Name: Omar Aloulou
Nationality: Tunisian
Occupation: Film composer, producer
Current release: Omar Aloulou is one of the artists contributing to the new V/A - Place: Tunisia compilation curated by Azu Tiwaline and Shinigami San and to be released on Air Texture March 24th 2023.
Recommendations: Shoji Yamashiro - Akira original soundtrack (music); Céline – Journey to the end of the night (book)

If you enjoyed this interview with Omar Aloulou and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit him on Instagram, Facebook, twitter, and Soundcloud.



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

I started playing piano at the age of 7, but I started writing and producing music at the age of 13, 14.

I had many passions and influences when I was a young kid, from Led Zeppelin, to Machinehead, Pantera, Rage Against The Machine, Down but also rappers like M.O.P., Ol dirty Bastard and the French rap scene from the early 90s. So I was mainly into rock and rap. There are also some influences that were there without me beeing conscious of it, music that my mother was listening to, like Fairuz or Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov.



But when I was a young teenager, I totally fell into the music of Nine Inch Nails which was a huge influence on me, and still is now.



As far as I remember, my absolute first musical excitement was me listening to my older cousin singing and playing on the piano - “Let it be” by the Beatles. I guess that was my first step into the music world from an aesthetic point of view.

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?

I'm not sure I can answer clearly to that question, it's more about feeling than seeing things. But I believe in moments of grace in music, that brief moment when you get goose bumps, when you're taken away completely.

I think paths in a music structure should lead to those kinds of moments. And I believe that when I compose, I consciously or unconsciously try to structure my music that way.

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

As a musician I went from different ways of making music to different genre interests in music. I went from psychedelic and progressive rock music as a band musician and composer to a more experimental searcher as a solo artist and a classical music listener, besides a career as a film composer.

So I'm trying to manage how to keep my personal voice when I'm making music for others, and it's quite challenging. Sometimes it's taking so much time that I can't find time for my personal projects.

The main challenge I have to deal with is to concentrate more on my own voice, my own aesthetic researchs, but also try to make more live music.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

When it comes to art, I'm not into identities. I'm open to all kinds of music  regardless of its origin.

I compose with the equal temperament system mainly and I'm not that much into the electro-arab musical movement which strongly affirms its identity. The main reason is probably the fact that I'm very influenced by Western classical music, and I feel that I don't have to explicitely express my identity musically.

It's there, it expresses itself when it must, and I don't feel the need to show it if I don't musically have to.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

My main engine are sadness, pain, love and freedom. I guess I make music to express my own sadness and suffering, to find a way to sublimate it, and to try to liberate myself from it.

As the great conductor Sergiu Celibidache once said: Every art has only one goal, freedom.  

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

I think that looking at the future can only be done by continuing a tradition in a certain way, at least in my way of seeing art. We are always digging into the past to push things forward.

For instance, I personally am classical music lover. And I tried to learn some classical techniques to use in my own music, like counterpoint or canon, and even orchestration.

I think it makes you see thing from a wider point of view, and it can only enhance your technical palette.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

I started by playing piano, then guitar and then bass which became my main instrument for years. Then I went back to piano for composition purposes. But besides that, the computer has always been around, and it is really my main instrument and tool.

But there's something I want to try from now on, it's less computer, and more hardware.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

My routine is always changing, I'm dealing with disciplinary problems. I'm a night guy but I'm trying to convince myself that I'm a day guy. So I'm trying to get up early in the morning to start working, after a breakfast, a coffee, and a cigarette.

In reality, I find myself working any time of the day, in complete disorder; but I'm really more concentrated at night when everything is quiet. Everything comes at night.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

The cineconcert I made for Murnau's masterpiece Faust is maybe the musical work that is the most close to what I want I aim to do musically.

It's mainly based on themes and motives. There's a theme for every character, a motif for the main conceptual themes. So I tried to find my themes and motives at first, themes that can be reworked, reduced, amplified, rearranged the way the movie scenes in which it appeared required. So there's a lot of time passed into finding those themes. The main work is done there.

Then comes the composition phase which is basically developing those main ideas and making pieces of music out of it. The orchestration I tried to make for this work was mainly trying to imagine a symphonic orchestra made out of electronic synths. So, trying to find or make the synths that share musical characteristics with the instruments of an orchestra, like string sections, brass sections and so on.

I spent many months in the composition phase, and after all that was done, I tried to imagine how to make this two-hours-long musical piece into a live music to accompany the screening of the movie. And that was another challenge, which instruments will I play live, how to follow the movie while every piece was perfectly synced with the scenes.

After I finished the cineconcert, I was literally emptied. I felt I put everything into it. I couldn't make music for a long time after that.  

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

In my early years of music, I've been in bands, and I really enjoyed the experience of relying on fellow musicians, and sharing ideas from one to the other in the compositional stage, or live on stage.

But the more I grow, the more I realize that the solitary experience is more suitable, because you don't have to please all members if you are in a band, the ideas that are emerging are free to go everywhere they want to go.

I see it more like a fascist way of seeing music - but it's probably the best way to explore things without limits of any kind, for the best or for the worst.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

Philip Glass once said that music is a place, and we can go there. I like this definition, where it's not supposed to have a role, a meaning, or a purpose, it's just there, and there are as many places we can create or visit as there are music visions and musical languages.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

I think pain is maybe the topic that is the most related to music in my case, and which maybe is the most serious subject in life.

For instance, an album that I'm deeply connected with is Nine inch Nails The Downward Spiral, and also The Fragile, which are albums that I listen to a lot in moments of complete disappearance of oneself. So you find yourself relating to an artist that feels kind of the same way, and you become him and he becomes you.



Art becomes in one way a kind of spiritual healing, or maybe a way to sublimate oneself's condition and suffering, to find freedom.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

Science has always been related to music, from the beginning of music theorizing. Music has been systemized thanks to mathematics, and many contemporary musicians have used mathematics to compose, such as Tool, or astronomy as did the belgian band Aka Moon. So I think science will always stay aside from music, from theory to composition methodology.



But in the other way around, I'm not sure of it, because music is the unseen, it's the non physical-dimension. It's beyond science I guess.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

When you're making a great cup of coffee you're aiming for instant satisfaction. When you're making music you're aiming for eternity.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

There's no explanation to search for, instrumental music is the purest and the most abstract form of art, and yet we seem to understand it.

It is  as magical as the creation of the universe, an organized chaos for us to find a meaning where in reality there is none. It is pure magic.