Part 2

Before you started making music together, did you in any form exchange concrete ideas, goals, or strategies? Generally speaking, what are your preferences when it comes to planning vs spontaneity in a collaboration?

Patricio: Human connections inspire me, not so much the theoretical and technical talks, these are important too, but are generally part of a more solution oriented process for me.

As Emil said, our collaboration grew very organically. Talking with each other, not just about music, but small and big things in life. I also think that the different challenges that we both faced in the industry motivated us to create something new together. Something that could fine tune our strong sides as composers, and get rid of some of our weaknesses at the same time.

I think it would be very difficult to make a project of the magnitude that an album is, without having a personal relationship and understanding of each other as persons. If you don’t know each other in the beginning you certainly do when you finish the project!

On the practical side, we very much mixed spontaneity and planning in the process of making The Expected Sounds of Minor Music. We had a couple of pieces in the beginning that we had developed as a ‘side effect’ from other projects that we had done together. They had an aura and inhabited narrative about them that we strongly felt needed to be turned into an album. Like a film director’s synopsis based on an idea or emotion that it’s inspiring and clear enough to put into a script, and later into a film.

You need to have a goal and plan, still allowing a lot of room for the spontaneous stuff to happen throughout the process.

Describe the process of working together, please. What was different from your expectations and what did the other add to the music?

Emil: Making The Expected Sounds of Minor Music was a dynamic process but not a process with set expectations for me. So in that way it didn’t differ from anything I might have envisioned it to be in my mind, because I was open to what might materialize, musically speaking.

The writing process was done in Copenhagen in the gloomy hours of the winter and early spring of 2022 with recording and mixing happening in late spring and early summer. We talked about wanting to make an album that would play as a film score, even though it’s not written for any particular film or plotline. I believe we had most of the titles written down before we started working on the music, to give it more of a narrative arch.

My approach is very intuitive and Patricio has a strong analytical sense. I think both have great value and complement each other very well. Patricio's musical training and skill helped nurture nuances that in effect helped elevate the finished album.  

Patricio: I very much agree on not having specific expectations of what was going to happen musically. Again it was an inspiring place to be without any external expectations or guidelines, as we are used to as film composers.

It’s fun that Emil says that I have a strong  analytical sense, I feel the same about Emil. He is very good at throwing ideas away, killing your darlings and cutting into the bone as well as trusting his instincts. But that’s maybe the essence of any collaboration. We all have both intuitive and analytical capabilities, but it can be really difficult to analyze your own output instantly. So it feels both scary and safe having another person listening to your creative process as it is happening in the moment.

In the end I think that good collaborations nurture good art, it adds more perspective and emotions to the work. It doesn’t feel perfect as you had envisioned, but more often than not it's a lot more interesting. I feel that is very much the case with The Expected Sounds of Minor Music.    

Is there a piece which shows the different aspects you each contributed to the process particularly clearly?

Emil: I think “Copenhagen, February” is a good example of this.



I had a chord progression from another project that I wasn't sure what to do with and Patricio expanded on these chords and I added some ambient layers and arrangement and so on. We went back and forth like this throughout the process of making the album.

Another good example is “A Moment In Time” where Patrico had the piece sketched out and I added some changes and sound design elements and processing. It was a fluid process that comes across when you listen to the whole album I think.  



What tend to be the best collaborations in your opinion – those with artists you have a lot in common with or those where you have more differences? What happens when another musician take you outside of your comfort zone?

Patricio: I think this refers to earlier questions. Every time you collaborate with someone on these types of projects, you are taken out of your comfort zone, I think.

That’s the essence of collaboration. You lose control and can’t figure everything out as you imagined, something new and often completely unexpectable happens in that process. That’s very beautiful and sometimes magical.    

Decisions between creatives often work without words. How did this process work in this case?

Patricio: We wrote an instrumental album, so I guess words didn’t help us much.

I will rather put the focus on being honest with each other, and the emotions that the music we were making together evoked in us. This is something you need words for of course, and that process was also very important to us. I got better at this, doing this project together.  

What are your thoughts on the need for compromise vs standing by one’s convictions? How did you resolve potential disagreements in this collaboration?

Patricio: Again. Being honest with each other is extremely important. And is something that you can get better at with each collaboration you do. That’s the case at least for me. There are ways of standing up for your convictions, without being judgemental about your collaborators view.

On the other hand you need to learn to step back from some of your initial ideas letting them become common ground, let the process flow. See if the new ideas are better than your first instincts in the long run.

“Don’t rush it” is a key sentence for me especially with collaborations, that takes more than just one person to get used to something.

Was this collaboration fun – does it need to be?

Patricio: It found it both fun, cozy, inspiring, frustrating and exhausting at given moments. Again I have been through a bunch of collaborations. It’s a roller coaster more often than not.

Do you find that at the end of this collaboration, you changed certain parts of your process or your outlook on certain creative aspects?

Emil: I don’t know that it changed my process as much as it broadened my horizon musically. More than anything, I think this collaboration and the process of making The Expected Sounds of Minor Music sharpened my pen and enriched my musical understanding.

Patricio: This collaboration with Emil broadened my musical understanding as well. I got a better understanding of my voice as a composer, and the fine balances between overdoing and underdoing things.