13. Oskar Sala
Oskar Sala did the soundtrack for The Birds and all of the bird sounds are synthetic, so they are so much more frightening. That really turned me on to his work, most of it is classical, and he comes from a classical pianist background, but The Birds soundtrack is just an incredible noise record.
I’m a painter really, so I started making music as an accompaniment to these images, and I don’t think of the two being that different. So whenever I check out film composers, this is how I feel about my music. It always has some sort of environmental thing, which I’ve expressed through Dilemmas Of Identity – and there’s an environment that these things are being made in that are just as important, if not more important than the actual music itself. It’s there that you can see the artist emerge as an individual, rather than just as a film score. You see the image that is influencing the sound and the sound that’s influencing the image, and Sala and Riz [Ortolani] both have that going on for me. There’s so many more of course.
I always appreciated that idea, that the image influences the sound and the sound influences the image – but then it becomes a chicken and egg with more abstract music. Not being trained you have to find your ways around all of that and melody still exists within abstract music it’s just become something different, and if you look at how Sala in the birds used melody, in this shrieking nasty bird sounds, there’s still a melody that goes along with the actual film, an arc that brings it to a certain point that you wouldn’t get otherwise.
