“Like pulling on threads”: composer Simon Goff on his life, his music and creating the soundtrack for Vlny
Simon Goff, a British musician and composer, is the visionary behind the soundtrack of this year’s celebrated Czech film Vlny (Waves). He spoke to Danny Bate about his British background, his move to Berlin, his process of making music, and his career path into composing film soundtracks.
I'd like to start with your early years, and especially the role of music when you were a child. Was there much music at home or at school, and was there perhaps a lightbulb moment when you realised that being a musician was what you wanted to do with your life?
“I was very lucky to grow up in a country that had a Labour government at the time, since one of the great things that they did was an initiative to support musical education in schools. I was one of the lucky beneficiaries of that system and got to learn the violin at a young age. My brothers also learned an instrument. My parents, while not musical themselves so much, were very keen for us all to learn a musical instrument; my brother learned the piano, my other brother learned the guitar and I picked up the violin.
“It felt very fortunate to be able to do this and to have that experience, and it continued through my teenage years. I had a great support network in the school for music, with three fantastic teachers in my secondary school who were just very encouraging. There was had a school orchestra, a school band, school string group, and the teachers really supported us all in learning these instruments and creating a community around them.
“We went on trips – we actually did a trip to Prague, and also to Krakow. Where else did we go? I think somewhere in Germany as well. It was a really great support network. I travelled around playing these concerts in churches around Europe. That was my formative time for the violin.
“At the same time I was playing in bands with friends. At the age of sixteen, I ended up meeting a bass guitarist called Herbie Flowers, who was a session player from the late 60s and 70s through to recently. He was famous for playing the bass line on Walk on the Wild Side, Lou Reed's record on the album Transformer. I was very lucky to have his mentorship and guidance. I ended up teaching some summer courses with him, helping out on these courses that he ran in the south of England.
"I've done enough work if I make 25,000 a year, and so can go visit my family ... If I make any more, it either goes to charity or my grandkids"
“He was a really formative influence on me in terms of seeing music as both a passion and a profession – what the profession was, how it worked, the circles that operated, and just his attitude towards music. He always said to me ‘I've done enough work if I make 25,000 a year, and so can go visit my family, and see my daughter and my son once a year for a holiday. If I make any more, it either goes to charity or my grandkids’.
“This really influenced me, just by the power of music in your career. I felt very lucky to have had his guidance. He was the one who encouraged me to then go on to classical music college. At age eighteen or nineteen, I went on to study at Birmingham Conservatoire.”
And when would you say then that your career in music began? Where would you put that date in your life? Also where does the move to Berlin and Germany come in?
“So I think a ‘career’ in music is an interesting thing, because it depends on whether you define a career in music by when you started playing with intent, or by when it became a profession and you started to make money from it.
“I definitely think that I engaged with music with intent after going to university, or even before then, I think. It was at university that I joined a band from Leeds, and this band was called Hope and Social – they are still called Hope and Social! They exist in Yorkshire and they are very much a community-driven band. They have a fantastic, strong following in Yorkshire and nationally. A lot of their way of working is focused on community. I spent four years playing bass guitar and violin. I was doing that while I was studying at the conservatoire and doing some sessions, to piece together this thing that at music college they call a ‘portfolio career’.
“I was doing this all while I was studying, and then at the end of my studies, the deputy head of composition at Birmingham asked if I would be willing to join a piece that he was writing called Dantereier. It was a contemporary dance ensemble, for which he was writing music based on a book of music that had been found in western Germany. It was for a small ensemble; I was playing violin and viola, there was clarinet and bass clarinet, classical guitar, and recorders. We made a quartet, and that was when I first came to Berlin. I'd been once before visiting friends, but this was the first time I really came for work.
“At the same time, with three friends, I joined a band called Bee and Flower. We did two tours of Europe in 2012. Actually, in 2012, I think we did something like a twenty-eight-day tour around Eastern Europe, of which fourteen gigs were in the Czech Republic, or something like that. We played everywhere in the Czech Republic.
“So that I think was the real beginning, when my career started. Then it just developed step after step, and I decided to move to Berlin in 2015. That was when I decided to focus on Berlin as a home.”
You mentioned there that you have this long-standing connection to the Czech Republic. That's interesting, because you have now worked on Czech films – for example, one that came out a year ago was Úsvit (In English: We Have Never Been Modern). So where did that come in? When did you make the transition to working on the soundtracks for films, specifically Czech films?
