David Holmes
May 2004
London

DJ, composer and musician David Holmes is a very busy man these days. After several tries at setting up a interview, the Belfast native is finally pinned down via cell phone at his London studio, where he's hard at work on a new record. It's not the soundtrack for the upcoming sequel to 2001's successful Ocean's Eleven by Steven Soderbergh (in 1998, Holmes compiled a poppy, catchy collection of music for Soderbergh's Out of Sight). And he's not working on a follow-up record by his band, Free Association, which released two full-length albums in 2002. At the moment, "I'm doing a new record just for myself," he says with a laugh.

The hyphenate artist has never shied away from doing what he wants if it feels good, and that mentality has resulted in a great deal of success. Holmes has crossed boundaries on dance floors, in studio production and, in this case, as a soundtrack composer, for I've called him to discuss his soundtrack to Michael Winterbottom's Code 46, starring Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton. Released this summer in art houses across the U.S., the film is a glimpse into a frighteningly possible future full of familiar (if disturbing) similarities to the world we know now, with an even greater polarization between the privileged elite and disenfranchised poor.

The film has just enough of a sci-fi bent to come off cold and distant but it is Holmes' evocative score that provides a critical connection between the viewer and the film's subject matter, which at its core is a story about love. The music acts as a third main character in the film, forming a bridge between what Robbins' and Morton's characters are going through and the viewer experiencing the film. It isn't a sound you might expect from someone who came to prominence as a dance club guru – a hipster whose work is considered primarily electronic.

But that improbability is precisely why it was such a treat to talk to Holmes and figure out how and why he does what he does.

Along with whatever project it is you're doing for yourself, I assume you're working a lot these days on the Ocean's Twelve soundtrack.

Yes. I’ve been basically sending Steven lots and lots of music, but the real work hasn’t begun yet. At the moment we're just shaping the whole vibe of it and trying to establish a real direction in the music, the feel of the whole soundtrack, by temping with different tracks that I've suggested.

That seems to be the way that you would work, having that background as a DJ. But to me the music in Code 46 was huge and very different from your past soundtracks. It was just as essential as either of the two main characters in the movie and without it I think it would have lacked an emotional tie for the present day audience to connect with that kind of distressing, futuristic world.

Yeah. I mean, thank you very much!

You’re welcome. It really impressed the hell out of me, I have to say.

You know, the part of it that I really want to avoid is being typecast. I would never do that sort of style for Ocean’s Eleven and Out of Sight.

It wouldn’t fit.

It’s not that…lots of people have asked me to do it for other movies that maybe it would fit, but I just refuse to be stereotyped. And Code 46 was a real chance for me to do mood music that I was really feeling, that I listen to much more than I listen to a lot of the sort of funk, rhythm and soul/psychedelic music that would influence Ocean’s. I listen to so many different genres of music. To me, I don’t even split them up into genres. I just look at it as music. And there’s just so much more to me than actually making funky music. [Laughs]

Free Association and Ocean’s Eleven and what I do as David Holmes are all completely different things and they all have completely different concepts. It’s just that I love music, period, rather than just one thing. Code 46 was a chance to really express that, to show people that I’m into a lot of different kinds of music, and that I can make music that doesn’t require horns and a lot of funky drums.

Yeah, that it’s not all about a beat or whatever.

Yeah, it’s much more musical and and emotional, you know?

Exactly. It's interesting that the directors that you’ve worked with I think have spent their careers also defying genres and defying being categorized. How did you connect with Michael Winterbottom to do this?

I had done a movie – it was the first film that I’d done – called Resurrection Man, which was directed by a great Welsh director called Marc Evans and produced by Revolution Films, where Andrew Eaton and Michael were both producers. I really had a good relationship with those guys from that time, and when Code 46 came up they thought of me because what I did in Resurrection Man was much more textural and tonal and sort of eerie. I sort of made my name doing Out of Sight and Ocean’s Eleven, because they were so huge. But I'd been doing more darker and more interesting – not interesting, because I think what I do in Ocean’s is interesting – but just much more sort of abstract and left field music before that.

What was it like to collaborate with Michael Winterbottom? Did you start off during production or did you come in after the film had been shot?

