Well, this one is pretty insane! From his early days as the frontman of Oingo Boingo, to his collaborations with filmmakers like Tim Burton, Sam Raimi and Gus Van Sant, Danny Elfman is indeed a legend, whose body of work has permeated the very fabric of pop culture!
His composing credits include The Simpsons theme—recognized the world over—Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Mars Attacks!, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Spider-Man, Oscar-nominated scores for Good Will Hunting, Men In Black, Big Fish, and Milk, the list goes on. It’s hard to imagine anyone going through life without encountering one of Elfman's compositions.
Danny Elfman recently scored Tim Burton's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the hit Netflix series, Wednesday, starring Jenna Ortega. He's also set to write original music for Dark Universe at Universal Orlando—which, I have to admit, I’m pretty excited about (like synths, you could say amusement rides rely on a precise combination of components to create an immersive experience, and unsurprisingly I am indeed a fan of theme parks). He’s also performing at the Hollywood Bowl on 11/2 and Shoreline Amphitheater on 11/3. More info can be found here.
Below, we talk about his favorite films, the early days, how the evolution of music technology has impacted his workflow and more.
Provided by Ambar Navarro for Synth History.
Synth History: I read that when you were young you spent time at a local movie theater discovering sci-fi, fantasy and horror films. What were some of your favorites?
Danny Elfman: Every weekend of my childhood was spent at this theater, whose audience consisted mostly of juvenile boys. In those days, parents would just let their kids go to the theater. I can’t remember my mom ever coming with me, except for one movie, The Haunting, which I still really love. My mother was a writer and a big fan of Shirley Jackson’s. That was the only time I ever remember going with her; otherwise, it was just me and these boys creating a ruckus.
The theater played mostly monster, sci-fi and a certain amount of action movies. By ‘action’, we're talking fantasy-action, not like an action movie that you’d think of today. It was more like Sword-and-sandal, you know, Samson or Hercules versus such and such army, that kind of action. I had so many favorites.
I loved the down and dirty horror, like The Brain That Wouldn't Die. Really gory – if only my mother knew what kind of movies I was seeing. The first movie that really scared the crap out of me—and got me into monsters and hands—was called, The Beast with Five Fingers. It was about a hand pursuing the actor Peter Lorre. It was made in the 50s, but I saw it in the 60s.
The movie that got me into film scoring was called The Day the Earth Stood Still. I saw it when I was about twelve. I learned later that The Day the Earth Stood Still had come out a decade before I saw it. We didn't have cable and streaming, so to us, it was like, “That’s a new movie!” It had this great score. It was the first time I had ever heard the composer, Bernard Herrmann, and after that I started noticing his name.
Then, I started noticing the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion animation films: Jason and the Argonauts—I must have seen that one about six or seven times; The Seven Voyages of Sinbad; Mysterious Island—they all had Bernard Herrmann scores. I just loved that. Another one of my favorites of that era was called The Time Machine and the Morlocks, which I must have seen four or five times over the weekend it was in the theater. Movies didn't stick around for a second weekend either. A totally different era.
Synth History: So if you missed your chance, that was it!
Danny Elfman: Yeah. On the other hand, you got to see a huge plethora of films. Another favorite of mine at the time—where I also loved the music and thought the music was really funny—was called Eyes Without a Face, a French film. My brother and I were laughing so hard at the music that the usher came over and made us stand in the lobby. They would do that then. They'd pull you out, shine a light and say, “Come on!” and make you stand there for 10 minutes and settle down, “All right, go back to your seat.”
Synth History: Time out! [laughs]
Danny Elfman: We just thought the music was so funny. Later, it became one of my favorite scores. It was an early score of the composer, Maurice Jarre, who did Lawrence of Arabia and all. I actually paid homage to it in Nightmare Before Christmas. If you listen to the mayor's theme, when he is bumbling around in Nightmare, it's kind of a homage to Maurice Jarre’s score to Eyes Without a Face.
There were lots of science fiction movies in that era involving giant things—giant ants, giant locusts, giant everything. Alien invasion was huge. Giant mutations were huge. There was an endless amount of those kinds of low-budget horror films. I loved the movies from England, the Hammer horror films with Christopher Lee; Tim Burton and I bonded over those—all the Dracula movies. The Roger Corman films, which usually involved Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff, featured in these Edgar Allan Poe movies that had nothing whatsoever to do with Edgar Allan Poe. They were really absurd. Oh, Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath...
So that's the kind of stuff I really loved.
Synth History: Can you tell me about joining The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo and the transition into Oingo Boingo?
Danny Elfman: Well, I was drafted into Mystic Knights, I didn't have a choice.
When I was 18, I decided to pick up my first instrument, the violin, and was going to travel around the world with my friend Leon, who had picked up a saxophone. He had his alto sax, I had my violin, and off we went. We ended up spending a year crossing Africa.
