's all made by hand. There's not a lot of MIDI, and there aren't mockups of any kind.

You usually work with an engineer to make the process go faster. What's the most important skill your engineer can have?

To be a purist, because I don't use a lot of plug-ins. I do use Altiverb; that's a great reverb for film and TV. But I mostly like to use outboard gear that I learned about from older film guys — like the Publison Infernal Machine. It's an early digital box that has just wonderful reverbs and delays in it. It's also two in, four out, so you can do one reverb time in the front, and one reverb time in the rear for quad, which I do a lot. These days you walk onto a scoring stage and there's no gear in there. But, back in the day, there were things like my Quantec Room Simulator, the Marshall Time Modulator, and the Cyclosonic Songbird, which is a wonderful panner that also does quad. They used that on Pink Floyd's The Final Cut .

I didn't see a tape machine in your studio.

I do have a tape machine, but it's small; it's a Nagra 1/4-inch, 2-track. I use that mostly for varispeed, which is one of my all-time favorite effects — digital just doesn't do it anywhere near as well as analog. Sometimes, because on a lot of my projects I'm the music supervisor, I'll need to record a band, and the Nagra can be great for that. I did some reggae songs, for instance, for one project, and I insisted on the drums hitting tape.

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We tried to use a watermelon as a drum by floating it in a giant tub of water and striking it with different mallets, while using an underwater microphone — we didn't get anything out of that. Which was a shame, because I know that it works. I think you just have to have the right kind of melon.

Often, as you just mentioned, you've combined the roles of composer and music supervisor on film projects. Is that unusual?

As far as I know, I'm the only one. I started in film as a music supervisor, but I started in music by playing in bands and making records. I moved into composition when I knew what I wanted to put in a scene, but I couldn't find it in my record collection, or it didn't exist. So I just made it. I've been doing that now for a long time, really since my first film, The Virgin Suicides , because I played on the score with Air, who were hired to score the film. But I was hired to be the supervisor.

So you came in through the side door.

Well, I wasn't looking to be a film composer. My job was "music;" the director was my friend [Sofia Coppola], and I wanted to do a good job for her. So anything that had to do with music, I got involved in to help her get what she wanted. And that's the role that I've taken on ever since, because it worked. Because I'm such a music geek, and I have such a massive collection of records and knowledge of music, I can go into a movie and score it without ever playing a note. Or I can play all of it.

Do those feel like different processes?

Well, in the end, you're still scoring a movie. I don't think many people would watch something like Lost in Translation and know what was scored, and what was "sourced." That was the whole point; the idea was to do it with my record collection, and then fill in some holes with score to glue it all together.

Sort of like making a mixtape.

For most of these kinds of projects, there's one song, or one band, that's kind of the nucleus of it; everything comes from that place, and somehow connects with it. With Lost in Translation it was My Bloody Valentine, so when I brought Kevin [Shields,] in, I knew it was going to work. Or working with Explosions in the Sky, or with Britt Daniel — that was so much fun for me, because it was like being back in a band, but working to picture. Now that everybody has iTunes, if you're scoring a love scene, you can just type "love scene" and a bunch of songs come up. But I stay away from iTunes; I try to go to record stores, or just look in my collection, because that process is more satisfying to me and I tend to go on weirder tangents.

You're a great admirer of Toru Takemitsu , a composer who also wrote for film. How has his music affected the way that you record?

This goes back to your question about listening. What I've learned from people like Toru Takemitsu, and Kevin Shields, is how to listen. Kevin's so sensitive that he'd hear something — you'd be in the studio and he'd say, "Wait, do you hear that?" People around him tend to shrug him off. But I could zero in on it, if he could help me find it.

Like what?

One night, in my first few days of working with Kevin in London, there was some sort of medium high-frequency sound in the corner of the room, and it was really bothering him. None of us could hear it. Kevin had everyone be quiet and listen for it; he pointed over to it, and I heard it. I realized that I could tune that out. But he couldn't.

That's surprising for someone who's known for making such loud music. A friend of mine lost some of his hearing at a MBV concert.

But you know the way that he makes his loud music is so pure . It's not using effects. It's using volume, technique, and physics. And that leads me to Takemitsu, because what I learned from him is a continuation of where I started with Kevin. Takemitsu's music, to me, is the most alive music there is. It sounds like it's unfolding in front of you for the very first time. Takemitsu didn't differentiate between music and ambient sound — birds chirping, the wind, whatever. All that stuff is part of our soundstage. As I'm talking to you, there are some people upstairs, and I can hear them walking around; that's part of my soundtrack right now. And Takemitsu's music never distracts from those kinds of events; it's so naturalistic that it just feels like it belongs there, like you're inside of it. And it mimics nature in lots of ways, whether it's the cadence of an insect sound, the rush of wind through the leaves of a tree, or a car honking in the distance. He could take an orchestra and make it sound like you're outside standing in a garden. It's just exquisite.

What are some projects you dream of working on?

My fantasy is to be able to go into a room with a 100-piece orchestra and be able to create new sounds with those instruments, with all the timbres of the orchestra and the percussion world thrown together. Because I know you can do it. I'd love to work on a film project, or a TV project, that would afford me the time and the resources to do that. It'd be great if that were a science fiction project.

I'd love to hear a sci-fi movie scored by you.

I've done comedies, I've done action, I've done horror, I've done drama; but I haven't done sci-fi, for some reason. I'd also really like to do an animated film, something my daughter could actually watch, because she hasn't seen anything I've done yet. She's eight, and she's a big Harry Potter fan. She knows that I worked on The Bling Ring with Emma Watson, but I'm not letting her see that movie!

What makes you say "yes" to a project?

I'm really careful about what I say "yes" to. It's the same as when I used to get calls to be a session drummer. I would talk to the producer and say, "As long as you want me to be me , I'll do it." When I work on films, I sit down with the director and say the same thing. If I feel like I'm in a position where, if I can't do the things that feel natural then I say, "No." I've said no to a lot of things! I could be a rich man, but I'm way more interested in this search for new sounds and new projects.