Ari Balouzian & Lance Oppenheim (Interview)

Good morning.

Today we’re listening to Ari Balouzian, a composer and multi-instrumentalist based in Los Angeles. He scores films with his producing partner, Ryan Hope, and has collaborated on multiple projects with director Lance Oppenheim. We previously recommended their scores for Spermworld and Some Kind of Heaven back in April. Today we’re spinning the score for their new documentary miniseries Ren Faire on HBO, a larger-than-life drama of fantasy and succession at the Texas Renaissance Festival. We’re also re-upping their excellent, tender score for Some Kind of Heaven, a documentary about the largest retirement community in the United States. An interview with Ari and Lance follows the streaming links.

Ren Faire - Ari Balouzian (90m, some vocal snippets)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal

Some Kind of Heaven - Ari Balouzian (30m, vocals on the last track)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal

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Picking up from our previous conversation… Lance you establish these huge stakes with King George, who owns the Texas Renaissance Festival, and the question of who’s going to take over the festival.

Lance Oppenheim: Ren Faire is about power and the proximity to power. You hear variations of it throughout the series over the three episodes. Each character has their own version of the melody. It sounds different each time and becomes surrounded with strange elements that are refracted through their lived experience. They ultimately want what George has, but what you realize by the end that to get to where he is, George had to destroy so much of what’s been in his life.

George listens to Enya every day. Did you get a hold of his Enya playlist?

LO: I wish. I know George listens to DirecTV’s “New Age” mix on the daily. There’s a lot of really amazing ambient bangers that run on that channel. But on the subject of Enya, there’s actually two of her songs that he listens to daily on loop. There’s “How Can I Keep from Singing” which is in the show, and another song called “Angeles,” which we weren’t able to use sadly because of licensing issues. But I’m sort of glad “How Can I Keep” is the only song featured in the show – I really think it’s a gorgeous piece of music. It’s based on an old hymn that Enya later reworked. And due to another legal/licensing issue, Ari had to actually sort of remake and do his own rendition of the song. We were able to fair-use about 10 seconds of the actual song (which plays, in real life, literally from 7AM to 7PM every day at George’s). But for the rest of the sequence, Ari and Julianna Giraffe (an amazing vocalist – Ari and Julie have a band together named Midnight Sister) did their own, beautiful, and nightmarish spin on the song. It’s amazing! 

Ari Balouzian: It was really beautiful and took a minute to construct it with Juliana, like to do it like the original hymn but have the kind of feeling of the Enya one in the background. When I saw the edit that Max [Allman], Nick [Nazmi] and Lance had done, it was incredible. In the mix with Paul Hsu they pushed a lot of weirder elements in our version as the opening sequence moves along – that was really cool to me.

“George of Todd Mission” is a fantastic cue. Reminds us of Hitchcock, in that it contains both unnerving suspense and romantic strings. Tell us about that one and any inspirations that you can recall for it.

LO: There were a lot of things swirling around when we were trying to figure out what the vibes of the show should feel like. We had a playlist going, lots of Jerry Goldsmith’s Chinatown (“Love Theme,” “The Last of Ida”), Bernard Herrmann’s score for North by Northwest (“The Streets”). One cue we had on loop was “The Reunion / Goodbye / The Question” theme. That cue specifically felt like a technicolor dream with a sense of dread looming on the periphery. And we wanted to find a way to capture a similar feeling. A sense of nostalgia. A reminder of the Magic Man who George used to be, and to some people still is. And then, the feeling that the magic is gone. What’s left is the really acute sense of hollowness… emptiness. I remember showing a lot of these things and talking with Ari about what it was like to be around George, the idea of creating several sweeping, old Hollywood, big strings-based themes, which could begin romantically and by the end of the show curdle somehow. And he just nailed it beyond my wildest dreams!!! 

AB: That one was the first time we figured out a theme for the darker side to George – his power and how he wields it – with the main theme of it in the end. Like Lance said, it starts with this nostalgia for the magic that George created and then descends. I think also a big influence for me was the Days of Heaven theme by Ennio Morricone.

Tell us about the strings on Ren Faire. How’d you get those sounds?

AB: I record all the strings live at my studio in Burbank by myself pretty much and Neil Charles plays upright bass on a few of the cues. I’ll usually set up two mics panned into stereo and layer the tracks by moving around the room to create the illusion of people playing together. I’ve been doing it for years now and learned it from JR White, a dear friend and brilliant producer from the band Girls. 

We heard a Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 adaptation at some point. How’d you pick that piece and how did you figure out how to adapt it?

