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Jon Opstad

@jonopstad

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Composer - The Veil, Bodies, Black Mirror, @rainbow6game, etc.
Single "Blue Sky, White Clouds" on
@dgclassics
Rep. @first_artists_management

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Latest in my sporadic list series. Analogue synths this time.

The photos are of my own ones.

I’ve used all of these in my scoring work - the Oberheim far and away the most.

If anyone wants to sell me a CS80 or a Rhodes Chroma for the money they were going for 10-15 years ago (or better still 20) rather than the silly money they are now, please do!

Please look back through my timeline for previous lists if you’re interested

#synthesizers #synths #analogsynth #moog #oberheim by @jonopstad

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8 days ago

Doing a little rejig of this corner of the studio to make room for the DX7iiFD that I’ve added to the collection. Starting to look a bit as though I have an endorsement deal with Yamaha in 1985.

I was trying to work out how to squeeze more synth space into the studio and came up with the idea of customising a Jaspers rack to fit around the piano - buying some of the longest cross beams they do and cutting them down to size with an angle grinder, while also making some wooden supports to go under the legs to lift the whole thing higher. Works well.

#synthesizers #dx7 #yamahadx7 #recordingstudio #musictechnology by @jonopstad

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9 days ago

Live at the National Portrait Gallery, London, back in 2008.

I think this might be the only footage in existence of me playing drums in a live setting. This was actually my last ever live gig, not far off two decades ago (which seems crazy) back in 2008.

Quartet with the incredible musicians @gareth_lockrane on alto flute, @johnturvillemusic on piano and my brother @jamesopstad (19 at the time) on bass, playing my own music.

This was the days before filming on phones was commonplace. I had a vague recollection of having filmed this gig, but I wasn’t sure if I’d ever seen the footage or where it could be - I couldn’t find it on any old hard drives. Then a little while ago I came across some Mini DV tapes from my NFTS days in a drawer. I had no way of playing them, so decided to pay to get them professionally digitised. Sure enough on one of them there was a video of this gig. I was in my second year at the NFTS at this point and I borrowed a DV camera from the school to film the gig - funny how terrible the video quality is compared to what a phone can do now! I had recently bought my first multi-input audio interface at this point (a secondhand Tascam), so was able to record it with multiple mics.

It was a nice venue to play - decent piano, good sounding room. Although the camera angle picks up some of the movement in front of us there was actually an attentive seated audience that’s not shown.

Honoured to have shared the stage with those guys - such amazing musicians. This was my final gig as a drummer - after this I made a conscious decision to place all my focus on composing.

#jazz #modernjazz #drums #jazzdrums #londonjazz by @jonopstad

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13 days ago

Thanks so much to the judges at @musicandsoundawards for this lovely news!

Thanks to director @arthur_cary for bringing me on to score this beautifully made, thought provoking film.

Thanks to the brilliant musicians on the score, @laetitiastott, @matthewjcalvert and @eastconnectionmusicrec, and to @mathilde_koechlin for helping with the music editing.

I put a lot into this project to try and write music that helped tell this nuanced story, so I feel very happy to receive this nomination

#filmmusic #documentaryfilm #documentarymusic #awards #composer by @jonopstad

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22 days ago

Cooking up more synths & Rhodes (+echoplex & fuzzwah) in the lab

#synths #synthesizers #fenderrhodes #electronicmusic #ambientmusic by @jonopstad

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a month ago

An analogue synths day

#synths #arp2600 #somalyra8 #oberheim #fenderrhodes @somasynths by @jonopstad

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a month ago

LIST 4 - Best Live Music Performances I’ve Experienced

The ballet “Mere Mortals” at Sadlers Wells this week, scored by Floating Points, was absolutely extraordinary from every perspective - incredibly powerful staging, dance, choreography, lighting, design… but particularly the music. Just mind-blowingly brilliant orchestral writing. The best integration of electronics and synths with orchestra that I’ve ever heard, but just brilliant from every dimension, and with a harmonic/tonal/textural language that had me utterly riveted for its 75mins. That combination of grit and beauty that gets me more than anything else. Special mention for the beautiful playing of @miriamadefris on harp too.

With that experience in mind, here is my latest list - Best Live Music Performances I’ve Experienced.

