Ari Balouzian (Interview)
Good morning.
Today we’re listening to Ari Balouzian, a composer and multi-instrumentalist based in Los Angeles. He scores films along with his producing partner, Ryan Hope. They, along with singer Jacob Lusk, make up the band Gabriels. We’re listening to two of Balouzian’s film scores for documentaries directed by Lance Oppenheim. Spermworld is the brand new doc about the “unregulated sperm donation universe,”1 and its synth-led score is primarily influenced by Raymond Scott. Some Kind of Heaven is a 2020 doc about The Villages, a massive Florida retirement community, and a few eccentric residents. Heaven’s ethereal, wistful score channels Japanese ambient music and exotica à la Les Baxter.
An interview with Ari, Ryan, and Lance follows the streaming links. The trio also discuss their upcoming HBO docuseries Ren Faire, which recently premiered at SXSW.
Spermworld - Ari Balouzian (40m, vocals on the last track)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal
Some Kind of Heaven - Ari Balouzian (30m, vocals on the last track)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal
Tell us about the earliest musical memories you have.
Ari Balouzian: For me it was the Messiah. Handel’s Messiah. When I was really young, the first time I remember my parents getting mad at me, was when I heard that “Hallelujah!” I had a meat tenderizer in my hand somehow. It was my first time ever feeling that release of music. This is probably my earliest memory period. We had our little living room table, which was probably my mom’s mom’s, some Armenian passed-down thing. I was like, “Hallelujah!” and I was hitting the table super hard. I remember my mom getting so mad at me, and I didn’t know why. I ruined that table. That’s my earliest memory of music.
Ryan Hope: My earliest music memory is going to a Sunderland football match – that’s where I’m from in England. “Can't Help Falling in Love” by Elvis. It was an impactful thing, being a kid and hearing 20,000 people singing that song. I think that’s my earliest musical memory. The crowd sings that song every match. I used to go to the matches every week with my dad, when I was five or six. We had season tickets.
The score of Some Kind of Heaven is a big part of the overall experience of watching that movie. How did you come up with the musical concepts which draw from Les Baxter and that kind of imagined tropical sound?
AB: It comes from the falsely comforting feeling of the place, The Villages. We were playing into the type of movies and music that its people were listening to, like [characters] Reggie or Dennis. When you look at Dennis with his hat and the Hawaiian shirt, it aesthetically speaks to that style of music. It’s your idea of what island music might sound like. Which is what The Villages feel like, in the way it’s decorated, with the trappings of island living and country clubs. Charles Mingus is also a big influence on me. I always liked how he performed these Old Hollywood, dreamy pieces – but there were these cracks in them. That’s the feeling of [Some Kind of Heaven], when it starts getting deeper into people’s lives. The theme for Barbara was very influenced by Mingus. And then you discombobulate that style with Reggie – as you enter his mind it starts getting a little crazy. There was also this idea of a percussive element. Lance and I both really like the scores across Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies. He uses these really interesting, weird rhythms. You hear that in “Dennis on the Prowl.”
Lance Oppenheim: What was the one in Boogie Nights that he uses at the very top of the movie? “The Big Top.”
AB: “The Big Top” is a big one for us. It’s barely in the movie [Boogie Nights] but there’s a version of it online. It’s a theme that Michael Penn and Jon Brion did. It has a laugh track and other effects, but it’s this sad theme music. I thought that those sound effects gave it this darker layer, as silly as they are.
LO: Before Some Kind of Heaven, Ari and I did a short film together, Happiest Guy in the World. There were certain things I could see he was doing on that where it wasn’t quite lounge music, but he was taking the horns of the cruise ship and making these beautiful melodic passages that capture the fantasy of what it’s like for the people who are there. Ari and Ryan really get into the process – their best asset as composers is they’re storytellers too. They connect so intimately with the characters in the films that they bring an expansive feeling and universe to everything they compose. It’s the same in Spermworld and definitely in Ren Faire. Ari’s band with Midnight Sister had an early demo called “Tomorrowland,” which they did with the guy JR from Girls. The mellotron on that was the first thing that we identified for [Some Kind of Heaven].
AB: Those low trombone sounds.
LO: That song actually is in the film, or a modified version of it. That set the tone for the other stuff in the movie.
When you brought up Paul Thomas Anderson and percussion, our first thought was Punch Drunk Love and that clangorous score.
AB: That’s a huge influence. In the There Will Be Blood score, there was that one cue “Convergence.” It was a piece by Jonny Greenwood that he had actually done before for a film called Bodysong.
That’s why he was disqualified from the Oscars for There Will Be Blood.
AB: There was also a Brahms piece that he used right?
LO: Has he still not won? Phantom Thread was nominated right? He shoulda won.