It started with visiting my brother in France, who was performing as a conga drummer—a hand drummer—and played with a French musical theatrical troupe called the Grand Magic Circus, whom he had met randomly. I stopped to visit him. It was very romantic to me, being in Paris; I was 18 in an apartment in this great old part of the city. When I was practicing in his apartment one day, the director came in and heard me playing in another room. I stepped out, and he was just sitting there. I was really embarrassed, but he said, “You come and play with us!” I go, “I don’t know...” he insisted, “Yeah, you’re good enough for us!” So, I toured with the Grand Magic Circus.
I then began my long journey. My brother went back to Los Angeles and he founded the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. When I finally showed up [in LA], about eight or nine months later, he had this troupe. He said, “OK, you're gonna become our musical director and violin player,” and I said, “Well, you know, let me rest up a little.” I had gotten malaria three times, came back with hepatitis and a couple of other things that I don't even know the name of—really near killing me. He goes, “OK, you can take tomorrow and the next day off and then you can sit in on a rehearsal.”
I had gotten a couple of letters from him in Africa talking about how he was starting his own troupe that I had to join. I was expecting something ‘worked out’. I thought, what would there be left for me to do this many months later? But when I got back, there was plenty left, because they were really a street group, street theater. We evolved over the next couple years into a pretty big troupe, there were about 12 of us. We tried to have this thing where everybody played at least three musical instruments. Because I'd been in West Africa, Leon and I—who I'd traveled with—we started making our own balafons. In fact, see that curved marimba there? [Danny points behind him to his vast collection] That is one of our early Mystic Knights instruments that we made!
Synth History: Oh, wow!
Danny Wlfman: We'd do lightning shows outside, street shows. We would use all percussion, stringed and brass instruments. I learned to play the trombone. I learned to breathe fire. We had an acrobat who was also a trumpet player named Jan. The two of us would blow fire and then we'd suddenly pick up our trombone and trumpet and play an old 1930s jazz piece, Cab Calloway or something. The idea would be to show up at a movie theater line or something like that, do a quick show, pass the hat and get out before we were arrested. Because obviously, busking is not legal.
Synth History: Did that ever happen?
Danny Elfman: Yeah. We got arrested once. It was at a memorial day parade in Venice. We
drummed our way right into a police van. It happens. That was the Mystic Knights.
That would have been around ‘72, then around ‘76 or seven, my brother left. He wanted to make a crazy film called Forbidden Zone. After that, I took the Mystic Knights in a more musical direction. We started doing theaters and became a pretty good, decent ensemble. I started writing original music in that period. Somewhere right around the end of the 70s, I heard ska out of England, and I just thought to myself: this theater stuff is fun, but I want to be in a ska band. So myself, the guitarist Steve Bartek and three brass players said, “Let’s form a band!” A ska band has a brass section, so it made sense. We started an early version of Oingo Boingo.
There was a big debate whether or not to take a new name, because we were a different group. The Mystic Knights was all acoustic, no electric music at all. Oingo Boingo was a rock band. We didn't have any of the same music, except maybe the tune I wrote from my brother's movie, Forbidden Zone, which was my first time ever writing for electric guitar. We had a bunch of other names for a while... Clam Nine, that didn't stick. Finally, we said, “Let's just stick with Oingo Boingo.”
Synth History: It's a good name!
Danny Elfman: But it makes things really confusing. I try to describe these two different eras, two different decades, the 70s and 80s, and they're just so different. But, you know, we have the same name, so I try to call The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, the Mystic Knights.
Synth History: Do you remember some of the early gear — some keyboards you were using back then?
Danny Elfman: I mean, the 80s was the beginning of digital keyboards. I had some early analog stuff, but it was hard to use. I would get a sound I liked and I'd never get it back again. My first early Moog had a bad tendency to drift out of tune when it started getting warm. If the room got too warm, suddenly, “Oh my God, it's out of tune!” So, I jumped on the first digital synths. Roland and Yamaha started coming out with their digital synths and I was all over that. I was so eager for that idea of being able to get a synthesizer that actually had a memory card where you could sit there and program a sound and save it. That was a miracle to me. I actually hooked up with a music store in Tokyo and would get stuff directly from them. I figured out how to convert dollars to yen and would get stuff shipped out to me before they were in the American market. All the memory cards and things like that, the upgraded stuff. It was very exciting getting these early synthesizers.
The big game changer for me was the E-mu Emulator, one of the first samplers. I fucking loved it. For me, to be able to make my own samples and then mess with them and lay them in tracks was a great thing. Between the early Roland and Yamaha digital synthesizers and the Emulator, that was the 80s for me.
Synth History: How has technology impacted your workflow overall, has it made things easier?
Danny Elfman: It definitely made things easier. When I started in ‘85—that's when I got Pee Wee's Big Adventure—there was very little to go with. I'm not a pianist, but I had to sit there in front of Tim Burton and a producer and play pieces. The music to Pee Wee’s Big Adventure was really simple, but for me, it might as well have been Rachmaninoff. I'd be sweating on the keys. So, I was really anxious to find a way to play back music.
