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“Stefan Girardet is a successful film and TV composer. Among his big screen work, he collaborated with Goldfrapp on the soundtrack for “Johnny and the Dead”, and his music and songs appear on BBC primetime. Girardet’s track, “Bloodlines”, received accolades from ‘Time Out Magazine’, as “The sexiest slice of art ever”.

STEFAN GIRARDET IS A FILM COMPOSER, and thus, by definition hired to score scenes previously constructed and defined by others. Girardet has delved into the mind of many directors, creating compositions to reflect their point of view. He crafts musical pieces and themes that are associated with plot and character development, to facilitate understanding of a film’s emotional arc. In his work, visual and sound become inseparable, encouraging audiences to suspend disbelief as they are guided through a film’s intended catharsis. Girardet has recently taken time away from film and TV in order to score his own off-screen experience. His first solo album, “Are We Here Yet” debuts July 6th on Unsound Records. Through a lush mix of live and acoustic elements, Girardet explores themes of recognition, technology, and confusion. Without a director to inspire, guide, or restrict him, Girardet has no one’s story to tell but his own. A slice of Girardet’s innermost thoughts are revealed not in front of our eyes, but broadcast from his mind’s speakers as music to our ears; a projector flickering upon our imagination.

Memories and musings run their rapid undercurrent through our mind. What melodies underscore your deepest and most abstract thoughts? How many songs does it take to isolate a memory, to examine it in its purest form? Who would score the movie of your life? What scenes would you show, and what music would consolidate and define your initial and later understandings of your personal experiences? The sounds of our lives collect in our subconscious, as orchestrations of intimate narrative. With time’s architecture, we condense disparate thoughts and experiences into a textured web of visceral, idiosyncratic illustrations of our lives. Compositions shower our ears, wash over our inner eye, and traverse our mindscape; drawing out our deepest emotions, and stirring our bodies to feel the essence of our truest story.

THE ALBUM ART for “Are We Here Yet” imposes very few images on us. The cover is reminiscent of a Rorschach (ink blot) test, (a tool that delves into a viewer’s unique perspective, with their interpretation of the image a function of their private experience). Next, a candid snapshot offers a behind the scenes clue to Girardet’s inner life. Without Girardet’s verbal explanation of his photos, we can impose and infer only so much of their meaning. To fill in the blanks, Girardet has created a soundscape that weaves his private visions with our own. Girardet seems to say he will not dictate intention by casting scenes on a two dimensional screen. The drama of Girardet’s album exists in its sounds, and the images listeners associate with them. It’s time to close our eyes in the dark theater of our mind, and immerse our ears in Girardet’s musical meditation.

I had a chance to converse with Girardet on the eve of the release of his debut album:

INTERVIEW:

MARCIE: You are always telling a story with your music. Most of what you’ve done has been for TV or film. In this case, I’m thinking your debut album might be telling a more personal story. I’m hoping we can break down your artistic process a bit, and go through the album. If we talk about film scores first, people often describe specific albums as soundtracks to their lives, or as a soundtrack to a memory or event. Coming from your background, how did you define an album for yourself as different from a film score?

GIRARDET: For a film score, the narrative is totally derived from the visuals, and although typically the music inhabits certain characters during the course of the film, it’s very much secondary to that. With an album, you have lyrics too, so you get to tell the story in a much more first person way, and be the main protagonist.

The other difference is that you learn how to tell a story without lyrics, so you’ll have a lot of instrumental sections, and even a few instrumentals on the album that I still think have some kind of story they’re telling.

MARCIE: Do you find when you’re doing film scores, that you’re inserting your personal feelings into music that’s supposed to be about a character other than yourself? And if so, do you feel like your album is purely personal, as if it’s your own narrative?

GIRARDET: Yes, I do, actually. That was my mission statement, so to speak, when I made it. I wanted to do whatever I wanted to do. I’ve done a lot of film stuff, a lot of songwriting for films…. This is completely removing myself from [earlier templates]. Whatever I wanted to do, even if it came out completely uncommercial, was what I was going to do.

MARCIE: Is “Are We Here Yet” meant to be heard in order of the track list, as a full album?

GIRARDET: Yes. Absolutely. That was why I bookended it with two versions of the same track…the album as a theme is totally encapsulated in ‘Chemical Sky’, and the lyrics of that track. The whole record is about being completely confused by the world we live in now….and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information and all kinds of pollution that goes through our heads. The peaks and valleys of the structure of the record were very much designed.

MARCIE: Do you feel like you solved any personal confusion in the process of writing the album? How did you decide it was time for the reprise?

GIRARDET: I feel like I certainly got a lot of stuff on the table…in the record, musically and lyrically. I think for everybody, making a record is a kind of cathartic process. You’ve got to get your own demons out there, and all the stuff going through your head and just put it in a blender and see what happens.

Whenever I finish anything…I’m only 60% happy with it, and 40% thinking, “oh man, I could have done that better”. I wouldn’t have it any other way, really.

