Elori Saxl and Lia Ouyang Rusli Are Comrades in Film Scoring

Elori Saxl is an experimental electronic musician and film composer based in New York; Lia Ouyang Rusli is also an experimental musician and film composer based in New York. Elori’s new record, Earth Focus — which is out now on Western Vinyl — was created to soundtrack the PBS show of the same name. To celebrate its release, the two got on a call to catch up about its creation, and much more.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Lia Ouyang Rusli: So, should I start asking you things?

Elori Saxl: Either way. I have questions for you. 

Lia: I’ve never done something like this. 

Elori: I know, that’s why I was like, “Is this going to be a horrible idea or is this going to be fun?”

Lia: Well, OK, I’ll start. So, congrats. I listened through — there’s so much music, which is really fun. 

Elori: Oh, my gosh. 

Lia: It’s got this very unique Elori energy, but it’s also more propulsive… I don’t know if there’s a single to something like this, but when I heard “Taking Action,” it was like it’s going, it’s going, and all these subtle layers are building, and then they just drop out. And then there’s this sound that, I don’t know you remember it—

Elori: [Laughs.] I don’t.

Lia: I just started making a stank face. I was like, Oh, yeah. It was so surprising and nice. It feels like an album where you can kind of just leave it on while you’re doing things, but then these surprises jump out and I’m drawn in. It was really a pleasure to listen to it, and I’ve had it on for the past few days around the apartment.

Elori: Thank you so much. 

Lia: You just had the concepts of the show in mind, and you weren’t actually scoring to picture, right?

Elori: Yeah, I basically had descriptions of all of the episodes, and I talked a lot with the directors about what they wanted it to feel like, and then they sent me a rough cut of the first episode. I watched that through, but then I just decided that I think I make a lot better music if I’m looking out the window, or not looking at the video. So I just tried to hold the images and pacing and concepts behind the show sort of loosely. It’s almost like my guessing what the show is going to be about. 

Lia: I like that, because then it’s almost like a concept album.

Elori: Yeah, totally.

Lia: That’s something I’ve always wanted to do, a concept record of a film that doesn’t exist. Like some crazy sci-fi film that I’d have the whole plot in my head, and try to have it rendered in the music somehow.

Elori: I’d like to hear that. Also, let me just say, the HAPPYEND score is so cool, and the film is so cool. It has just this really unique tone that I don’t feel like I’ve felt in a film before. There’s a coolness to the whole thing, and it has so many subjects I love, like techno and teens and surveillance and technology. And I feel like the score plays to your strengths so well — it has the techno beats and the big melodies and weird synthetic sounds. It’s just really cool. 

Lia: Thank you.

Elori: What was your process for this film? And I’m curious, are you generally scoring to picture or is it more concept driven? 

Lia: It’s interesting — when you say “coolness,” how do you mean?

Elori: Well, it is a stylish film, but I think I more meant that there’s a blue tone emotionally and visually, and there’s kind of a distance to the whole film. And yet it also has this real tenderness and teenage loving-ness. But the whole thing is so sleek and there’s so many hard edges. 

Lia: One thing we talked about was — there’s a version of this film that’s really cool and hip, where the score is electronic, darker, ambient, and maybe there’s more techno. There’s a cooler score, as in a hipper score. But we made a very conscious effort of, it’s going to be more melody forward, it’s going to be more nostalgic and a sweeter score. Originally we were like, “It’s going to have this big heaviness.” But then — I don’t know if you know, but the director [Neo Sora] is Ryuichi Sakamoto’s son.

Elori: Yeah.

Lia: So he has all these songs that are very nostalgic in melody. And that’s part of it, his relationship to that. Then also me admiring his work, I feel like that kind of came out naturally. But yeah, it was very melody forward, but also Neo’s a very anti-give-you-what-you-want-to-feel director. The music has to be almost doing a 180 of what you expect. Which can be frustrating as a composer when I want to just, I don’t know, write a tearjerker, “Let’s go huge.” But the score is so restrained in this film. The only unrestrained part is the opening and the closing where I got to write my dream theme, this massive synth melody.

Elori: Totally. Those themes had some common ground with the Problemista score in terms of grandiosity and wonder.

Lia: Yeah. But I think there’s a throughline with how you’re talking about working on your show, because we were like, “There has to be a very pure piano melody in this film.” So I turned off the film and I just sat in front of the piano for days, just grinding out melodies and really trying to find the purest [sound] possible, distilling the film. You hit the nail on the head when you said that it felt at a distance, because Neo was like, “Every element of the film is supposed to feel like these kids are older, looking back on their teenage years.” So, yeah, we were really trying to figure out a melody that felt like teen warmth and nostalgia, thinking about those years from a distance.

