COMPOSER PIANIST AND PRODUCER ASGER BADEN
Asger Baden
A wide and vast musical room, built from improvisation, prepared piano, and happy accidents.
If the Music Stops They'll Eat Him Up is the album by Danish composer and pianist Asger Baden. Across its nine tracks it conjures a sense of mysterious, highly visual storytelling, as you might expect from a composer whose music has reached the screen, from Breaking Bad to The Wolfpack.
Baden studied piano and keyboards at Copenhagen's Rhythmic Conservatory, and his compositions embrace the natural qualities of traditional instruments while pushing at their physical limits. It is as if he were painting a wide and vast musical room, inviting the listener to explore its every nook and cranny: soft percussive footsteps in the background, the whispering rumble of synthesizers just in front, the frail conversation of strings happening to the side.
Antakly Projects · Music & Nights · Copenhagen
From the world of If the Music Stops They'll Eat Him Up.
Asger Baden is a Danish composer, pianist, and producer living and working in Copenhagen. He works as a film composer, and although he loves and needs the challenge and self-forgetfulness of serving someone else's vision, the most important and rewarding part of what he does is his own music. Those are the projects where his curiosity is the catalyst, and where he can be the boldest.
That curiosity has carried his music into wonderful productions, from Breaking Bad and The Wolfpack to a recent sync in the Netflix series Cowboy Bebop. He has also been wrapping up an EP with a long-time idol, the Swedish singer-songwriter Jenny Wilson, a more electronic companion to his latest album. And, as he happily reported, his third child, a daughter, had just been born, catching him in a wonderful blurry state of sleep-deprived bliss.
Follow him on Instagram.
Tell us a bit about your greatest inspirations or influences?
Oh, and Asger, we love the film The Wolfpack, by the way. Such an emotional journey that was.
My inspirations are so many and ever-changing. Of course, there are a lot of obvious musical ones. Everything from Krzysztof Komeda, Prokofiev, The Cure, Bernard Herrmann, Syd Barrett, Nick Cave, Serge Gainsbourg. The list goes on and on.
On my last couple of records, I've been playing around a lot with plucked and hammered piano and autoharp strings. I love the indefinable, timeless and folklorish feel this gives me. This fascination came about partly by listening to a bunch of Hungarian cimbalom and dulcimer music, but the piece Experiment in Terror by Henry Mancini played a big part as well. It revolves around the autoharp, which is strummed but also, more unusually, plays the melody by plucking the strings. The contrast between the sharp, small sound of the autoharp against the orchestra is totally magical to me and blew my mind the first time I heard it.
But I really get a lot of inspiration through my eyes. Countless times a day I find some random clip that appeals to me on YouTube, mute the sound, and listen to the music I'm working on while watching it. That always gives me all sorts of epiphanies and ideas on where to go and what to do.
Yesterday in the studio I used some clips from the Swedish director Roy Andersson's films, which inspire me a lot. I adore the way he creates these one-shot tableau scenes that are at the same time so poetic, depressing, full of humour, repulsive and strangely captivating. But a drone shot of a city or a forest can work wonders too.
Tell us a bit about your creative process?
My creative process changes a lot, but these days I want to pursue a way of writing where the sounds and their sonic qualities are just as important as the actual notes and melodies. I want to be open to the quirks, random incidents and happy accidents, rather than being totally focused on the composition in a conventional sense.
The work with a piece usually starts out with recording a lot of improvised performances with myself and other musicians. I love having the piano as a starting point but challenging the sounds a piano can make, for example by plucking, picking and hammering piano strings, or bowing them with fishing wire. I press record and do long stretches of improvisations. I really enjoy this part, it is extremely meditative. Then I cherry-pick the best moments of these recordings, heavily edit, re-arrange and dub them with new recordings. It is like harvesting ideas from a vast field of improvisations, chasing and nurturing the most beautiful moments. Once I've done this first layer, I add more until the music finds its form.
Sometimes I might write a composition around an improvised soundscape that ends up being almost edited out. For instance, the track Nobrac Naked, where the main part of the piece is recorded with a conventional string symphonic orchestra in Prague's great concert hall, the Rudolfinum. In this case, the exploration of soundscapes and samples serves just as much as a canvas and as a means to reach the end goal.
What do you love about working with other musicians?
I love working with other musicians. The blessing of collaborating is kind of paradoxical. On the one hand, there's the competitive element which can be really fruitful, the Lennon and McCartney syndrome, where you really up your game to come up with your best stuff. But on the other hand, the collaboration element is also liberating and relaxing, in that it frees you from the heavy load of constantly doubting yourself to pieces, because you are in it together and can pick each other up and move on in those difficult times that always come in a creative process.
The challenge, of course, is that you sometimes have to meet half way and compromise when you see things differently. On my new album I was on my lonesome, and for me that always causes a lot of struggles in terms of torturing myself with doubts. I think that's the reality for most creative souls.
How has the pandemic affected your creativity and how do you see the world changing?
I really can't say that the pandemic has affected my work all that much, neither my creativity nor the amount of work I've had. I feel almost shamefully lucky in that regard. I do play concerts now and then, and I have had shows cancelled, but almost my entire creative work takes place in my studio. Half of the time I do commission work and the rest of the time I get creative and make my own music. Every day I feel extremely privileged to have this work-life, and overall it has been like this through the course of the pandemic.
I've been very concerned for my musician friends who depend on making their living playing concerts. In terms of restrictions, everything is pretty much back to normal in Denmark, but it has seemed like people's habits might have changed a bit. Perhaps people have grown a bit more leisurely, staying at home binging Netflix instead of going out to concerts. That is a concern.
Who do you consider to be an icon of your time?
Someone contemporary who I think is consistently putting out interesting music is Damon Albarn. He started out in Blur, which of course was incredibly successful, and since then it seems he's never ceased to follow his curiosity and urge to create. He seems to just throw himself into new stuff vigorously and without compromise. From Blur and Gorillaz came The Good, the Bad and the Queen, and so on. A lot of his music is amazing and legendary, some not as much, but it's never boring, and it seems to me that he is never on autopilot even though he's struck gold over and over again. I admire that greatly.
We agree with you completely. Damon Albarn is iconic for us musically as well. We love him.
What does wellbeing mean to you, and what do you practice?
Last year I bought a summerhouse in the countryside, by the lake where I grew up. Being a country boy, and after living in the city for twenty-odd years, it's amazing to have this getaway back to nature. It's a really strange little house built by an artist couple back in the fifties. It looks like a mix of a hobbit house and a mountain cabin in Switzerland. The lake is the cleanest in Denmark, and we share a bathing pier with neighbours.
"Jumping in the lake first thing in the morning, summer as well as winter. This is wellbeing for me."
Our Composers Archive
More brilliant conversations with composers →A conversation with Asger Baden for the Antakly Projects archive. Follow him on Instagram.
Part of the Antakly Projects music and nights archive, conversations with the people scoring our world. Explore the composers archive.
Stay curious,