A couple of particular mentions…

The Cookers at @church_of_sound in 2022 was amazing to see a group of legendary musicians in their 80s playing at such an astonishingly high energy level until after midnight, feeding off the energy of a young London crowd mostly in their 20s.

Seeing Penderecki conduct Threnody and Polymorphia in person in his lifetime was unforgettable.

Seeing Kenny Wheeler play what might have been his last gig as a leader, in a north London pub to a crowd packed with musicians was poignant.

Bond music is often done wrong. The 2022 gig overseen by David Arnold absolutely nailed it. Shirley Bassey, Lulu, Hans Zimmer, impeccable arrangements and playing, and some rarities like George Martin cues from Live & Let Die.

Also organised by David, his concert for Care had an amazing lineup of composers involved - John Powell, Rachel Portman, Anne Dudley, Jonny Greenwood, Michael Nyman, John Ottman, etc.

Some other memorable performances… Amy Winehouse before she was famous when I played in a support band for one show; Johann Johannsson, Haushka & Dustin O’Halloran triple bill before they were all Oscar nominees (I saw Johannsson twice); Steely Dan at Wembley in 2000. Jazz gigs at The Oxford (Kentish Town) and Con Cellar Bar (Camden) around 2006/2007.

@floatingpoints @herbiehancock @davidmtorn @eivindaarset #music #livemusic #classicalmusic #filmmusic jazz by @jonopstad

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a month ago

LIST 3 - 17 Pieces of Notated Classical Music That Have Influenced Me The Most

Next instalment of my sporadic list-making. Still very much practising an inability to achieve round numbers.

These are all incredible pieces of composition that have had a big impact on me, and with most of these I have studied the sheet music a lot in a way that has helped shape my own composing.

The music composed by Lutoslawski and Penderecki in mid-century communist Poland has had a really powerful effect on me. There’s a great book, “A Polish Renaissance” by Bernard Jacobson, charting the history of this music, alongside that of Gorecki and Panufnik, who completed the quartet of major Polish composers of this era. Penderecki and, in particular, Lutoslawski are the ones whose music hits me in a really powerful way though. Penderecki is the much better known of the two among film fans (mostly because of The Shining, etc.) and to me, Lutoslawski (20 years older than Penderecki) is hugely underrated - similarly pioneering experimental aleatoric techniques, but with a different, highly individual, harmonic sense.

Arvo Part is much imitated but never bettered. His music can appear simple on the surface but hides deceptive complexity and packs huge emotional resonance. These works were composed in Eastern Europe around the same time as Penderecki and Lutoslawski’s but are hugely different, and charted a new path.

John Adams took minimalism to new places, and Shaker Loops is one of the great works of minimalist string writing. Schoenberg was of course an expressionist master. The Ligeti works created new sounds and textures with strings and orchestra. The Paganini is a masterwork in solo violin writing. The high register solo cello in the Tavener is stunning.

Currently, my favourite of the younger current generation of composers is @cassiekinoshi, who is brilliant and completely has her own voice as a composer. I’m also looking forward to hearing @floatingpoints’s ballet Mere Mortals soon.

Previous Lists (flick back through my posts):

List 2 - 26 Film Scores That Have Changed Me
List 1 - Top 15 70s American Crime Films

#list #classicalmusic #composition #filmmusic #composers by @jonopstad

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a month ago

I read these three (fairly recent) books over the summer - each absolutely superb and thoroughly recommended.

“The Last Kings of Hollywood” - Paul Fisher
“Sonny Boy” - Al Pacino
“Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate and the Price of a Vision” - Charles Elton

My favourite era of cinema is 1970s Hollywood. I’ve read quite a lot around this previously. Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” is the central text on this period, and I wasn’t sure how much Fisher’s book would retread the same ground, but it’s a different story really - I was impressed with how much Fisher humanises the characters involved, and finds new depth by rooting the story around the three central figures who had the biggest box office successes in this period - Coppola (The Godfather), Spielberg (Jaws/Indiana Jones) and Lucas (Star Wars/Indiana Jones). Meticulously researched and totally fascinating reading.

