COMPOSER PIANIST AND PRODUCER ASGER BADEN

If the music stops they'll eat him up is the new album by Danish composer and pianist Asger Baden. The album invokes through its nine tracks a sense of mysterious and highly visual storytelling. As is expected of a composer who has worked with cinema extensively (his music has been featured on the soundtrack for Breaking Bad and The Wolfpack amongst other great films and TV series).

Baden studied piano and keyboards in Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Conservatory, and his compositions embrace the natural qualities of traditional instruments as well as pushing at their physical boundaries. It’s as if Baden was painting a wide and vast musical room where the listener is invited to explore its every nook and cranny, from soft percussive footsteps in the background, to the whispering rumbles of synthesizers just in front or the frail conversation of strings happening to the side.

I’m a Danish composer/ pianist/ producer living and working in Copenhagen - Denmark. I work as a film composer but even though I love (and need) the challenge, and self-forgetfulness of having to please someone else’s vision, the most important and rewarding aspect of what I do is my own music. These are the projects where my own curiosity is the catalyst and where I can be the boldest.

Chasing down the ideas that occur in this space always takes me to new places. My own music also often proves to be the most fruitful endeavours, when I’m lucky to have it featured in wonderful productions such as ‘Breaking Bad’ and “The Wolfpack”. I just had a track synced in the new Netflix series “Cowboy Bebop” which premieres in November. I’m really looking forward to seeing that.

At the moment I’m wrapping up an EP, which is a collaboration between me and a long time idol of mine, Swedish singer-songwriter Jenny Wilson. To a degree, it’s in the same vein as my new album, but it has a more electronic approach, and obviously has vocals on it. Another pretty crucial thing that’s just happened in my life is that my daughter (my third child) was born last Saturday. So you’re catching me in a wonderful blurry state of sleep-deprived bliss.

Tell us a bit about your greatest inspirations or influences oh and Asger, we love the film Wolfpack by the way, such an emotional journey that was!

My inspirations are so many and ever-changing. Of course, there are a lot of obvious musical ones. Everything from Krzysztof Komeda, Prokofiev, The Cure, Bernhard Herman, Sid Barret, Nick Cave, Serge Gainsbourg - the list goes on and on.
On my last couple of records, I’ve been playing around a lot with plugged and hammered piano- and autoharp strings. I love the indefinable, timeless and folklorish feel this gives me. This fascination came about partly by listening to a bunch of Hungarian cimbalom/ dulcimer music and the, but the piece “Experiment in Terror '' by Henry Mancini played a big part as well. It revolves around the autoharp, which is strummed but also, more unusually, plays the melody by plucking the strings. The contrast between the sharp and small sound of the autoharp against the orchestra is totally magical to me and blew my mind the first time I heard it. But I really get a lot of inspiration through my eyes. Countless times a day I find some random clip that appeals to me on YouTube, mute the sound and listen to the music I’m working on while watching it. That always gives me all sorts of epiphanies and ideas on where to go and what to do.

Yesterday in the studio I used some clips from the Swedish director Roy Andersons films which inspire me a lot. I adore the way he creates these one-shot tableau scenes that are at the same time so poetic, depressing, full of humour, repulsive and strangely captivating. But a drone shot of a city or a forest can work wonders too.

Tell us a bit about your creative process?

My creative process changes a lot, but these days I want to pursue a way of writing where the sounds and their sonic qualities are just as important as the actual notes and melodies. I want to be open to the quirks, random incidents and ‘happy accidents’ rather than being totally focused on the composition in a conventional sense.
The work with a piece usually starts out with recording a lot of improvised performances with myself and other musicians. I love having the piano as a starting point but challenging the sounds a piano can make. For example by plugging, picking and hammering piano strings or bowing them with fishing wire. I press record and do long stretches of improvisations. I really enjoy this part - it’s extremely meditative. Then I cherry-pick the best moments of these recordings, heavily edit, re-arrange and dub them with new recordings. It’s like harvesting ideas from a vast field of improvisations – chasing and nurturing the most beautiful moments. Once I’ve done this first layer, I add more until the music finds its form. Sometimes I might write a composition around an improvised soundscape that ends up being almost edited out.

For instance, the track ‘Nobrac Naked’ where the main part of the piece is recorded with a conventional string symphonic orchestra in Prague’s great concert hall Rudolfinum. In this case, the exploration of soundscapes and samples serve just as much as a canvas and as a means to reach the end goal.

How has the pandemic affected your creativity and how do you see the world changing?

I really can’t say that the pandemic has affected my work all that much - neither my creativity nor the amount of work I’ve had. I feel almost shamefully lucky in that regard. I do play concerts now and then, and I have had shows cancelled, but almost my entire creative work takes place in my studio. Half of the time I do commission work and the rest of the time I get creative and make my own music. Every day I feel extremely privileged to have this work-life and overall it has been like this through the course of the pandemic.
I’ve been very concerned for my musician friends who depend on making their living playing concerts. In terms of restrictions, everything is pretty much back to normal in Denmark, but it has seemed like people's habits might have changed a bit. Perhaps people have grown a bit more leisurely, staying at home binging Netflix instead of going out to concerts. That is a concern.

Who do you consider to be an icon of your time?

Someone contemporary who I think is consistently putting out interesting music is Damon Albarn. He started out in Blur, which of course was incredibly successful, and since then it seems he’s never ceased to follow his curiosity and urge to create. He seems to just throw himself into new stuff vigorously and without compromise. From Blur and Gorillaz, came The Good, the Bad & the Queen and so on. And a lot of his music is amazing and legendary, some not as much, but it’s never boring and it seems to me that he is never on autopilot even though he’s struck gold over and over again. I admire that greatly.

We agree with you completely, Damon Albarn is definitely iconic for us musically as well, we love him!
What does wellbeing mean to you and what do you practice?

Last year I bought a summerhouse in the countryside by the lake where I grew up. Being a country boy and after living in the city for 20-odd years, it’s amazing to have this getaway back to nature. It’s a really strange little house built by an artist couple back in the fifties. It looks like a mix of a hobbit house and mountain cabin in Switzerland. The Lake is the cleanest in Denmark and we share a bathing pier with neighbours. Jumping in the lake first thing in the morning, summer as well as winter - this is wellbeing for me.

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