It was a last-minute kind of thing. But once we'd had a conversation and once we had connected and he showed me some things, I knew instantly the sound to go for. I made him a CD the following day of influences that inspired the soundtrack.

What were some of those influences?

There's a band from Germany called Limp…My Bloody Valentine was an influence...lots of early eighties electronic sort of music because it has kind of a futuristic feel but it was very emotional and sort of string-led. It's music that was very textural but had a real futuristic feel to it; it’s sort of electronic, but there’s layers of guitars. That’s where the My Bloody Valentine influence came in. Sigur Ros were an influence too, like the way their stuff is arranged and the way they layer their music as well, just the sound of their records. Stuff like that. Michael was sold immediately.

Yeah. It’s an odd kind of conundrum. When you think about things that are futuristic, I think the tendency is to think of stuff that’s much more sterile and non-emotional and whatnot. But you really hit it with those influences. Those are really things that, even if done twenty years ago, sound so far beyond right now.

I think of it as like you're dealing with pure emotion in music. I mean, all music is emotional, really, but this is the type of emotion where it’s sad and melancholy but it’s hopeful as well – the music just punches those buttons. And I think if you can do that well, you can actually create something that is quite timeless because you’re dealing with the human psyche, you’re dealing with people. Everyone gets fucked up, everyone gets emotional and sad, and if you can have music that can make you feel one of those emotions, you’re always going to be reaching for it because life is full of ups and downs.

This is very true. It makes it universal.

Yeah.

How do you compose? What’s your recording process like?

Well, what’s most important to me is just having ideas without even thinking about the whole technical side of things. I think the first thing you’ve got to go into the studio with when you’re making music for a film is a really strong idea of what you’re trying to achieve. From that point we sit around and we talk; we talk about lots of different things that inspire the creation of the music. We talk about recording techniques. The instrumentation may be the first thing you would think of; then, when I’ve got the right amount of people, the right musicians to work with, we sit around and play them things and we talk about the strength of the dynamics and where the music has got to build and where it’s got to drop, the whole emotional feeling that’s trying to be achieved. And that’s just all through the conversation.

Then if we’re working with the guitar, for instance, which is the case here – the guitar is the main instrument in Code 46, but it’s being recorded so many different ways, with so many different effects, going through different amps, using different techniques to create the sounds that I’ve got in my head. So a lot of it is part improv and part discussion on exactly what we’re trying to achieve. Once we’ve sat down and everyone understands what we’re trying to achieve, then everything else from then on is based on improvisation and we try different things out. And we work until we get it right.

You were talking about what you were trying to achieve in terms of manipulating emotion or fitting in with the emotion that you’re trying to match the music to in certain scenes. Do you think your practice as a DJ has helped you with that? It just seems like they are similar, the timing and manipulation of sound to make people feel a certain way.

Well, DJing and making music for films is quite similar in a way, because for two hours as a DJ you’ve got a crowd of people in front of you and you’re basically taking them on a journey. It’s the same thing in a film. In those two hours, it’s going to have highs, it’s going to have lows, it’s going to have tension, it’s gonna have drama, it’s gonna have all these things. So definitely, if I never had DJ’d, I would never have been able to do film scores, because in a way it’s theoretically the same.

Did you grow up being really into films?

I grew up with not many choices. I grew up in Belfast, where the entertainment was very limited, but it was also really, really precious. When I grew up in Belfast, everyone was fucking crazy. There was practically a civil war going on in the Seventies and stuff. So you got your kicks out of watching films and getting into music. In Belfast, especially growing up in the Seventies, there was a lot of temptation for people to make the wrong choice and either join the army or join a parliamentary group.

It had a deeper meaning. It was an outlet.

Well, or you could just do your own thing and lead a straight life and really get into the music and join a band or get into whatever sort of art form you wanted to. So because of that lack of choices, when you got into something, you really, really got into it. And I just really, really got into music. The first club I DJ’d in, I was fifteen, playing really rare soul and rhythm and blues. And that was something that I got into watching Quadrophenia. So the two things, film and music, were sort of completely connected already without even knowing.

