Julian Brink: Utility Music

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Julian Brink is a South African composer. Born in Johannesburg in 1989, he first picked up his mother’s guitar at the age of ten and grew up playing in rock bands. He discovered a love of contemporary classical music through the films of Paolo Sorrentino and Paul Thomas Anderson. Hearing Jonny Greenwood's score for There Will be Blood, in particular, was what led him to pursue composition. Although he didn’t learn to read music until he was 19, while studying guitar at undergraduate level, he went on to complete a master's degree in film scoring through Berklee College of Music and relocated to California in 2015. Brink works in film music and lives in Los Angeles with his wife, actress Maddie Hasson. His composer credits include the original scores for Amir Motlagh’s Three Worlds (2018) and No Longer Suitable for Use (2021), directed by Julian Joslin and produced by Sam Rockwell, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was featured in The New Yorker’s "The Screening Room".

In collaboration with eminent classical label Sono Luminus, "Utility Music" is Brink's first standalone release. Originally composed in 2019 as a score for an abandoned film project, the music was arranged for piano, harp and string trio. It was later repurposed, reorchestrated and combined with a few older pieces into what is its current form. The album features performances by several distinguished musicians, with the heart of the music being the string trio of Moldovan violin virtuoso Dan-Iulian Drutac ; Nick Revel, violist of the Grammy Nominated PUBLIQuartet ; and Joe Zeitlin who was the lead cellist on Mica Levi’s Oscar-nominated score for Pablo Lorraín’s Jackie.

The title is a reference to both the German "gebrauchsmusik" - music that was written not for its own sake but for a specific event or purpose - as well as the expedient nature of the recording process. Performers being recorded individually is common practice in popular music but less so in the world of classical music. "Utility Music" was self recorded during the summer of 2020 by Brink and the featured musicians in bedroom studios in Los Angeles, New York, London, Frankfurt and Hamburg. In Brink's second bedroom in his West Hollywood apartment, he had only a few hours of quiet each day to record, between the dying down of street noise and the insects in the evening. Grammy winning mix engineer Brian Losch was tasked with achieving the illusion of a group of musicians performing together in a single space.

Inspired as much by John Cage and indeterminate music as by an abundance of free time and the joy of experimenting with microphones. The additional instrumentation, so to speak, was largely improvised on instruments, toy instruments and non-instruments alike. "Utility Music" is, at its core, an experiment in organising sound. © Sono Luminus