Dark, full-volume West Coast glitchtronica
Who He?
Well, elsewhere in this very issue you can read all about the other side of schwarzmodul as he offers us a peep into the world of his fascinating day job. Go on, have a flick, we’ll wait here before taking a swizz at his nom de plume…
Why Schwarzmodul?
Found him? Good, good. Born and raised in Norway, the Los Angeles-based artist has composed, produced and remixed music for hundreds of film trailers. It’s a very special sort of skill and one he brings by the truck load to his solo work. You don’t learn how to make music leap off a screen and not use some of those licks in your own work, right?
Tell Us More…
You can take the boy out of film soundtracks, but you can’t take the film soundtrack out of the boy, so goes the saying. Sort of. With his first, self-titled album recently arrived on the Los Angeles indie imprint Track Number, you can’t half feel the fizz of his considerable craft. Take the low, rumbling groan of ‘Heave’, the heartbeating thud, haunting chants and crystal-bright percussion of ‘Variform’. He sees it all as “distorted data dumps, failed backups, and gurgling analog gear”, which pretty much nails it. There’s all manner of goodness swirling around, dead of night distant vocal snips, tense string sweeps, pounding rhythms. And the sound, as you’d imagine, it’s huge. The louder you dial it up, the better it seems to get. You’d wager it sounds amazing on a full-blown cinema soundsystem.
‘Schwarzmodul’ is out on Track Number
