Behind the Music interview: Under the Silver Lake’s Disasterpeace

Under the Silver Lake, the ambitious third feature from It Follows director David Robert Mitchell, comes out in theaters and VOD this month and the film’s multi-talented composer, Disasterpeace, is here to talk all about it!

Behind the Music is an ongoing series that seeks to interview and gain an introspective on both established and up-and-coming composers. These composers, who have worked for everything from television to film to commercials to video games, share their experiences, work ethic, and more. For this edition, we chat with the composer for David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows and the upcoming Under the Silver Lake, the film composer/chiptune sensation Richard Vreeland, also known as Disasterpeace.

Known for his serene, yet incredibly nightmarish tunes, Disasterpeace has infiltrated the sounds of both video games and film with his disturbingly beautiful music. Fans of indie games may have caught themselves replaying the odd, but catchy soundtracks to games like Shoot Many Robots, Hyper Light Drifter, and the notorious Fez, which has the chiptune composer expand on his musical talents to accompany gamers across their playthroughs.

Not one to stick to one art medium, Disasterpeace has also made his name known in the world of film, largely in the films of American filmmaker, David Robert Mitchell. Mitchell is responsible for bringing the sleeper horror hit, It Follows, to the mainstream with Disasterpeace at the helm of its musical production. His score called back to his days of scoring video game music, but blended with the feel of a classic 80s slasher, creating a dreamy synth score that stood out as its own character within the throwback nightmare.

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Disasterpeace’s style takes on the world of Hollywood noir with his work on Mitchell’s soon-to-be-released dark comedy neo-noir film, Under the Silver Lake.

Taking a modern approach on the conventions of the gritty noir subgenre, Mitchell’s Andrew Garfield-vehicle ventures far away from It Follows while keeping its surreal atmosphere, doubling as a matter of fact. All of this is enhanced by Disasterpeace’s juxtaposing score for the dark Hollywood odyssey.

Disasterpeace discusses his mindset on the creation of Under the Silver Lake‘s sound, the film’s polarizing reception with both critics and fans, and much more in our feature on both him and Under the Silver Lake!

Hidden Remote: First of all, thank you for opening up your schedule for this! Hopefully we didn’t take away too much time from your schedule! How busy have you been over the past year since completing your work on Under the Silver Lake?

Disasterpeace: Pretty busy! I dove right back into a game project I’ve been working on the last few years with Heart Machine, the studio behind the game Hyper Light Drifter and in August started working on a movie for Netflix called Triple Frontier, which just recently wrapped. I will also be working with the director Joaquin del Paso on a film called A Hole in the Fence. And some other very exciting things!

Hidden Remote: Your work, up until 2015, was primarily heard in the world of video games, most notably in the 2012 indie platformer hit, Fez. How has the transition to film score composing worked for you personally?

Disasterpeace: It’s been a big challenge for me. The scheduling and emotional requirements are definitely a step up – the work tends to be more time compressed and more fraught with competing perspectives about what the final work should be, which I think is a product of the culture of producing films, and just the sheer amount of people who tend to be involved, and whose opinions carry weight.

I’ve always preferred the intimate creative relationship, which I’m grateful we had on Under the Silver Lake. I think it allowed us to make something concentrated and unique. External influences can sometimes dilute the quality and nature of the work.

Hidden Remote: Under the Silver Lake does sound unique in the end! There’s definitely a video game-esque atmosphere to your work on the horror hit, It Follows, given the synth-heavy soundtrack. On the other hand, Under the Silver Lake has you scoring an odd post-modern neo-noir film with an absurdist twist. How jarring did you find this switch-up from David Robert Mitchell’s last film?

Disasterpeace: It was definitely the biggest creative challenge I’ve ever taken on. I like to say that I usually look for projects that are one step away from my comfort zone. I would say this one was at least a few away, as I had to learn on the fly how to write for an orchestra. I had a ton of help from an experienced orchestral team, but I’m proud of the fact that all of the score in the film, and most of the arrangement decisions, were mine.

My initial ideas and impressions about what to write for this score were vastly different from the direction we ended up taking. I had proposed the idea of writing to picture without any temp or reference material and it yielded some interesting music, but ultimately it was the film noir style that worked best for the film. Without it, I’m not sure people would understand the nods to that genre we were making quite as well.

Hidden Remote: Film noir has a recognizable sound to it, but Under the Silver Lake has a strange tone to it that differentiates it from the Hollywood noir tales of the past. How did you go about in reflecting this tone with the music?

Disasterpeace: My background is so unrelated to Hollywood noir that I think I got a couple of free points towards doing something different. The film certainly has an air of cultish mystery. It was fun to try to weave elements into the score to reflect that. I try to find signature effects for my projects, and for this film, I honed in on a particular type of warping that makes the score sound like it’s almost melting at times.

Another theme in the film is the limitless feeling you’d get from having to solve secrets in classic video games using a pen and paper. The score participates in this theme by weaving video game sounds into some of the cues. All in all, it is quite an unusual soup of influences. It’s not often you get to use Bernard Herrmann and the Legend of Zelda in the same sentence, so it was a definite treat!

Hidden Remote: The most unusual combination for sure! With blends like this and a film as odd as Under the Silver Lake,  the work process is bound to carry a level of difficulty in properly scoring the film. What did you find to be the most difficult aspect of working on this film?

