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Interview by Angela Stengel
Nico Muhly should be a pop star. The 25 year old New Yorker started having piano lessons when he was thirteen, is friends with people in Grizzly Bear and has worked on films and with international rock stars. But he's actually a contemporary classical composer, already with a long list of achievements to his name. He has played piano on Björk's album Medúlla, performed and collaborated with Antony of Antony and the Johnsons, orchestrated The Manchurian Candidate for Rachel Portman and has for many years worked with composer Philip Glass. His latest achievement is releasing his own album, Speaks Volumes, which was produced by Valgeir Sigurdsson, whom he met while working on Medúlla.
“Because I'm sort of naïve about the ways of the world, I never actually had any studio recordings,” says Nico. “I only had pieces recorded with one minidisc in the back of the hall with someone holding it and a student orchestra playing 50 yards away. The quality of the recordings was really poor. When Sigurdsson had asked to hear how my stuff sounded he said, ‘This is insane. The quality of the material is good, but these recordings are just unacceptable.’ He basically said, ‘Why don't you just come to my house in Iceland and record it?’ I was like, ‘Oh, ok, that sounds like a pretty good idea.’ We emailed back and forth and we worked on this project through the mail. It wasn't that long a process. It was a huge success for both of us as musicians and it was really fun to work on. I wouldn't say we have similar working styles but we have very mutually agreeable working styles.”
Speaks Volumes would be considered contemporary classical over any other genre, but its recording style, among other things, draws more from popular music than classical music. There are moments where you can imagine it with delicate beats clicking away underneath, and others where you feel it's going to take off into a groovy Plaid-like track of a few years back, or something more recent and folktronic. However, it always comes back to its classical roots, often in painfully beautiful ways.
Despite working closely with Valgeir during the recording and other projects, Nico is unsure of his musical background. “I think everyone in Iceland has the same background, which is that they were in a thrash band,” he says seriously for added effect. “I think as a nation they have a really good, informal musicianship. There's something very DIY about their musicianship. There's a fetish of the unpolished. Valgeir's production is based on all of these noises and intimate details of sound. I think he just had a lot of experience working with Björk and, before that, with a lot of different bands. He's wonderful and he's also completely unassuming and very sweet and quiet in a good way – for instance, I'm not quiet. The two of us working together is generally me insanely jabbering on and him listening and nodding and culling that into something beautiful, leaving the rest as kinda just decoration.”
Born in Vermont and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, Nico has spent a fair amount of time in interesting places. At thirteen he moved to Rome with his mother, a painter, and his father, an academic. It was here that his knowledge and love of music really grew. He had a studio mostly to himself and took lessons from a great pianist. While his first trips to Iceland were to work on other people's projects, he returned there for six weeks (in two separate stints) to record his own album.
“First of all, it looks like the moon,” he says of Iceland. “It really does look like outer space, but I'm told that the outback is similarly desolate. There's a sense of desolation there which is quite severe. As is the case in desolate places, there is a cosy ‘small town’ warmth to it. To be there for music is to be there for the right reasons. Everyone is like, ‘What are you doing here? Are you touring?’ ‘Oh no I'm working on some music,’ and they're like ‘Who are you working with? Where are you doing it?’ and you tell them and they're like, ‘Oh I know that kid, he's my cousin's dentist's girlfriend's brother.’ There's a tiny, tiny little scene. It's just amazing. The other thing is that they have a very serious drinking culture that is very conducive to studio life. They have beer, but they also have this gross shit which is made out of liquorice. It's really quite dreadful, but they do also drink a lot of beer.”
Recording the album in Iceland made for quite a unique experience. “The day consisted of waking up by nine maybe and then you'd sit over a cup or two of coffee and talk about the plan for the day. It would always start at the municipal baths, where you'd go and take a steam bath and a sauna and a little dip and just hang out. Then you'd come back and work the brunt of the afternoon until maybe seven or when you're so hungry that you're going to pass out. Then you make a plan for dinner and after that you drive downtown and drink incredibly heavily and regale everyone with stories from your day and they tell you stories from their day. It feels like the small town world that, certainly as Americans, we tend to forget about.”
Back in the US Nico regularly works for Philip Glass, where his tasks include making demos of compositions Glass has written for films. Nico will enter the compositions into the computer and then play them back to Glass and the crew. “That can take a couple of hours, but when he's in full-on crazy mode it can eat up the day very quickly,” he says. More recently he worked on Matthew Barney's film Drawing Restraint 9. “Working on the film basically consisted of taking instruction from Björk about how she wanted something to sound – a big, baleine wash of creamy brass, or something – and then figuring out how to translate that into something achievable in the studio with standard orchestral instruments.”
He squeezes his own composing in around this and other jobs. “I've never been lucky enough to have two weeks of nothing to do where all I'm doing is writing. Since I've been a composer I've always just squeezed it in between the cracks. There's a period of time immediately after Thanksgiving, which is in November, and occasionally it happens that you have a week free. I find it really intimidating and really difficult to get work done then. I find it easier to take a day off or a morning off or three hours off.”
Nico is surrounded by musicians and was brought up around many interesting people. He first studied piano with a Latvian teacher who he describes as “very relaxed, very wonderful,” with whom he played lots of Russian music and Bach. He then sang in a boys choir whose repertoire included renaissance and Tudor period English choral music. “Simultaneously, a friend of my mother's, a jazz musician and composer called Kevin Sullivan, was teaching me sort of esoterica about music – weird improvisational techniques, listening to any obscure thing he could get his hands on. Out of this, I developed a pretty fierce passion for music – writing, singing, playing – that eventually focused itself over the next two or three years onto writing music pretty exclusively. I took piano lessons with a man called Dale Munschy who was a Beethoven freak and he had me play a million sonatas.”