“I've always been interested in cinematic music. That's something that was very strong in my childhood. I was super inspired by soundtracks, and this has continued for me. The work of John Williams is incredibly similar to the work of Stravinsky, and this of world of classical music has expanded out from that interest.
“As I studied I was still interested, and then I joined this band in Leeds. The reason I moved to Berlin actually was to give myself space to discover what I wanted to make from music. I felt that when I was in the UK, I was defined by the things that I had already done, and the things I was currently doing. I was looking for some space in between, and I couldn't really find the fertile ground that I was looking for to grow my own thing. When I ended up in Berlin, it very much felt like this was the place to do that.
“So I came here, and in 2016 I ended up taking an internship at a recording studio called Vox Ton. This studio had been the centre of a lot of amazing music; the head engineer and owner there, Francesco Donadello, is integral to so many of the great Icelandic records that we know. He's worked he was a big collaborator with Jóhann Jóhannsson, and a constant collaborator with Hildur Guðnadóttir. So I stepped into this world, and I got to learn from him for four years, studying to be his intern at first, then becoming an assistant engineer, and working up to be an engineer there and then the in-house engineer. I worked closely alongside him, learning the tools of engineering.
“The wonderful thing about this was that we were working on all of these film scores at the time, so my interest as a classical musician also got to dive into seeing how people like Jóhann were creating their film scores. I got to piece together their scores with the different building blocks that they had. This was a masterclass, an absolute masterclass in how to score films, how to create music, and how to generate material that you can meld into different forms for film.
“Through that time, I met some people, and this guy Carlo Garrè reached out to me. He was a fan of a score I had done for a dance piece that I'd put out in 2016. He encouraged me to make a new record and my own music. So, in 2019 and 2020, I started putting together what would become the record Veil. This was released on his label 7K!, which is part of the !K7 group.
“In 2021, it was actually one of the tracks on this record that Miro Šifra, the writer from Úsvit, heard. He reached out to the director Matěj Chlupáček. They discussed and basically said that this one track called I Filled my Lungs with the Necessary Air, and Yelled! was the sound of Úsvit. They identified that they had to have this track in their film, and so they reached out to me and asked whether I would interested in also scoring the film. This was an opportunity I absolutely jumped on. It went on to be a beautiful collaboration with Matěj, and I now class him as a very good friend.”
And on that subject I have to bring our conversation to Vlny, or, as it's known in English, Waves. This film, which came out this year, is the talk of the town here in Prague. I make no secret of the fact that I loved it, and your soundtrack to this film was part of the reason why I loved it so much. For context this is the new film about the Prague Spring and a very brave team of radio journalists who keep broadcasting during the Warsaw-Pact Invasion. Now, as somebody who is utterly musically untalented, I'm fascinated by how you go about creating a soundtrack. Where do you even start? What are your influences? Who do you work with within the film's production team?
“So, with Vlny, when I met Jiří to begin with, we met in Berlin. We had a big conversation about the film, about what it meant for him, and what he was trying to say with it in these two sections in the film, very much like two chapters – the beginning of the film and then the invasion – and how important the music was to him, and what he was trying to say with the music. Of course they had a temp score in place, so he discussed the temp score, what was positive about it and what wasn't working, and then I went away and started working on the music. I started putting together some ideas about where we could go with it.
“Whenever I'm writing music, whether it be for film or for general release, for a record or for a dance or theatre piece, the place where I try and start is just to find one idea. For me, it's very much like pulling on threads. You find that one thread, and then you just pull on it a little bit, and a little bit more. You can say it negatively; you can pull on a thread of a jumper, and before you know it, you have a pile of cotton in front of you! But this is this is very much like scoring for me; I pull at that thread until I have all of the cotton in front of me. Once I have all of the material there, I can start to sculpt it into a coherent image.
“Scoring for film in particular – and this is very similar for theatre and dance as well – is like you are making one sculpture in a picture of sculptures. It’s about making your sculpture fit amongst all of these other sculptures that have been made by the cinematographer, the costume designer, the set designer. Everybody's doing their bit and crafting their part, and you have to try and find your bit that fits perfectly into the space that they've left for you.
"You are making one sculpture in a picture of sculptures. It’s about making your sculpture fit"
“You don't want to just take a mould of what they've left and put it in there, because that can be quite generic at times, so you try to find your way to fit that mould. So, with Vlny, I spent some time doing research on the student uprising at the time. I really liked this moment in the film where the students are all walking down the hill by Prague Castle, and this line they were chanting "we want light".