MARCIE: I could see themes of self discovery in “I Don’t”…

GIRARDET: That song represents another theme, which is a feeling I think a lot of people have, which is we have a tendency to be slightly schizoid. A lot of songwriting comes from that. I see myself in a perfectly good mood one second, and then a few minutes later…I’m someone completely different. That’s what that song is about: when you look at yourself from the outside in, and you don’t quite recognize yourself. That’s definitely a big theme with me.

Technology is another big theme, and that’s what the song “Space Junkies” is about. As musicians, we spend so much time noodling around with computers and technology now, and I think a lot…of the emotion and sentiment gets pushed aside because you’re spending so much time trying to get that plug in to sound the way you want it too, or dealing with computers that crashed.

MARCIE: I was looking at your Record Label, Unsound Records, where you have music defined as classically inspired. You spoke of Modern technology interfering with songwriting processes. Do you think classical composers had something parallel inhibiting their creative processes, (whether it was the quality of instruments, their conductors, etc.)?

GIRARDET: Well, I think the main defining difference between classical composers and people who make records historically is [that] if you’re making a record, you’re making a recording. You’re not writing 12 songs down on manuscript paper. Your primary responsibility is to create a recorded entity that can be played on the radio or on someone’s CD player. That is a huge difference, and I think it’s kind of problematic. I know a lot of young artists who don’t have any recording skills, but are brilliant songwriters. They can’t really get anywhere, because they don’t have the ability to create that CD or mp3 they can send someone. And that wasn’t the case with classical composers. When you present a score to a conductor, and an orchestra…you have to be much more specific [in orchestration] about exactly what’s going to go on with the musicians than you would when you make a rock record. But you’re not responsible for mic placement, which keyboard patch, which plug in, which compressor…and all those kinds of decisions that really define what [recording artists] do.

MARCIE: And also define how long lasting what we do is. Certain sounds become extinct two months after they’re popular. It doesn’t matter how ‘good’ the song was…

GIRARDET: The adverse of that is that you can have a terrible song which is really well produced. I’m sure we all feel like that is representative of the marketplace right now.

MARCIE: It’s just a different way of passing along musical ideas. Whether it’s written scores which might make it more timeless, or whether it’s recorded?

GIRARDET: Yeah.

MARCIE: Would you feel okay if directors wanted to use songs from this particular artist album, after it was originally meant to stand alone as an album?

GIRARDET: I don’t mind at all. I actually think that if it’s the right film, and the right sequence, and you get to hear enough of the song, it’s one of the most flattering ways to hear a song. I like that a lot.

MARCIE: I wasn’t sure if you were protective of the album as being separate, and from your head, and not meant to have images imposed on it.

GIRARDET: Well, as long as people also have the album, and they can listen to it in a darkened room, then that’s fine. I wouldn’t want it to only exist [in a film]. If a couple of songs got really big because they were in a film, and that was the only way people knew the track, then that would be disappointing.

MARCIE: Which track on the album is most personal for you?

GIRARDET: I think it would have to be “Space Junkies”. One reason was it arrived really quickly. The music and the lyrics just came in a few hours. I remember I was watching a documentary that said it cost 10,000 dollars to get a pound of anything into orbit. Then I thought, there’s all this garbage orbiting the earth, which is the most expensive garbage above the earth, and I thought ‘man, that’s a really interesting metaphor for something’. I just thought that you could be simultaneously worthless and very valuable, and that’s how I kind of cast myself lyrically in that song. It sounds a bit arrogant, but it’s also very self deprecating.

MARCIE: Did you have influence on your cover art?

GIRARDET: I’m glad you asked, actually. My cover art was photographed by a brilliant photographer from San Francisco called Shaun Roberts, (triplewide.net). We were in New York at the opening of a film that I scored…and Shaun and I were walking around New York City, and he saw a pool of oily water on the sidewalk, and said ‘Stefan, STOP’. I didn’t know what he was doing. I didn’t quite understand what he was taking a picture of, and I certainly didn’t understand why the lens was pointed away from me, (laughs). Then he showed me my reflection in this pool of oily water, and he just looked at me and he said: “Chemical Sky”. That became the basis for the artwork.

There are two other pictures. He took a portrait of me, (and I hate having my picture taken), rubbing my face between what I thought were shots. I really like the fact that all the pictures in the album artwork were not posed. I didn’t know I was having a picture of me at that time, cuz I hate it. If I knew it, I would have made a silly face.

MARCIE: I thought the cover looked like it might have something to do with the space junk idea, or an ink blot or Rorschach test.

GIRARDET: Exactly, We were going for that spacey look.

Check out Stefan Girardet: http://www.myspace.com/human66 & http://www.unsoundtracks.com
More by Marcie: http://marcie-speaks.blogspot.com/

Posted in: Interviews, Special | Posted on July 7, 2010 by MarcieJoy