AB: I read that on set, PTA will ask for percussive stuff – that’s what Jon Brion was saying. There’s this big article on Punch Drunk Love. PTA asked for weird percussive stuff that he could shoot to. Something about that always felt interesting to me. You can hear that across a bunch of the scores we’ve done.
What other scores did you send each other and talk about as influences?
LO: We’re always talking about Chinatown. Even though it’s cliche to bring up, it is the best score ever written. We were looking at the other composer [Phillip Lambro]. Los Angeles, 1937 is what it’s titled as on Spotify.
AB: The guy whose score got cut from the film.
LO: He self-published a book called Close Encounters of the Worst Kind.
[Unanimous chortling]
LO: His original score is beautiful too, even though it’s a bit more atonal. You can see that Jerry Goldsmith – even though he did his own masterful, lush score – reuses some of the themes from the other guy. On Ren Faire, we had a lot of music. Getting to work with these guys is the most fun part of the process. It’s like an added layer of writing. They find a whole new emotional way for the audience to engage and connect with the world of the film. With Ren Faire, the music is so inextricably linked to picture. It was a challenge, though, because it’s almost three hours long, and there’s music in virtually every scene. We were wondering how to define the throughline. We would come back to Chinatown a lot to look at…
AB: …the way they used their themes. With Lance it worked great because he would help direct the themes. Across Spermworld and Ren Faire, he would say try a version of this or that theme and play it. Once you have that shared language then you can start really moving. Another example of a score that’s been big for us for a while is the Birth score, Jonathan Glazer’s movie. It’s an Alexandre Desplat score.
LO: Yeah we love that shit. For Spermworld eventually it got to a place where Ari and Ryan were so tapped into a specific sound, and it kept pouring out of our score into music they would make in their band. But the places that you were starting with, you both were looking at Suicide, Raymond Scott.
AB: Scott’s early electronic music for ads and music for babies…
We’ve featured Raymond Scott before.
LO: That’s what made me think of doing something together because Raymond Scott was our starting point. We were also listening to Clara Rockmore…
AB: …her classical versions of certain things, like “The Swan.”
Which you perform in the Spermworld score.
LO: And then we were looking at Japanese ambient composers…
How much Yoshimura were you listening to during the making of Spermworld?
AB: I wasn’t but Lance was. He was sharing that stuff, and we were interpreting it in our own way. Ryan and I were playing Suicide and Raymond Scott, the more American references.
LO: [Editor] Dan Garber and I would find a bunch of Japanese ambient composers. There’s this guy Yasuaki Shimizu who has an album Music for Commercials. His “Suntory” track and “Seiko 2” are the ones we kept listening to. Raymond Scott was the obvious initial place for us because of Soothing Sounds for Baby, the idea of using synths and science fiction sounds to represent the cadence of sperm traveling. The synth could be used to capture the swimming motion. Over time it became something different. There’s one track “Atasha” where Ari and Ryan added these crazy sound effects. It almost feels like something out of a John Carpenter movie, like an ‘80s sci-fi moment.
AB: Lance is really good at bringing those influences in early on and making playlists. We start to feel it and start making stuff. We develop our own language between us. Once you find the sounds and tricks that work, the new music becomes its own unique thing, where it’s hard to trace the original influences.
LO: Even the The The song we use at the end of Spermworld that Ari’s singing on, “This Is The Day…” So much of Spermworld is melancholic, but the movie is like a great pop song that’s danceable but has a melancholic heart. That song speaks to the idea that this dream of having a child could reshape your life, and there are all these meeting points where life-defining and life-altering transactions are happening. That whole album, Soul Mining, has a Spermworld palette to it: beautiful melodies that are sometimes upbeat, and then get scaled down and go darker.
AB: We decided to use that song after a screening.
LO: My friend Eugene said, you should put that song in as the ending credit. I first thought that seemed so random. But then I listened to it, and thought oh fuck that’s a perfect song.
AB: Ryan really knew the song. We were thinking of having my friend Julie sing it, and then Ryan said to me, “You should try singing it.” It worked out.
One of my favorite cues in Spermworld is “Baby Making Music.”
AB: Hell yeah.
RH: I remember the day I was in England when Ari sent me that for the first time. Ari writes all the melodies across all the scores. I feel lucky to be the first one to listen to the new melodies. I was on my brother’s allotment watering his garden because he was on holiday, and Ari sent me “Baby Making Music” and it blew me away. I thought it was a banger.
AB: I tried a faster version of it as a song [for our band], but that original one is it. We actually used Rick Rubin’s 808 on that one. Ryan and I were working with our band at Shangri-La. Before we left we got some samples off his personal 808 which we were using.
Is that 808 from back in the day?
AB: Yeah, it’s allegedly the one he used on the LL Cool J and Beastie Boys records.
RH: It certainly looked like it was.
AB: It’s amazing that he allows people in the studio to use it.