LO: Nicholas Nazmi and Max Allman, the editors and co-authors of Ren Faire, came up with the idea to use “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” as a temp track in the edit. I usually tell Ari to ignore the music when he’s watching early cuts, but when he saw how we were using the queue, he immediately sprung up. I wanted to take a stab at adapting it into the language of the rest of the score. He also reminded me that “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” was also used in an old Looney Tunes episode. Looney Tunes are in eternal inspiration for Ari… So it felt like kismet all around. I remember first hearing his rendition of the cue and literally I dropped everything I was doing, I rushed into my car and drove around for a while just blasting it. It’s really amazing what he managed to do.

AB: Yeah it just felt like the timing of it worked so well with the edit and I didn’t really want to mess that up with doing something different. There was something about like cartoon music and older noir or dramatic scores that are really over the top that really suited itself for the show. We had really developed the palate of the score at that point with the cartoon sound effects mixed in with the percussion and the flutes, harpsichords and strings etc., so it was just a matter of executing that huge scale of a piece with the tools I had been using in the rest of the score. I knew about the concept of Carl Stalling and Spike Jones making these versions of the pieces, but I didn’t listen to those much to influence it too much. The identity of the score was clear enough that we could just follow those instincts in executing it.

Tell us about the track “Whiskey Tea” which by Appraiser.

AB: Ryan [Hope] and I have been working as Appraiser for a while just as our studio and have been recently putting together an album of songs we’ve written working with a few different vocalists. We’ve had an incredible time with our band Gabriels and had just created this new body of work between my studio and some sessions at Shangri La in Malibu that felt like it’s own thing so “Whiskey Tea” was a part of that collection. Lance had that in for the sequence with the Greeks and Darla and it felt amazing so we put some of the instrumentation from the score (harpsichord, flute) on there to tie it all together.

In the final minutes of the third episode, we see a kind of fantasy montage with a gorgeous, dramatic cue. Tell us about the inspiration and composition process for that one.

LO: “The Big Nothing,” the final cue of the series, is my favorite piece of music that Ari’s ever made. I’m almost certain this was the final piece of music he wrote for the show, too. We originally were temping with Isao Tomita’s “Claire de Lune” and accidentally grew very attached to it. But I always knew it wasn’t quite right. Whatever we did here had to basically become a medley/suite of all the prior themes of the series, especially the main George theme, “A King’s Heart (The Big Hit).” It took a lot of trial and error, but we discovered that playing it super slow on synths gave us this feeling that there was a new world order at the faire… but also that everything would remain the same. That the whole thing was one never-ending merry-go-round that all of our main characters were trapped by. When the strings come in… I always get extremely emotional. We try to embody the same fantasy that everyone else dreams of… the desire to be king, a fantasy that will always like go unfulfilled for the people in the series.

AB: When Lance first showed me that end sequence, I cried. It was so powerful and crazy to me that he was able to have these people re-enact their wildest dreams of being king, knowing that it would never happen at that point. It was a big sequence that we felt we had to incorporate all the themes we had developed throughout the rest of the show in a seamless way, kind of like a suite. I made a bunch of different versions of it and landed on moving between the “King’s Heart,” “Humble Servant,” and then “Poor Little Augustus Gloop,” which was originally called “Jeff’s Dream.” Strangely, the theme from the Barefoot Contessa (Ava Gardner/Humphrey Bogart movie) was also a big influence as it has this similar beautiful, tragic but also almost comedic feeling. We had cut all the cartoon SFX for episode three since it felt like it started to move into a real emotional zone there, and all the artifice is taken away. One of my favorite parts is when the “laugh track” effect comes on when it goes back to the shot of Jeff’s face after the dream sequence.

What’s your favorite song from Shrek: The Musical? (People who’ve watched the show will get it.)

LO: I wish I knew other songs from Shrek: The Musical. But I do love “Who I’d Be.” It gets stuck in my head a lot. What’s wild about that song is that right after George finished watching the series, he called me up and the biggest, most burning question on his mind was to ask me about the name of that song. He loved it so much. I think he may have added it to his daily rotation in between all of the Enya!

What are some other scores that have come out in recent years that you love?

LO: Mica Levi’s score for Monos. Jonny Greenwood’s score for Phantom Thread. Nick Cave’s score for Blonde. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score for The Killer. Harold Budd’s score for I Know this Much is True. Emile Mosseri’s Kajillionaire score… Jerskin Fendrix’s scores for Poor Things & Kinds of Kindness. [Ed note: We interviewed Fendrix about Poor Things here.]

AB: Agree with all of those. Godzilla Minus One reminded me how good all the Godzilla music has been – love how they used the original theme in the most recent movie. I loved John Medeski’s score for The Curse. It just felt like it worked so well in the show. 

What are you working on next?

LO: I’m working on a documentary and my first fiction movie. I don’t want to forsake either of them so I probably shouldn’t say too much… I’m not a superstitious person, but when it comes to projects that are still germinating… I very much am. But whatever I do, I will beg Ari and Ryan to come with me.

AB: Really excited to get into Lance’s new movies. Ryan and I are also finishing Gabriels and Appraiser albums over the next year.