How Daniel Blumberg turned water, wind and silence into a film score

The Italian director Gianfranco Rosi has long established an aesthetic for his patient, poetic documentary features: no talking heads, no music, no voiceover, just the simplicity of the images speaking for themselves. On Sacro GRA, it’s an Italian motorway, and the communities surrounding it; on Fire at Sea, it’s migrants trying to reach the island of Lampedusa. Within the silences – or, rather, the sound of wind, water, human chatter, accidental ASMR, whatever Rosi’s microphone is capturing – there exists a hypnotic, transfixing beauty.

Daniel Blumberg, the 36-year-old artist who won an Oscar for scoring The Brutalist, is an avowed fan of Rosi’s work, particularly the absence of any music. So there was pressure when Rosi asked Blumberg to score his latest film, Pompei: Below the Clouds, a black-and-white documentary about how living in Naples is affected – or surprisingly unaffected – by the presence of Mount Vesuvius. Edited down from three years’ worth of footage, Pompei: Below the Clouds follows the everyday exploits of figures such as archaeologists, firefighters, and call centre workers who calm down panicked residents about a volcano that could erupt at any moment.

“I love films without a score, and I was sceptical about him using score,” Blumberg tells me in his Hackney flat where we spend an afternoon chatting in his kitchen. “I saw a full cut that was assembled quite early on, and it was really functioning. But I trusted his judgement. There was a reason why he wanted me to be involved.”

After all, Blumberg is an acclaimed avant-garde musician who, in recent years, has become beloved by Hollywood. A former indie rock star in his teens, Blumberg switched wholeheartedly to experimental music in his 20s and has released albums like Minus, On&On, and GUT. (Blumberg is also, according to Dazed, the 25th most fashionable person in the world.) In terms of movie work, Blumberg scored three projects for Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet: The World to Come, The Testament of Ann Lee, and The Brutalist. Winning the Oscar for The Brutalist, Blumberg shouted out Cafe Oto, the Dalston music venue, in his speech like how some actors might thank God.

It’s at Cafe Oto that Blumberg watches and performs with artists like Seymour Wright and John Butcher, who both play saxophone on the score for Pompei: Below the Clouds. However, if you listen to the film’s soundtrack (it’s available for purchase), you might not realise that the piercing, cinematic wails are created by saxophone, or that Blumberg’s contribution is via the bass harmonica. Wright also plays the launeddas, a Sardinian set of pipes commonly used during the Roman era.

“Gianfranco said quite early on that he didn’t want people to register that it’s an instrument,” says Blumberg. “Brady wanted the presence of the pianist on The Brutalist, so I placed the microphone so that you almost could hear him breathing and pressing the piano keys. On this, Gianfranco wanted a sound you couldn’t quite locate. John and Seymour are musicians who don’t do stuff unless they really commit to it, because they’re uncompromising with the way they work and live. Gianfranco relates to that. The idea with John and Seymour is they never play the same each time.”

“I do a drawing if I need to step back a bit. It keeps my focus. The other side of my brain can re-evaluate the music”

Initially, Rosi only wanted Blumberg to record music for the film’s eerie final scene: the camera dives underwater to find Roman statues, the remnants of a previous world, surrounded by fish and floating debris. “I had to watch it a few times to get to grips with it,” says Blumberg. “You watch it to feel it, and then you have to zoom into where the music maybe could be. As we worked more, I noticed he was using sound design. To me, that related to adding music from outside of what he was using, so I thought there was license to experiment.”

The score was recorded in both Blumberg’s Hackney flat and underwater in the Roman town of Baia. In Blumberg’s home, Butcher and Wright improvised on their saxophones without playing to picture. “It’s very high-end recording equipment, so I’m not compromising on quality when I record acoustically here. It’s making sure the mics are pointed away from cars.” He recalls recording the actors for The Testament of Ann Lee in his Airbnb in Budapest. “I was on set, doing a comp of Amanda Seyfried’s voice, and I heard this motorbike go past, and I thought, ‘OK, there’s a motorbike in the 18th century.’ That’s one problem. But it’s creatively useful because you can work for hours and let people relax, rather than renting a studio.”

After spending time together in Rome and New York, Blumberg and Rosi reconvened for a week in Hackney, where they experimented with microphones and speakers in Blumberg’s bathtub. “Because of the camera going underwater, the underwater microphones were obvious to me immediately. I’d used hydrophones before. It was later we experimented and tried it in the sea in Baia.”

In Naples, Blumberg and Alberto Landolfi, the assistant director, drove around in search of spaces to play the music and record underwater. “We looked for hot steam coming out of a volcano, so that I could put my microphones in,” says Blumberg. “But the music sounded too nice and tidy conceptually. It didn’t sound as good as the situation underwater.”

So, at two in the morning, when tourists had gone to sleep, Blumberg and Landolfi recorded at a pier in Baia where a metal staircase went into the water. “I put geophones magnetically on the staircase, so that it almost activated the staircase as a microphone. There’s a hydrophone in the water, and the other hydrophone on top of a scaffolding pole that had waves crashing against it.” They returned the next night. “The wind was going over the same microphones that were capturing the saxophones. It felt like the landscape was interfering with the music, and vice versa. The sound of the saxophone was pushing through the water and waves.”

On the soundtrack, the tracks are named from “Nuvole I” to “Nuvole X”, as Blumberg referred to them as “cloud music” (“Nuvole” translates to “cloud” in English) with different slabs of sound following each other. The minimalist, hypnotic score thus complements the images, rather than overwhelming them or dictating a new meaning. Sometimes the music integrates so seamlessly with the sounds of overlapping waves, it takes a moment to realise you’re also listening to, for example, a repeated sample of Wright breathing into his saxophone.

Adding to the film’s otherworldly splendour is the black-and-white cinematography that makes ashes falling from the sky look like white snowflakes glowing in the dark. Blumberg reveals he doesn’t have synaesthesia, and as an artist, doesn’t really deal with colour. In fact, his flat is filled with Silverpoint drawings – he estimates there are at least 10,000 lying around in boxes – and he creates a few more during our conversation. He’s preparing the drawings for a solo show at Galerie Balice Hertling, an art gallery in Paris. “I love the colour of silver. It’s always changing.” He shows me an example. “This is oxidising. It’s got blueish hues and browns. The oil on my hands will change the oxidising.” He points to one on a wall. “If I boil that kettle, the steam affects how it oxidises.”

Until Blumberg works on Corbet’s next film, his focus will continue to be on drawing, an activity that’s ever-present in his life, even when he’s in musician mode. When writing music, he typically sits at a keyboard, picks an instrument sound, and throws ideas around. “I can also step out and do a drawing if I need to step back a bit. It keeps my focus. The other side of my brain can re-evaluate the music.” He adds, “You can finish a drawing in five seconds, and put it in the bin or on the wall. The Brutalist took seven years for Brady to make it. It’s nice to work on different scales. It’s a good reminder of how to work, and what’s possible.”

Blumberg jokes that with music, he half-expects people to switch his records off halfway, if they’re not playing it in the background while washing the dishes. The joy, then, with scoring a film like Pompei: Below the Clouds is that, in the age of shuffling and streaming, the songs are digested with full concentration, in the correct order. “It’s nice that people are actually going to sit and listen to the music,” he says. “This experience starts, you go through it, and it finishes. You actually bring people on that journey.”

Pompei: Below the Clouds is streaming on MUBI now