Living in New York provides him with many opportunities to be exposed to varied music and art forms. He can appreciate this after spending time teaching at a high school in Colorado last year. “It's definitely not a sophisticated place,” he says solemnly of Colorado. “One of the things I wondered was would it have been possible for me to have grown up here and felt knowledgeable and felt able to produce anything?” He decides that his artistic knowledge and passion is partially due to his parents’ eclectic taste. “My dad is like a semi-serious academic and my mother's a painter. They have incredibly diverse friends – they're slightly older than hippies – there's the crazy cartoonist and there's the comic book historian and the weird state senator; there's a million different people who are involved in their community. I think my diversity of influences is due mainly to that. More so than where I physically grew up.”
Nico studied music at the Juilliard School for composition, a prestigious New York arts school, and he also completed an English literature degree from Columbia University. He's not professionally involved with literature, but does draw on it for inspiration in his music. “For me it feels necessary to be engaged in thinking about words, if that makes any sense. I like the input in my work to be not just musical. There's a sense with composers that there's this, not incestuous but, it's like a cat chasing its own tail a lot with classical music. It's like what goes in, the same thing comes out. I've always tried to have a slightly more diversified set of inputs.”
Speaks Volumes comes with extensive liner notes, written by his friend Daniel Johnson, detailing each piece much in the way a classical album would, except in a far more approachable way that provides a personal insight into the creation of the album. “I thought of Danny because he's not actually a musician. He's a 25 year old who works in a CD store in New Haven. His fluency in the language is amazing, but also his ability to write convincing, non-pretentious and accessible program notes. Classical music has some bad program notes. In my days as a student composer I'm sure I have written bad program notes. If you go to composers' websites you can find some really crazy stuff like ‘This is a piece of music that's based on the Freudian thesis of development,’ and you're thinking, ‘Oh god, I should certainly hope it's not.’ People say things like ‘I discovered this Taiwanese pop song…’ There's a really gross kind of self-exposure that happens in program notes that I was trying to avoid. The notes contextualise the album in a way I wouldn’t be able to do myself.”
Nico comes across as a composer who thinks through all aspects of the music he creates. Obviously the instrumentation and the style, but also the recording techniques, the musicians, the audience and the circumstances in which the music will be listened to – whether that be a live performance or a recording. “There's a sense that thinking about your audience is actually really gauche – that's what entertainment is for and you shouldn't be doing it because music isn't entertainment. Well I think that is basically bullshit. I think that considering the circumstances in which you want your work heard is totally legitimate.”
“I think in electronic music the pressure to perform is most acutely felt. There's so much work done on these little details that any real acoustics get completely eaten up. That said, there are a lot of artists who very seamlessly make it happen. Björk actually, is a great example. To see her live is to receive a very spirited performance of songs you know that sound as awesome as they did on the album. They end up sounding pretty close to the album versions too. I think she's someone who's willing to spend the time to figure out how to make it work live.”
“I did ask her for advice during the recording (of Speaks Volumes), especially about the sequencing of songs. She's very wise about her albums being made up of individual compositions each with their own agenda, but also participating effortlessly in a greater structure. She also came to a bunch of the first performances of Keep in Touch, and Valgeir and I asked her for advice in trimming down the vocal. I think Björk understands that in a studio situation, composition, such as it is, does not end on paper, but rather, in a technical way inside the studio itself. She understands that technology is a tool that needs to be harnessed and made a part of the process of writing – more like farm equipment.”
Interestingly, for a musician who had always focused on the composition and performance of his music, the recording of Speaks Volumes has an attention to detail more in common with electronic producers. There is something new to discover with each listen – the tapping of an instrument that should be bowed, the crackle of electronic equipment, the reason for a certain change in mood, a delicate pan – and every sound is well thought out and perfectly placed to appear as though it was haphazardly thrown together.
Nico talks of the dilemma of getting people to understand his music so that it can be both satisfying and marketable. “If my music were marketed by a classical music label, I can imagine exactly the names and addresses of the 75 people who would buy it. I know it's everyone's dilemma, the ‘If you just market this right then everyone will buy it and it'll be awesome, thing.’ He is shocked at how explicit the marketing of music can be. “People would say, for example, ‘What we need to do is get a review in such-and-such a magazine.’ The great narcissistic urge is to say, ‘Mine is a project that has no precedent,’ but any effort you make is going to fall in the footsteps of other things. The question is what footsteps and who understands it the best to give it a good chance. That said, Valgeir, is a non-classical musician who heard what I was doing and was interested in it.”
Luckily Nico has found the perfect way of releasing Speak Volumes so it has a chance to reach more than 75 people. It is the first release on the Bedroom Community label set up by Valgeir and Australia's Ben Frost. “The Bedroom Community label essentially is the tiniest boutique-y recording situation where it's just music that Ben and Valgeir like and that they want to have a stake in; music that comes from specific traditions but points towards others, if that makes any sense, rather than coming from a tradition and beckoning others to come. I think there's a lot of rock music which is proudly made for consumers of rock music and that's awesome. Then there's other music that's a little more trampy with its affections and it wants more people to come and love it. I think we're aiming for that.”
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