I sometimes wonder how what I’ve learned during the past two decades could be utilised to achieve something new with it.
Imagine you’ve had a vague idea of a different kind of music, and suddenly you discover that people have been doing this for decades! So after my third year of study at The Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, Denmark, I went to study electroacoustic composition with Denis Smalley at City University in London.”Īndersen continues: “Leaving the orchestra behind wasn’t an active decision, it just happened. “Getting acquainted with the electroacoustic music and writings of Denis Smalley and Trevor Wishart was a huge revelation to me, and pivotal to the switch. Eventually the sound collages became more interesting than the transcriptions and I had to question the purpose of involving the orchestra. “Initially, I created simple sound collages that would serve as the source for orchestral transcriptions, but at some point I started to work more creatively with the sound collages themselves, processing and sculpting the sound sources, etc. Working with scores, I was inspired by spectral composers such as Tristan Murail and the idea of translating recorded sound into musical performances." He explains: “I have always been interested in musical properties beyond melody and harmony, beyond the time and pitch grid of the score. Ī repress of the Control double LP is, at the time of writing, available to pre-order at (and may also be available through some third-party retailers.)įans of his work may be surprised to learn that Andersen studied traditional ensemble/orchestral composition at a conservatory before taking a left turn into the study of making music from everyday sounds, known as 'electroacoustic composition. You can stream and buy the Control original soundtrack on all major digital platforms including Spotify and Apple Music. We chatted to him about that marriage of audio and music, his allegiance to the dark side, and how in-game architecture affects his work. We like to think of Andersen as being as much of an audio consultant - and a spooky noise scientist! - as a composer, such is the depth of his knowledge about sound beyond traditional music. And, in somewhat of a betrayal of the purity of the mononym, he is also working on audio and music for the upcoming Braid, Anniversary Edition. In particular, Playdead ( LIMBO, INSIDE ) and Remedy ( Control ) enlisted the sonic skills of Martin Stig Andersen, as well as MachineGames with its rebooted Wolfenstein series. It is among the moodier mononymic indie games of the 2010s that a Danish dark wizard of sound emerged, collaborating with developers that prized atmosphere above all else. On the indie side of things, there’s been a long-running counter-trend towards mononyms, including a resurgence around the time of the post-2008 indie game explosion ( Braid, FEZ, etc.) which wasn't new, of course ( Myst, Elite. We all know the AAA video game industry has a chronic problem with franchise naming, getting all in a tangle with subtitles, colons, and quirky variations of ‘Edition’. Laced With Wax caught up with the Danish composer and game audio specialist who played a large part in creating some of the moodiest games scores and soundscapes, including LIMBO, INSIDE and Control.
0 kommentar(er)
