Daniel Blumberg begins with a line. Not a melody or a lyric – the London-born musician does not read music and spent years making entirely wordless compositions – but with a stylus of silver wire dragged across paper treated with gesso. Blumberg, who studied at the Royal Drawing School in 2015, has been making silverpoint drawings for years: sketches are stacked in high piles on the kitchen floor of his modest Stamford Hill flat; in his bathtub sits a container of primer warming slowly in the water. On the walls are larger works in various stages of oxidation, some still bright with fresh silver, others deepened over months into muddier brown shades, the drawings continuing to change long after his hand has left them. He will tell you the drawings are the clearest indication of what he is trying to do in his creative practice: set up the conditions for something to happen, then get out of its way. This same principle governs how he scores a film or runs a recording session. Paul Klee famously wrote that a line is a dot that went for a walk; Blumberg has spent nearly two decades working out the implications of that idea.

The artist’s trust in spontaneity has afforded him a long and varied career: a brief stint in his teens in indie bands, several solo albums of brooding art rock, an Oscar for the soundtrack to The Brutalist (2024), directed by his close friend Brady Corbet. Along the way, he has built a reputation as one of his generation’s most innovative composers, a sonic alchemist in the lineage of Scott Walker and Brian Eno. This year, he returns with a show of drawings at Galerie Balice Hertling in Paris and soundtrack work for two starkly different films. The first, Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary Below the Clouds (2025), is an apocalyptic city symphony set in Naples, where the shadow of Vesuvius finds auditory reflection in Blumberg’s chthonic soundscapes. Then, there is Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee (2025), an ambitious, defiantly odd musical biopic of the titular missionary, its score steeped in the ecstatic hymns of the Shaker sect. TANK spoke to Blumberg on improvisation, the microphone as an instrument and his undying love of Tottenham Hotspur FC.

Matteo Pini We are currently in your flat in Stamford Hill. You often hold interviews in your flat: does this place affect how you speak about your work?

Daniel Blumberg I’ve had this space for 17 years. It was once my drawing studio, but I’ve turned it into a very good recording setup. There’s a control room and a live room next door, which is almost completely dead of reflections. I’ve done a lot of records here: my first soundtrack, The World to Come (2020), was mostly done here, as was a lot of The Testament of Ann Lee and Below the Clouds.

MP Almost immediately after you finished working on The Brutalist, you began working on the soundtrack for The Testament of Ann Lee. Where did Below the Clouds fit into this chronology?

DB Gianfranco had been collecting footage for years because that’s his process. We’ve been friends for about ten years, and I’d see him when I was in Rome. He called me last February and said he was thinking about music for the end of the film, where the camera goes underwater and the credits roll, and thought I could do something with the footage. I went to Rome, and we started talking about places where he was using sound design and where they could have a relationship to the film’s ending. I like the fact that his films don’t have scores. I definitely lean more towards narrative cinema than documentary but Gianfranco straddles that line: he has a compositional element to his practice that is quite unique to him. I remember seeing Notturno (2020) in the cinema and thinking, how the fuck did you capture some of these images?

MP Below the Clouds is a quiet film, which makes the presence of sound more impactful. When you compose for film, how do you think about diegetic sound versus the soundtrack you compose?

DB Gianfranco captures sound himself: he is holding both the camera and the microphone, so he’s made important choices with those elements already. I was on set when I was working on The World to Come (2020), but I wasn’t in conversation with the sound team as much. There was one point where we were filming day for night and some cows walked past. I asked them to put microphones on the cows so I could incorporate their noises into the soundtrack. I brought more of that approach into The Brutalist: I was on set and speaking with the sound team about the perspectives they could capture. The Testament of Ann Lee brought that method of working to its extreme. I was working on set every day setting up microphones for six weeks. For Below the Clouds, I watched a really strong cut five months before it was finished. Because it was already functioning sonically, I felt like I had to meet the sounds and images he had captured. I wanted to capture the landscapes where he’d been working. We went to Naples to record on-site, using these hydrophones and experimenting with sounds from underwater speakers. We also used the bathtub in my flat to experiment with underwater sounds, which I later re-recorded in Baia in the actual sea. I see film as a song: if you consider dialogue as the lead singer, supporting the dialogue depends on what the director wants. It is about having presence while not distracting. It was a delicate balance.

MP The image of Vesuvius recurs throughout the film. What sort of resonances did that create for you?

DB Clouds, steam and water vapour all became clues for the direction the soundscape would go. We spoke about low frequencies a lot, which are relevant to how scientists record information. I used these geophones, which are normally used for recording seismic activity and convey a lot of low-end frequency and vastness. There were specific images that were exciting for me, particularly one scene where you can see the reflection of modern tourists looking at the vitrines of the frozen people of Pompeii. It represents what he does so beautifully in the film, mixing the ancient image with the present and the future.

MP Do you see the microphone as a kind of instrument, given how much you work with them?

DB Definitely. When I came to improvised music in my early twenties, I was exploring the dynamics of instrumentation, and how you can play with pitch and texture. I did a tour in Italy playing at different venues: the first was a cathedral, the second was an old theatre in Rome, the third was an old church. They all had different acoustics, and I got excited about how you could experiment with the dynamics of space and with using microphones. I love recording: I was taught to record by Peter Walsh, who recorded all the later Scott Walker records. He’s a great teacher and was very generous in educating me on how to use microphones. I’ve designed a very specific setup: with Below the Clouds I used hydrophones [microphones designed for underwater use] and geophones [devices that measure seismic activity] but I normally use two types of microphones, U89s and Schoeps. The saxophones were recorded with Neumann U89 microphones, which are very flat. They’re like Swiss Army knives; they’ve got five different patterns you can adapt to a space.