And then through the eighties there was so much other great music coming out, like hip-hop and electro and acid house and techno. And that became a real obsession, getting into the techno and acid house music, like all that great music that came from Detroit and Chicago – that to me is real techno. When people look at techno now, it’s just become a really bad word because people really misuse it. People think it’s really heavy, banging fucking music that’s just so monotonous, but techno actually had soul and funk and still to this day sounds totally fresh. To me, it was as funky as listening to James Brown. And through that, I got into making music and going to distributors and engineers and buying records and creating music from ideas and, of course, sampling very heavily. But that’s an important part of music, I think, in this day and age, just as being able to play the cello or the guitar.

It’s a new skill.

Yeah. But I’m going to try not to sample as much as I did. What I sample these days are more textures and sounds and drums and percussion, things like that. I have the most bizarre record collection you’ve ever seen. I’m really into Music Concret and lots of really ancient electronic music from the Fifties and Sixties. Just bizarre library records and generally finding really odd things.

Educate me – what’s electronic from the Fifties and Sixties?

Well, people like Paul Doxstader. The guy was a complete genius. He was basically experimenting with sounds through magnetic tapes and all sort of generators, collecting lots of natural sounds and sounds that he’d made, then manipulating them through these generators and reel-to-reel tapes and making the most amazing sounds that you’ve ever heard. It’s such a laborious process, what he was actually doing to get these incredible sounds and textures and tones. He later went on to do music for the popular Sixties cartoons. Like [makes "boing" sound"] – he used to do really mental stuff like that.

And people like Stockhausen and John Cage. I could name you just loads – Raymond Scott, people like that that who were experimenting with the first-ever synthesizers and oscillators and creating these incredible sequences. And then the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, that was a big influence over the years. Earlier I was on about Music Concrete and so many incredible composers came out of that genre. There’s Phillippe Arthuys, Jean-Jacques Paris, Pierre Henry. These guys were making music thirty years ago that still is completely relevant in this day and age. They would be more my influence than a lot of modern music.

Right – you’re looking for that timelessness is what you’re trying to do.

Yeah! But I’m also delving into obscurity and just constantly trying to dig deeper to find that record that no one has, or that sound that is still unique, or that drum sound that just could not be re-created in this day and age – the way it’s recorded, the machinery, the way they cut the records, the way they mixed them, the rooms they used…. It’s just stuff like that. But I would never sample like Stockhausen or Jean-Jacques Paris, because these guys are more well-known. I try to go a bit deeper into names that I would never mention to a writer over the phone. [Laughs]

That’s understandable. A magician never gives away his secrets.

Well, at least I’m giving you a general idea.

Yeah, I’ll go down the rabbit hole and try to find what you’re talking about.

Do! But at the moment, for Ocean’s, what I’ve been doing is basically sharing with Steven lots of European music. You know, people slag off France all the time about music, but those guys are fucking so far ahead of their time in the Sixties and Seventies. And I get so mad when people laugh at them! I’ve been sending Steven lots of that, lots of psychedelic European sort of floor fillers. I sent him an amazing version of...I shouldn’t be telling you this! [Laughs] Because I’ve been trying to find that new "A Little Less Conversation" [Junkie XL Elvis remix that was a giant hit off the Ocean's Eleven soundtrack] and I think we might have found it, but I can’t tell you what it is.

Okay, don’t. But as soon as I hear it in the trailer or whatever, I’m gonna spill the beans that I heard it from you! [Laughs]

It won’t be in the trailer, but hopefully it’ll be in the film. I haven’t even discussed it with Steven if he really wants to use it or not. I’m hoping he will, because lyrically and emotionally and the whole feel of it just totally makes sense.

And are there plans to release Code 46 soundtrack?

Yeah, definitely - it's coming out on a new label in the States. I can't really give out details at the moment – it's happening; we've just got to sign the contracts and stuff. But what I'll do is send you a copy now so you can have it.

That's great – thank you so much, David! It's been totally awesome talking to you. I've been dancing to your stuff since I was in college a decade ago and to see how far you've taken yourself and all these different directions you've explored is really inspiring.

Thanks very much! I'll keep going and see what I can come up with.