Fall on Your Sword's Will Bates (left) and Phil Mossman
Fall on Your Sword are a very, very good live band, as anyone that attended their performance at last year's Sundance ASCAP Music Café can attest. Only they're not really a band - they're more of a self-contained audio/visual combat task force, capable of composing a masterful score for an independent film one moment, creating an inexcplicable film miniature the next, deejaying the best party you ever attended that night and winning a Clio Award for a commercial jingle they wrote the next day. Anything that involves the pairing of music and picture, Fall on Your Sword are all over it. Case in point: they wrote the music to two independent films screening at Sundance next week. We figured it was high time we sat down the band's creative core of Will Bates and Phill Mossman for a chat.
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Given your constant stream of films, commercials and A/V projects, and the visual aspect of your live show, it's clear that Fall on Your Sword cares a lot about the interaction of music and images. Did you always know that you wanted to integrate the two so fully? Or were you a straight-up band first?
Phil Mossman: Wills and I have both been in band bands in the past but FOYS has always been about a bombardment of the senses. So yes, there has alway been an agenda of integrating sound and vision. There are plans for making a long playing record, but knowing us, we'll make a long playing video to accompany it.
Will Bates: Whether it's projecting a video onto a wall at a show or scoring a movie, the audio/visual connection is really important to us. A lot of our inspiration is from cinema. In fact the very first batch of FOYS songs relied heavily on samples from Queen's score to Flash Gordon, and the band's name is from that movie. So maybe not exactly high-end cinema, but still cinema.
What was your first scoring gig, and how did it come about?
WB: I scored a lot of little short films in my early days in London, but my first real break was scoring Ry Russo Young's feature, You Won't Miss Me, which took me to Sundance in 2009. We met after my wife had used her as a model in a couple of paintings, and she knew that I wanted to get into the scoring racket. Before doing You Won't Miss Me she introduced me to a lot of her mumblecore friends in New York, but in the end it was one of her movies that got me started.
PM: My first scoring gig came about when I was a part of the David Holmes troupe for Stephen Soderbergh's sophomore movie Out of Sight. The first movie that Wills and I did together was Aardvark by director Kitao Sakurai, who Wills knew through his previous work with Ry Russo Young.
Which artists, musicians or directors were most influential in shaping the projects you work on with Fall on Your Sword?
PM: There is a lot of common ground between Wills and I on this one, which is why we find each other so attractive. There is obviously a keen interest in pioneering electronic artists such as Wendy Carlos, Giorgio Moroder, John Carpenter, Jean Michel Jarre, Vangelis, Delia Derbyshire, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, etc. It would be very one-dimensional if that was all we listened to - we were listening to a lot of dubstep for a while for inspiration below 20hz and above 10k. We love the atmospherics of space and hiss.
Are you comfortable licensing out your music to other people's projects, where you might not have as tight creative control?
PM: If David Lynch called up and said he wanted to license one of our tracks, I'm sure we wouldn't have a problem with it. I guess it depends who's asking.
You've got two films in contention at Sundance 2012. What sort of role has Sundance had in Fall on Your Sword's career? Do you feel like it's becoming any more important for music creators to be seen and heard there?
PM: Another Earth's runaway success at Sundance was a game changer for us. It is one of the best platforms in the world to be seen and heard at.
One of your films at Sundance, Nobody Walks, concerns a filmmaker who is getting help with the sound design of her film from a married man that she moved in with. Did you and the director try to incorporate any "sound designy" elements to your music, as a creative parallel to the story?
WB: In the early discussions with Ry we talked a lot about fusing the sound design and the music, and there's definitely a few places in the score where the distinction between the two is blurred. But after trying a few different approaches it seemed best not to be too literal with the sound design in that sense. Some of the choices of instrumentation are dictated by what happens in the movie. The main character is a sound designer after all, so some of those choices are pretty bold.
Your other Sundance film, 28 Eight Hotel Rooms, is shot almost entirely from the points of view of two lovers in various hotel rooms. What was it like building a compelling score out of such a small range of visuals and characters?
WB: Although the movie only takes place in hotel rooms, the characters go through a huge emotional journey, so in fact there was a lot to work with. There's real highs and lows in their affair which the score helps to enhance. There's a sweeping romanticism in a lot of the early cues, we called on the cellist Eric Jacobsen again who played on Another Earth to help with those. And at times it gets pretty dark, so in a way it's one of the more diverse FOYS scores.
Do you ever make music that's not for public consumption? if so, what does it sound like?
PM: I play the ukulele to my daughter every night. She likes it when I play "Gangsters" by the Specials.
WB: In my other life I was a bebop saxophone player. When I know that there is absolutely no one in the studio I put on some early Miles Davis and play along, pretending to be Cannonball Adderley. Then I take the beret off and go back to writing techno.
From a business perspective, Is there a rule of thumb you use when you're evaluating whether to take on a new project? I.e. do you seek out certain publishing arrangements, sync fees, extra opportunities for promotion, etc?
PM: It's always a creative decision at the end of the day. We trust our agent to iron out the business side of things for films in particular; it's important to have that distance. There's no real deal breaker. If the movie is good and we want to do it, we'll do whatever we can to make it work.
Most of your past work has involved the senses of sight and hearing. Have you ever done a project that also involves touch, taste or smell?
PM: I love and admire Jamie Oliver and would jump through hoops to collaborate with him on a project. We are also experimenting with "Scratch and Sniff" for our next release.
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Visit Fall on Your Sword on the web: fallonyoursword.com
Read more about Fall on Your Sword's two movies at Sundance, Nobody Walks and 28 Hotel Rooms.