LO: It’s amazing as a filmmaker to benefit from this, because Ari and Ryan’s band, Gabriels, has taken off the last two, three years. Every time they go to a different place like Shangri-La or get their buddy to master the score at Abbey Road, they come back with all these crazy sounds: the harpsichord they’ll sample, the drum machine that iconic records used.
AB: It’s a fun process, because in docs now there’s a lot of functional background music. Lance likes to use music that plays into the storytelling and the characters. For us as artists, it’s nice to do that. All the scores that we’ve named here have melodies that could stand alone if you took the film away. The music can extend that world of the film when you can listen to it on its own. People like Henry Mancini and Bernard Hermann did that the best.
LO: The North By Northwest score was probably the biggest influence on Ren Faire. There was a cue on that called “The Reunion” that was so romantic and old Hollywood, with big sweeping strings. That felt exactly like the character George. Ari was pissed off about something one day and he made a song called “The Big Hit” and it became George’s theme. The process of making the music instructs the way I’m making the film, because he’s making music from the very beginning of production to the very end, which is like three and a half years. So he produced hundreds of cues for Ren Faire, which can then in turn become songs. Like the [Gabriels] song “Professional” was originally a Some Kind of Heaven cue called “A Prince.” For me as a filmmaker, it’s the greatest joy to see these melodies flow in and out of the score.
With Spermworld, the score sounds cute. Soothing Sounds for Baby as an influence makes a lot of sense. With Ren Faire, the first 5-10 minutes of the first episode teleport you into this huge-stakes fantasy world, and the music was a big part of that. How its shot makes a big difference too – it feels like a Ridley Scott movie, but it’s a Texas renaissance faire.
AB: That’s what’s so fun about working with Lance, because he’s making docs, but we also love movies like Chinatown. We don’t have big actors, but we’re working with these real characters to make big movies like Ridley Scott stuff. The music helps elevate the drama of what could seem like small stories.
LO: Spermworld has its own thing where the performance would be going on even if the cameras weren’t there. The [donor and recipient] are performing versions of themselves to one another because they don’t know each other, and they’re trying to figure out how to act around the other person. With Ren Faire, the treatment that we’re trying to achieve stylistically is to show the epic heights to which these people feel like they’re going. It could be easy for another film crew to come in and make a mockery of their lives. But for us, especially having lived with those people for so long, there’s nothing small about their lives at all.
You meet their level of belief and enthusiasm.
LO: Ari has all these great photo books around his house. Like that one Artificial Nature by John Divola. And then there’s Looney Tunes, and we’re really close to Disney right now.
AB: That was cool when I was experimenting with the Looney Tunes sound effects. And I was like, “I don’t know, is this too crazy?” And then Lance really leaned into it. Part of being in a band outside of film scoring gives you the balls to come back into film scores and try wilder things. Someone like Lance also has the balls to actually put it in his movie.
RH: I started as a director, and I met Ari by hearing his music. I sit in both roles. I used to make stuff with drum machines, like techno, but really I learned to make music from Ari. Being a director myself, I can understand what Ari and Lance go through in their different ways. I’ve watched them forge an incredible relationship as director and composer. It’s glued and matured into something that’s a really force. What they’ve got is trust. That’s the key thing when you get into a lane of making real fire. When you need to change something it’s very fluid.
LO: It’s incredible to have Ryan here too because it’s trust, it’s honesty. When something’s not hitting. I’m such a big fan of the music they make in their band, and then when we’re working together, the stuff is so intricate. The edit responds to what they produce. Like a sequence will be birthed after we receive a track from these guys. I don’t know how to read music, but I love watching these guys work together and support one another. It’s very inspiring.
RH: Ari showed me the Raymond Scott stuff. It felt Aphex Twin-level. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard it before. We really leaned into that influence and that’s a big reason the Spermworld score sounds so unique.
LO: With [sperm donor] Ari Nagel, the way he sees his life is as a screwball comedy. Pieces that are composed to him capture that bounciness and the comedy, almost like he’s trapped in comedic misery. He loved the movie, he loved the score. While we’re shooting, I’ll play the music for the people in the movie, to give them a sense of how we’re aestheticizing their experiences.
AB: In that way, Spermworld could’ve had a darker tone in the music. But instead it goes more sympathetic to how the characters are feeling.
What are you working on next?
LO: We have a movie that we started working on together that will be cool. We can’t say much about it. But it’s going to be awesome. These guys have their band, Gabriels and another band.
AB: We have some stuff in the works. It sucks we can’t really talk about much of it. But the sessions we did at Shangri-La, we have a lot of music from there that will come out in several different ways. Some as part of Gabriels but some became its own project in a way. It’ll probably materialize over the next year or two.
Did you read Rubin’s book?
AB: Yes. It was great. I’m a disciple. People think he’s played out but we love him. We were on his podcast, Broken Record, and it was one of the last interviews he did on there.
