Bobby Krlic has gone from making an experimental musical abyss in his parents’ Wakefield shed, to becoming one of film’s most important soundtrack artists. He tells us about Slayer leading him to the dark side, working with Atticus Ross, and leaning into Yorkshire nostalgia for his latest work on Anemone…
Bobby Krlic is a man of many hats: the avant-garde genius behind The Haxan Cloak; producer of U.S. noiseniks The Body; collaborator with Björk; studio buddy to Atticus Ross. Most famously, he’s known for soundtrack work – you’ll know him as the man behind the unsettling music for Ari Aster’s 2019 folk-horror masterpiece Midsommar.
At the end of a year in which he's already scored for Ari Aster's Eddington and Jordan Peele's HIM, in cinemas now you can hear his latest work, the score to Ronan Day-Lewis’ stylish, moody Anemone, starring the director's father, Daniel Day-Lewis. As with Midsommar’s reflection of contrasting beauty and grimness, he says, it’s quite the undertaking having to set the mood for such a thing.
“There’s a lot of pressure on the music,” he says. “In the film, everything's on a razor's edge the whole time. There's so much silence, and there's not a tonne of dialogue. As an audience member, you're trying to work out what people are thinking and where it's going to go. You want to hold their hand a bit, but you don't want to foreshadow too much. It’s a very fine line.”
On a sunny morning in Los Angeles where he now calls home, Bobby is talking to K! in a studio festooned with the tools of his trade.
“I amassed so much stuff that I decided to move it all into a different house,” he smiles of his workspace. Behind him sits a Mexican vihuela, a small guitar-like Mariachi instrument used earlier this year when working on Eddington, starring Pedro Pascal and Joaquin Phoenix. “I bought a bunch of stuff like this to score with. We had to get really into it.”
Where the man’s talent really lies, though, is in his ability to weave these sounds into something compelling and twisting. Not so much the change from major to minor as being able to seep into the very characters he’s accompanying.
“When we first started talking about Daniel Day-Lewis’ character in Anemone, we had this idea that he would actually be a repellent of sound – he just wouldn't have any music because he was a stoic, almost silent character. But actually, once I got working, the right thing to do was to use music to express what he couldn't. There’s this contrast between stillness and darkness and light, kind of hinting at what's beneath something that I found really interesting to work with, musically.
“It's interesting,” he smiles. “There's things that I find really uplifting that other people would just find weird."
Bobby is telling us all this from LA, but his roots actually lie 5,500 miles away in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. When the prospect of Anemone came up, set in Sheffield as it is, and featuring local icon Sean Bean, he says it was “a dream project”. Not least because, with his and Ronan’s shared love of shoegaze, and the director’s grand vision of England’s North, rather than as a few terraced streets, it gave Bobby a chance to express it as he feels it.
“There’s a world where someone would like look at a film like this, see the landscape, and be like, ‘Well, let's just get the felt piano out…’” he laughs. “I love his work, but if you look at a filmmaker like Ken Loach, there's a tendency to make those places feel really small and really intimate. And I love that Ronan kind of had this lens on it where he made it really expand. And I think that's where the shoegaze elements in the music came from.
“We really wanted to avoid this ‘BBC drama’ kind of world. It felt like it wanted something different.”
‘Different’ has always been Bobby’s thing. Growing up as a fan of metal and punk who saw Slayer before he was even a teen, he says he’s always been attracted to “dark stuff” and unusual art. As a child, his interest in his father’s instrument led to taking classical guitar lessons – a skill that is to playing rock guitar like what mastering Latin is to ordering a beer on holiday – while, following in the footsteps of his DJ mother, he was gifted a set of decks for his 16th birthday.
As a teen, he developed an obsession with film, the odder the better.
“For Christmas every year I would get the Time Out Film Bible, which, to most people, is probably one of the most mindfully boring books that exists. There’s no photos or anything, just all their film reviews collected together.”
Diligently, he’d go through, making lists of films and directors he needed to get more familiar with, which he’d then tape off the telly, and watch early in the morning before heading to school.
“BBC Two and Channel Four were just fucking amazing at that time. They'd have, like, a month of avant-garde Asian cinema, or weird horror – stuff that you just couldn't see anywhere else.”