Disasterpeace: There was a definite difficulty in tackling the many shades of this film in the score. Stylistically, the music shifts to reflect certain scenes and to emphasize the directorial references at play. There are irreverent waltzes, sweeping romantic passages, scary sequences where you could argue there’s a through-line from It Follows, and musical lattices that are so contemporary they wouldn’t be out-of-place in an Assassin’s Creed game.

So really it was quite an athletic project for me creatively. Learning about the orchestra, and getting intimate with instruments I barely knew existed before, like the bassoon and oboe, was a real joy for me. I’ll never look at woodwinds the same way again.

Hidden Remote: Without spoiling anything, what are some of the major musical motifs that an audience member should pay attention to when the movie finally comes out this year? They can be specific themes for characters or certain situations elevated by the choice of music.

Disasterpeace: I would definitely listen for what repeats. There are quite a few motifs in the score, some are more obvious than others. There is a recurring whistle that sometimes shows up as an arrangement of instruments who do everything to support the whistle’s melody, but the whistle has been omitted. That’s one example of something fun in the score that might be worth exploring.

Hidden Remote: Under the Silver Lake is a film that is as challenging as it is borderline nonsensical in its oddball execution. What do you feel was the most important lesson or food for thought that you learned over the course of working on the film?

Disasterpeace: I love the fever dream sensibility of the film. When you have a film like this that is so out there and ambiguous at times, it asks the audience to use their imagination and to try and find their own meanings, and it makes for a very participatory experience which I personally find really fun. It’s definitely not going to be for everyone.

Hidden Remote: How do you feel audiences might react to this film, given how polarizing it has become since its debut at Cannes Film Festival last year?

Disasterpeace: I’m sure it will continue to be a very divisive film. But I love it and I think a lot of the takes I’ve read both positive and negative are based on misconceptions about David’s intentions. From what I understand he wrote the script in a feverish sitting before he ever wrote It Follows, and it is meant to reflect a very particular period of time in East LA that was about 10 years ago, in an exaggerated way with larger than life characters.

It is in a way an insular film – for instance, the LA audience at the AFI fest seemed to understand the movie in a profound way that the Cannes audience didn’t seem to, perhaps because of the setting and all of the references to local places, cultures, and characters. It is a very funny movie, but I think some of the material goes over heads. Someone who lives in LA or knows it more intimately may find it a less esoteric, more relatable film.

Hidden Remote: Only time will tell how the general audience will react to the film upon wide release. Speaking of time, do you have plans to frequently score more films? You’ve already got two in Under the Silver Lake and Triple Frontier for this year, along with The Hole in the Fence, so who knows what the future holds!

Disasterpeace: Indeed! I don’t have any other films lined up beside the one I mentioned earlier, but I’m always open to doing more if it makes sense. I’m also diving into the theatre, and continue to work on games.

Hidden Remote: It seems as though you have adjusted to the world of film-scoring quite well. Do you plan to make film scoring and your own personal music your main priorities in your work or do you see yourself returning to the world of video games as well?

Disasterpeace: I’m not tied to any particular medium, but I do like to seek out novelty, so I’m sure I will continue to investigate other avenues. I would like to get back to writing personal music soon, too. I’ve been sitting on some songwriter stuff for a couple of years.

Hidden Remote: From your experience with video game music, I must ask: what do you feel is the most rewarding aspect of video game music? In other words, what do you feel is prevalent in video game music that isn’t quite as present in film music?

Disasterpeace: There is a feeling of authorship for the audience that I think is stronger in games. As a player making choices there tends to be an embodiment there, that makes you more of an active part of the experience and less of an observer. Music in games tends to reflect your choices and the way in which a game unfolds, which give it a feeling that is often non-linear, tailored, authored, or any combination of those.

Hidden Remote: Contrasting that, what do you feel is the most rewarding aspect of working on a film score that you wouldn’t get from video game music?

Disasterpeace: There is something nice about knowing the parameters of a project early, and the simplicity in knowing that you can just focus on music and not worry about all of the technical considerations of games. This is somewhat tarnished when you find yourself having to adjust your music to a picture that keeps being edited, though. So I think the ideal situation, at least for me, is to have a locked picture that you can work with, knowing that the rug won’t be pulled out from under you.

Hidden Remote: Before we wrap up, I’d like to ask a couple of personal questions. Firstly, what would you say are your biggest influences in your music and how do you try to pay homage to them in your work?

Disasterpeace: My influences grow and change over time but I would say there are some that are clearly formative. I grew up with artists like The Beatles, Joni Mitchell, and Vince Guaraldi, and as a teenager getting into rock I was permanently affected by bands like Led Zeppelin, Rage Against the Machine, King Crimson and Tool. In college, I started listening to more composers, like Steve Reich, Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky, who have all left indelible marks on my work.

I would gladly add Bernard Herrmann to that list after the work we did on Under the Silver Lake. Discovering him was one of the great joys of the project. I tried very much to honor his work and the work of others who have worked on classic film noir with this score, while also trying to do something unique. It can be easy to cut too close to the roots when you are consuming too much reference material, so I tried to keep a respectful distance. I watched a bunch of noir films and in general wanted to get an impression of that sound, without getting too specific.

Hidden Remote: Lastly, there’s the question involving perspective. You have a wealth of video game, film, and of course personal music credits to your name. What do you feel is the most important lesson (or lessons) that should be practiced by anyone attempting to make it big into their own respective careers?

Disasterpeace: I would just focus on doing what you love and what you feel called to do. Try to give as much of yourself as you can!

Disasterpeace’s work on Under the Silver Lake can be heard by audiences everywhere on April 19th! Have any of you seen it or plan to see it? What did you think? Sound off below!