Biskind’s book defines the second Golden Age of Hollywood in the 70s as beginning with Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, and ending with Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate in 1980. Heaven’s Gate has been notorious as the film that brought down this period of filmmaking (and ruined Cimino’s career). More recently it’s been re-assessed (thanks in part to @criterioncollection) as an unfairly maligned masterpiece, but it’s clear from Elton’s book that it ruined Cimino’s life.

Reading the Pacino and Cimino books back-to-back caused me to reflect on the nature of autobiography vs biography. I came away from the Pacino book seeing the enormous value of having a great figure chart their life from their own perspective in their lifetime, and so went into the Cimino book with lower expectations. But I came away from that one seeing the enormous value of an objective outsider having meticulously researched the life of an otherwise unreliable narrator (Cimino’s own contributions to his life story seem to need to be regarded as fictional to a degree). Cimino comes across as a hugely enigmatic, quite tragic figure. The book is incredibly well research and sensitively written – utterly fascinating.

#cinema #books #reading #michaelcimino #alpacino by @jonopstad

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a month ago

Beautiful summer times with family and good friends.

Just back from the best European road (and sea) trip. A rare instance of work deadlines working out perfectly for a holiday. I completed my latest score (Deadpoint) and two days later we piled the family into the car and set off.

LONDON - BARCELONA - ROME - POMPEII - BARI - CORFU - VENICE - LONDON

A mix of driving and overnight ferries. Quite an adventure!

Lovely time with friends along the way - @rogergoula on the coast near Barcelona and @harrietmoss in Pompeii.

Photos:
1-3: With Roger & family on the coast near Barcelona. Roger’s been a great friend for nearly 20 years now. First time meeting up on his home turf :)

4: In Barcelona (saw lots of great, inspiring Gaudi - might post some photos separately)

5: Saw some stunning sunsets out at sea.

6: View of the Colosseum from the apartment we stayed in in Rome

7: Tried to take the most Italian photo possible

8: Watched The Bicycle Thieves with the kids while in Rome. A classic

9: With the wonderful @harrietmoss in Pompeii

10: Looking out on Mount Vesuvius from our accommodation in Pompeii

11-12: I’d read recently that to put on weight for Raging Bull, Scorsese sent Robert DeNiro to Italy for a couple of months to just eat pizza and ice cream. Accordingly we referred to our holiday diet as the “DeNiro diet” (it was really good). The pizza shown here is from L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele in Naples - so pretty much the best in the world.

13 - Interestingly titled Greek yoghurt

14 - View from our balcony on Corfu, looking out over the exact bay where the water scenes in For Your Eyes Only were filmed :)

15 - Holiday reading on the balcony. Heaven.

16 - Another beautiful sunset at sea

17 - Venice. Hannah and I last visited in 2004. It seemed a lot cleaner this time. Such a beautiful city.

18 - Driving home I realised that we were going almost right by the tunnel in the Italian Alps from the opening of The Italian Job - couldn’t resist a short detour with Quincy Jones’s amazing score playing.

19 - Windscreen visitor

20 - Our trusty VW Sharan (in the Alps) that got us all the way to Corfu and back

#travel #roadtrip #summerholiday #italy #corfu by @jonopstad

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a month ago

Nice to see Deadpoint in The Guardian’s list of the 50 Best TV Shows to Watch This Autumn. Looking forward to this going out into the world

#deadpoint #tvdrama #thriller #filmmusic #composer by @jonopstad

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2 months ago

List 2 - 26 Film Scores That Have Changed Me

Carrying on my sporadic list-making activities. I was trying to limit this to 20 initially, then thought I’d successfully capped it at 25, before I realised I’d left out one more that I couldn’t not include, hence the slightly random number of 26.

These are all scores that have really affected me and influenced the way that I compose. There are many more that I love and that have influenced me of course, and composers whose work I love who aren’t represented here, but I’m pretty happy that this selection is a good representation of the film music that has shaped me and influenced me the strongest.

Side note: two film scores that aren’t listed here but that had a big effect on me were early works by my two great friends and @nftsfilmtv classmates @stuart_earl & @rogergoula - In Our Name (2010) and Shock Head Soul (2011) respectively. I heard both in the cinema and both gave me a strong feeling of really needing to get myself in gear and up my game.

#filmmusic #list #soundtracks #filmscore #composers by @jonopstad

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2 months ago