Meanwhile, his older brother’s influence saw him discovering everything from hip-hop to Morbid Angel and more sinister metal sounds, as well as artists like Squarepusher. Eventually, one-man black metal acts like Leviathan and Xasthur, and the more dronesome likes of Sunn O)) and Earth would begin inspiring him as to the possibilities of music beyond writing just songs, but creating a whole world. When he started for himself, convention didn’t come into it.
“That led me into experiments of down-tuning everything and sampling stuff and taking it way down in pitch,” he remembers. “I'd get the woofers from speakers, and I'd put different materials on it, and I'd just play like bass tones through it and watch how it resonated different stuff.”
His two albums as The Haxan Cloak, 2011’s eponymous debut, and 2013’s chilling Excavation, were like nothing else around at the time. Or, indeed, since. With no actual style to class it under, beyond the vaguest of ‘dark-ambient’ or ‘experimental’, his description of those early fascinations with vibration, and of sitting in the shed at his parents’ house toying with what weird sounds he could get from cellos and violins, will do. When we tell him we found it like listening to the Psycho soundtrack while in the throes of hangxiety, he laughs in approval.
“Even my parents being as adventurous as they were, and kind of what music they would listen to, even they’d go, ‘Yeah, I don't know where your degree [in music and visual art] has gone. This is pretty weird.”
Other people got it. It was actually while he was in Iceland working with Björk that Bobby got a message from Atticus Ross, inviting him to LA to meet up. As a huge Nine Inch Nails fan, Bobby was nervous, but up for it. After hours playing music to one another, Atticus posed a question: ‘What’s your plan? What do you want to do?’
Bobby told him he fancied film music, but had no idea where to start. Atticus replied that he currently had way too much on his plate, and that he’d be interested in having him help out if an opportunity came up. He didn’t have to wait long.
“About two weeks later he asked if I was free to help on a Michael Mann film – straight in at the deep end! I sent him some stuff. And he replied like, ‘With all due respect, I feel like you're making me what you think film music is. I want you to make me your music, but for film.’
“It was really empowering to have someone be like, ‘No, just be yourself. I've wanted to meet you because you make music as a point of view, and that's what I'm looking for.’”
For Midsommar, this translated as the balancing act of truly unpleasant darkness with the beauty and wonder of a film being almost entirely shot in bright, hyperreal daylight. He built it on a bed of Scandinavian folk, to better accompany the film’s rootsy, sylvain themes.
“We found this old instrument maker that lived in rural Sweden. He would make, like, a cello out of, like a barn door and stuff like that.
“Some of it definitely is really dark,” he ponders, “but I also wanted to lean into how bright it was. I was obsessed with The Beach Boys and their orchestration and stuff. There's a guy, Nelson Riddle, who was the orchestrator Capitol Records through the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. We were listening to a lot of that stuff, and Alice In Wonderland, and early Disney. Some of those early Disney scores are quite unsettling in a weird way. So, we were trying to draw from this bright, sort of fairytale idea of orchestra, and find a way to bring that in and then have it put sort of curdle on itself. That was really fun.”
Listening to Anemone, and seeing its lush, reverb-y sounds in situ, you can hear this coming through. It’s different in some ways to his other works, no doubt, but still sounds very much him, and articulates what’s happening onscreen, rather than just accompanying it. And, as per Atticus Ross’ advice, it’s him being him. The gear might be more sophisticated, and the weather a lot better, but Bobby Krlic still has the same motivations and fascinations as he did sitting in his parents’ shed.
“I kind of approached it in the way of making a record on a four-track, like I would when I was a kid,” he says. “There's no like MIDI in there, really, I recorded all the guitars to tape or to little cassette machines. I really wanted to treat it in a sort of naïve way, trying to put myself back in that space of being a young kid in Yorkshire, recording on my own. There’s a lot of nostalgia to me in the film, or to me there is, and so I really tapped into that.”
Probably not the first word a lot of people will go for, hearing it…
“Probably,” he laughs. “I just find a lot of comfort in things that other people would find bizarre or dark.”
Bobby Krlic's Anemone soundtrack is out now.
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