MP For the soundtrack for The Testament of Ann Lee, you draw on the tradition of Shaker spiritual music, which was predominantly sung a cappella. There can be something terribly exposing about the unaccompanied human voice. How did that manifest for you when working on the score?

DB It was the first time I’d predominantly worked with other people’s voices, as opposed to my solo records. I work quite a bit with Elvin Brandhi, who features on the score, and for my 2018 record, Minus, I recorded a choir at my grandma’s retirement home. For Ann Lee there were a lot of conversations about voices: would the voices be in the room, or reach out to something other? Processing a voice with reverb can make it sound more euphoric. There’s one scene on a ship where you hear the Shakers sing a prayer, and on set, I was encouraging the actors to sing more out of tune, because I wanted them to be heard from the sailors’ perspective. In the next scene, we’re listening to the same song, but it’s much more harmonious, to reflect what they feel inside.

MP How much did you draw upon extant Shaker music? How did you stop those references from consuming what you eventually made?

DB I wanted them to consume what I made, to use as much of the original material as possible and adjust it throughout the process. Mona was very encouraging in bringing the way I work on my solo music into the process. Working with Celia Rowlson-Hall, the film’s choreographer, the material started to creep in more. She was transforming these Shaker movements into more contemporary forms, and relating them to her practice as well. I felt an affinity with her use of improvisation. 

MP Improvisation has been so key to the development of your practice, notably in the improvisatory music you were seeing at Cafe OTO that changed the course of your career. In some ways, it’s a form of musical expression that can be deceiving, habit dressed up as spontaneity. How do you stay honest while improvising?

DB These are some drawings I’ve done over the past few days [gestures to a stack of paper]. When I started listening to improvised music, it felt like I was doing that with a piece of paper and a drawing tool. A silverpoint drawing starts silver initially, and then the environment affects how it oxidises. If I hold it, the oil from my hands affects how it looks. It’s this relationship between being in control and not limiting yourself. I’m working with musicians where I don’t know what it will sound like when they’re standing in a space, what time they woke up, how they’re interacting together. All these conditions affect what can happen. There’s a chaotic kind of randomness but you’re also creating an environment where you can have freedom. It’s about setting up those situations where there’s a balance between control and something actually happening in a moment.

I’m working with musicians where I don’t know what it will sound like when they’re standing in a space, what time they woke up, how they’re interacting together. All these conditions affect what can happen

MP Drawing is your first, and to some extent your core, practice. We’re speaking before a show of your drawings in Paris. What does drawing give you that allows you to keep returning to it?

DB It gives me a reminder of what I want to achieve. I started doing exclusively silverpoint drawing about seven years ago, with a process I developed myself. I don’t know what’s going to happen when I do it. It’s an old technique of using silver wire to draw: Leonardo da Vinci used it before graphite became widespread. I started to use larger bits of silver to draw, pushing them around the gesso, and it was unravelling before my eyes. I did a lot of drawings in Hungary when we were shooting Ann Lee and I hadn’t quite mixed the gesso properly. It was a really hot summer and it made for lots of conditions that created a really different oxidation. There’s a simplicity to it [gestures to a drawing of four lines]. This drawing is finished, and I probably spent five seconds making it. It’s nice to have something like that that goes alongside the films and the more time and resource-intensive things I do.

MP How does beauty function in your practice? Have you ever stopped making something because it was too beautiful?

DB There’s definitely a moment in the drawings where I might be going too much in the direction of illustration or figuration and I start to submerge or pull that back, if there’s a clarity that doesn’t need to be there. That’s something I feel relates to this urge I have with my music. I tend to write quite melodic songs; I love a chorus and how rewarding it can feel. I’ve spoken a lot to Brady Corbet about this: how to push a feeling as far as possible, or how to hold it back for as long as possible.

MP I might ask the same for meaning. Does meaning factor into why you make something?

DB It depends on what you mean by meaning. I think that’s something Gianfranco straddles really elegantly in his films. He’s presenting worlds and he’s giving you the space to engage with them as you are. The obvious example of this is when I was younger and first watched Andrei Tarkovsky. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on but something was happening inside me, something unspeakable and beyond the limitations of language or academia. Cinema has the tools to make those experiences real. Pedro Costa’s films do that to me: they make the pace of my body change; it’s very strange. I love Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017); her use of sound in that film is incredible. I recently did a screening at Close-Up Cinema in London, where they ask you to show something but don’t announce what’s going to be shown. I included two episodes of Pingu (1990-2000), one of which was where he’s skating on ice, having his first kiss and falls through the ice but gets out. I then showed Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog: One (1989). I was excited about the change in the journey.

MP You’re a big fan of Tottenham Hotspur FC. How does it feel to love something that will endlessly disappoint you?

DB With Tottenham, I’m so optimistic. I’ve had posters of Tottenham players on my wall since I was four or five, so I have endless support for them. I don’t think they endlessly disappoint me, because we won the Europa League! It’s a very different space from anything else in my life. Years ago, it was the only thing in my life that was unrelated to work, and I thought it was taking up too much space. I realised it’s good to have some hobbies. .