Elori: Wow.

Lia: And I never write that way, without picture. So I felt like a capital-R Real composer where I was like, Just me and the piano. [Laughs.]

Elori: Also, those piano melodies are just straight up counterpoint.

Lia: Yeah. That was fun. I felt like I was in school.

Elori: How did you know how to do that? 

Lia: Well, I studied counterpoint in school. But that was high school, and a little bit of college. There’s levels of depth in counterpoint, and you can go deeper and deeper and deeper, and it goes so much deeper than I actually studied. But when I was writing this, I wasn’t thinking of the rules. I wasn’t double-checking my homework. I was just writing.

Elori: Just sort of the idea of the feeling.

Lia: Yeah. So part of working on this film felt like music school or something. Also because he’s Ryuichi’s son, he has such an ear for harmony where he immediately knows if I’m cheating him, if I do something that’s too simple. That’s why it’s such a simple melody, but the chords are kind of complex and the melody never entirely goes where you want it to go, or where you expect it to go, because I can’t get anything past him.

Elori: Yeah, I was curious because you had said something about how it’s very melody forward because of the collaboration with the director. So I was curious what that had meant and how that had played out.

Lia: Yeah. But, you know, we have a lot of the same music tastes. It wasn’t too hard, and it was very fun. Somebody told me that the melody — and maybe it’s because of the jumping piano — reminded them of “Gymnopédie.”

Elori: Oh, yeah.

Lia: And you have a little “Gymnopédie.”

Elori: [Laughs.] Yeah. 

Lia: The spirit of Erik Satie is in all of us.

Elori: I know, I guess it’s inescapable. It’s so funny, I didn’t really have any thought when I was making that, but then some people have said that it has a little Debussy or Satie. Which I’m like, “Oh, cool.” I wasn’t thinking about them, but it comes through. 

Lia: Yeah. It feels like a nice nod, even if it’s not intentional. How long did [the whole score] take you to make?

Elori: Man, I want to say a couple months? But it was a funny thing where, because it’s a TV show and there’s five episodes, they just needed so much music. So I kind of just went into this turbo mode where I was trying to make, like, four cues a day, and just really not thinking and churning it out. Actually, I forgot to say, that sampler that you gave me, the E-mu sampler — I picked that up from you, and then the next week, I started this score. I was just trying to find anything that would help me think of new ideas and not just make my same old thing, so I would just put in one of the floppy disks — I think it was organs — and I would go through the presets playing a couple notes until I would find one that would inspire some sort of idea. And then I would record a bunch of cues with that one until I got bored with it, and then I would go to the next preset. So a ton of this score is with those sounds, but also very much creatively a result of those sounds. 

Lia: Oh, that’s awesome. The record feels so analog, so that makes sense. 

Elori: Yeah. It was cool because — I mean, there’s a lot of Juno, which is in all of my music and it’s a very warm sound — but I’ve been really trying to figure out how to bring some different sounds into my world and push myself to be ever-so-slightly icier. And that synth was like the perfect middle ground where it still has that analog feel, but it’s such an ‘80s sound bank that there’s a little bit more crispiness and plastic feeling to it.

Lia: Well, I’m glad you got it figured out because I couldn’t stand the floppy discs. As fun as it is, I was like, You can’t save anything?

Elori: [Laughs.] No. I’ll just keep really detailed notes of which disc and which preset. But it’s a pain in the ass. And every time you turn it off, you have to reboot it for, like, 20 minutes. But there’s some cool things, and I feel like taking it out of context was really cool, not knowing what the sounds were supposed to be. There’s all these weird things mapped to the modulation wheel that kind of turned it into some weird sounds. But I’ve only gotten through two of the discs! There’s, like, 20 more to go.

Lia: Yeah, there’s so many. There’s sound effects ones — there’s one with typewriter sounds.

Elori: Yeah. The first one I played was sort of a hip hop drum and sound effect bank, and there was a lot of crashing glass.

Lia: That’s awesome.

Elori: I’d like to figure out a way to work it in. I feel like you’ve got the sample libraries locked in. I need your tips.

Lia: But the deeper I go with them, the more away from them I go. It’s kind of interesting — I think a lot of film composers get obsessed with sample libraries and then it controls their process, because there’s a lot of limitations. You can’t write a string line in a certain way. And so they just change the way they write. So now, maybe because I have more resources to hire people or bring in friends to play something, I try not to use them as much.

Elori: Yeah.

Lia: You have a lot of woodwind sounds on your record. Are those all live? Because some of them sound a little digital too.