“I knew that the film needed a very percussive, driving centre to it, and I thought, ‘how can I take this and make it into something useful?’ So, I translated these words into Morse code, thinking about transmission and communication. Radio and communication are such an integral part of its job.
“I used this Morse code to create a rhythmic base and patterns of rhythms. That then led to all of the rhythms throughout the whole film; all of the rhythmic patterns are just one rhythm, using selected parts of it, laid up on top of each other to counter each other and make counter rhythms.
“At the same time, I did the same thing harmonically and tonally. I have a way of processing numbers into the letters of a scale, so I used these numbers to generate a scale that I then wrote down, and this gave me a tonal centre.
“You just start piecing together these little bits, and then you look back at the temp score. You try to listen to what it's doing, and how it's informing what you see on the picture, the emotions that it's giving you, the bits where it's a bit lacking. Then you go to work using this material, testing it out, crafting it and sculpting it into place.
“Eventually you find something, and you send it back to the director and ask what they think. Then starts the process of collaboration, which is something I really enjoy – the back and forth. When you get really good collaborations between directors and composers, which I've been very lucky to have in my career so far, I think it can be a really beautiful thing to find out what works.”
And a final question from me: what can we look forward to in the coming years in your career? You have not only your work with film soundtracks but also your solo career. For example, you have your 2023 album Spark Like Living Mothers – can we look forward to further albums?
“Yes, that's something I'm working on currently. Spark is actually a quite an interesting record, because that started life as a dance piece as well. I was contacted by the label Grand Chess, this very boutique label in Hamburg. They asked me if I had some material to make a record with, and so I sent them this this soundtrack for this dance piece that I had made, with the caveat of saying that I wanted to explore this material more.
"I really liked this moment in the film where the students are all walking down the hill by Prague Castle, and this line they were chanting 'we want light' ... So, I translated these words into Morse code"
“It had started when the choreographer had given me the task of creating some music. The whole dance piece that we were working on was going to be based around this ‘moment zero’ – the moment when everything stops, but it can also be seen as the moment when everything begins. Zero is the end, but it's also the beginning.
“I took this as an idea of renewal, and wanted to zoom into this renewal and reuse idea. So I interpreted that as an impetus to take something that already existed and work with it, reprocessing it and recontextualising it.
“I found a piece by a composer called Thomas Tallis, called If Ye Love Me. I took this piece, and to begin with, I just took a stereo recording of a choral arrangement of it. I processed that, put it through delays, looped it up, and it was just beautiful. I really enjoyed this process.
“My next step was to record that for voice violins. I created an arrangement myself for violins, and from there I then took this material and looped it, broke it up. I took little bits of the melodies and recontextualised them, writing new material that would sit underneath the melody. I took just a sound and put it into a generative synthesiser, so that it created new sounds. From all of this, I created this new music.
“When it came to making the record, I wanted to explore this even further. I knew that I wanted to kind of take this music back to where it had started, and look at how it could interact with vocals. So, I reached out to a friend of mine called Sam Potter; he was a member of a band called Late of the Pier back in the mid-2000s, and he's a fantastic artist and a very intelligent man. He'd been working with an AI algorithm that was the precursor to ChatGPT, and so he had this machine-learning algorithm that you could feed text into, and it would write new text for you.
“He had started out by feeding it his dreams and get it getting it to write new dreams. The next step was to go into a room of people and get them to all write down their dreams, and he fed the machine their dreams and got it to write this collective dream, which I was blown away by. I found it absolutely beautiful. So, I asked if we can find some old texts that were about renewal, reuse, spring, life and recreation. We found these texts, fed them into this algorithm, and got it to just write and write.
“This is where the title Spark Like Living Mothers comes from. It wrote this poem that you can see online, and in the record. It's just absolutely beautiful. I love how weird it sounds; it sounds absolutely profound, but it means nothing, because it's just written by a computer. This ambiguity and this contrast in existence I find absolutely fascinating.
“So, I worked with some singers and recorded parts of it, and we created this record that now is Spark Like Living Mothers. I’m actually working currently on extending that idea, giving the stems and the music to other artists to create new reworks and remixes based on this material – not only seeing it as a conventional remixes project, but something where they are free to create something completely new from a single piece of this music, if they want to. This is due to come out next year, and it's going to be just called Sparks.
“That's the first idea, and then I’m also working on another solo record currently as well, which I’m hoping to be able to start releasing in the autumn next year and to continue with that.”