Elori: Yeah, it’s a mix. I was definitely very interested in that blend of synthetic sounds and then real, and then where you can’t tell the difference and pushing them to sound like each other. So I wrote most of it with samples, and then I had Stuart [Bogie] come and record a lot of the parts. But then in some places, I just kept the sample because I liked the quality of it. There’s also a bunch of harp.

Lia: Yeah, that was great. I really liked that.

Elori: Originally, I thought I was going to re-track all of that with a harpist, but then the budget for it ended up getting cut. So I ended up just deciding to push it into more of an artificial space where it’s related to the harp, but not exactly a harp.

Lia: So what is it?

Elori: Just a mix of samples. They’re all Ableton stock sounds that I’ve really pushed to sound not like themselves. I think there’s some nylon guitars… There’s just a bunch of stuff layered.

Lia: That’s cool.

Elori: OK, I have a formal question. 

Lia: Let’s go. 

Elori: I was curious what you feel like the relationship between your scoring work and your personal work is, and what translates and what doesn’t? 

Lia: I feel like scoring is… I feel wrapped up in what I’m allowed to do. I’m a little more restrained with what I’m allowed to do, because I’m working on someone else’s project in a way. But it’s also liberating at the same time to not be beholden to my own brain. 

Elori: Yes. 

Lia: I can write within someone else’s vision. Obviously I always try to bring a very specific vision to the project that I don’t think another composer can. But it’s always ultimately their vision, the filmmaker. So there’s these two things where it’s liberating and also the opposite. It’s nice to switch brains and go back and forth. I feel like it gives me a lot of ideas for my own work, and I think I work on my own music faster because I do film scoring. I just have a certain muscle for writing faster now. And then I’m constantly using film scoring as a way to learn new sounds, and I save ideas for my own music — like when you’re playing around trying to find something for the film that doesn’t fit, but you’re like, Oh, my god, that would work so well in my own music. Let me save that idea. So in some ways, I feel like it’s sort of a breeding ground for my own stuff. How do you feel about it?

Elori: I agree with with a lot of that. I think in my own work, I’m spending a long time researching and developing an idea behind it and trying to find a question I’m trying to ask, and then developing a sound language that goes with that question. That whole process is very emotional and personal for me. And with a lot of the scoring I’ve been doing so far, people are coming to me through that work, so they’re referencing that work in the scores they want. But because I’ve already developed the sound language, it’s much more like plug-and-play. There’s not the same emotional component. It’s like using the tools, but it’s much more functional and I’m moving way faster, just coming up with tons more ideas and exploring without as much self-criticism. And I agree that oftentimes that that ends up coming up with ideas that for my own work that I wouldn’t have thought of.

It’s funny because I think with my personal work, it is the work that I’m the most emotionally connected to, so in that sense I feel the most proud of it. I think the scoring work is often a lot more broad stroke-y, more high drama, more accessible — but I think for all those reasons, it actually ends up resonating with a lot more people. So it’s this funny thing where sometimes I feel a little nervous around scoring work, like it’s kind of cheesy or emotionally simplistic or something, but then I think it’s actually a lot easier for people to enter versus my own work, which is a lot more subtle and maybe requires a little bit deeper listening, which not everyone wants to do. 

Lia: Yeah, that’s interesting. You’re scoring work has more overlap with your personal work than mine. They’re coming to it through your music, so you’re sort of making a version of it without all the personal…

Elori: Baggage. [Laughs.] 

Lia: I also think there’s something liberating about scoring and releasing that music where it’s like, I would never release this myself, but it exists and I’m happy enough with it that I’ll put it out.

Elori: Totally. I mean, this score — the show is all about southern LA, so I was like, OK, I want to lean into musical references from that area. So it’s a little bit more psychedelic and floaty than I’m normally comfortable putting out myself. But it was really fun to explore for this project. 

Lia: I didn’t hear the South LA high synth, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre — where was that?

Elori: [Laughs.] You’re right, that should have been the reference. None of this Alice Coltrane shit.

Lia: Where’s the Kendrick? Where’s the “Gin and Juice”? [Laughs.] Well, this was simultaneously not as bad as I thought it would be, but it was also not as easy as just talking.

Elori: Yes, it was not a normal conversation. But also, it’s rare that I am so intentional with questions I want to ask a friend, so it’s actually really a gift to get to go so deep on these things.

Lia: Yeah, that was really nice. And it’s good to see you in general.

Elori: You too. It’s fun that we did this, because I do feel like you’re my comrade in film scoring. You’re my teammate, or something. [Laughs.]

Lia: [Laughs.] Yeah. 

Elori: I’m rooting for you!

Lia: Likewise.

(Photo Credit: left, Max Basch; right, Jess X. Snow)