In the 50s, 60s and 70s, a composer would just play on a piano and all the director would get to hear is their theme. They wouldn't hear a whole piece of music. When Bernard Herrmann played theme music for Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcok wasn't hearing a big orchestral mock-up piece, like what happens now. But it was getting to be the end of that era. The directors really wanted to hear what it would actually sound like, this cue and that cue.
I found myself, right from the beginning, putting in all this time. I bought a 4-track, then an 8-track tape recorder. I was getting more synths and a lot more Emulators and using them for different samples. Within about two to three years from Pee Wee, I had racks of Emulators. You know, these are my woodwinds, these are my strings, this is my brass, this is my percussion. I was getting into early ways to sequence things.
A miracle for me was the first Mac. The program I used was called Mark of the Unicorn Performer. With the Mac, I could play synths and samples into it, then play them at my own tempo—slow, step time. This meant I could play a really complicated line in step time, then play it back in sync to the picture.
So really, Pee Wee's Big Adventure was a hodgepodge mostly [composed] on piano or things I could work up on my 4-track, then my 8-track, playing multiple parts. It was very time consuming. Tim would need to hear and approve the music, then afterwards I'd have to write it all down. It was like that for 20 films. By the time I got to Beetlejuice, which was my fifth film, Pee Wee was one, Beetlejuice was five and Batman was 10, Tim used to go, “How are you getting in four films between each of my films?” and I’d go, “If I don't, I'm not going to be able to keep up with you,” because each score was demanding much more of me. If I hadn't done nine films before Batman, I couldn't have done Batman. If [Batman] was my third film, it would have been hopeless. So by the time I got to Beetlejuice and then Batman, I was able to mock-up an entire cue in sync from the first note to the last, even though the sounds were really funky.
The first leap in technology was having a sequencer play back—not just a melody—but a whole sense of a cue. The brass might sound a little bit like car horns and the strings might sound really ratty, but the director could hear the whole sense of it. Then they hear the real piece with an orchestra and go, “Oh, wow, so good!”
The next big leap for me was around Nightmare Before Christmas. It was the first time using MIDI printout. When I was writing music [by hand], I never worked less than 16 hours a day, except maybe Sunday, I'd work eight hours and take off half a day. It was murder. In those same years, 1985 to ‘91 or two, when Nightmare came out, I was also recording and touring with Oingo Boingo. It was insane.
Suddenly, I realized that if I was going to take all these hours to mock-up a cue for Nightmare—because I had to mock them all up top to bottom and make demos, work out all the parts; it's orchestrated, it’s all there, every single instrument is there — now, I could print out MIDI into a score. That cut my days down from 16 hours to a nice, lean, short, 10 to 12 hours. It had a huge impact on my life, it was a big game changer for me.
I've heard some composers in interviews say, “Oh, if you do that, that's bullshit, it’s like cheating.” But I listen to their music and it's way simpler. It's easy to say that when ultimately, you've basically got four or five parts going. A string line and an oboe, or a little bit of some piano going underneath. When you're doing what I'm doing, which is pretty complicated right from the very beginning... I just got to the point where I would do my orchestration in the composition, because what I wanted [the director] to hear was everything. I didn't want them to hear just the ‘gist’ of it. By the time I got to that point, that's what directors were expecting to hear.
It was a huge paradigm shift from when I started. The directors were now coming in and saying, “Play me the cue,” you know, “play me the next cue and the next one and the next one.” There was no sense of, “OK, take your themes and go off and write a score.” The first time Alfred Hitchcock would hear the whole score Bernard Hermann wrote, it'd be in the studio when the orchestra would play it back. What a different world it was, than sitting there for hours with the director, playing cues, taking their notes, making changes, doing five, six, seven—eight versions of it and finally getting it approved. It was just very, very different. In fact, in the early days, in what they call ‘The Golden Age’—the 40s and 50s—often by the time a composer came on, the director was gone, they were already off working on another film. Everybody worked for studios, so the director would do a film and then leave and start another one. The composer would be hired and essentially be working for the studio and the director would not hear the score until it was finished. That is just not how it works anymore.
I really came in during that transition between the old school, where a director would hear the theme and say, “Go do your thing,” and the era where, if there are 57 cues and 90 minutes of music, the director expects to hear and approve every single one of those 57 cues in detail before they get to the orchestra. By the time they get to the orchestra, they've heard everything. Now, they're just gonna hear it better. You know, they want as few surprises as possible.
Synth History: Have you ever written a demo and then had an orchestra do it, but liked the demo version better than the orchestra? Are there certain sounds or samples you keep in?
Danny Elfman: Occasionally, there are certain sounds that I keep in apart from my samples because I know the director will like it. There are certain cues here and there where there is a very percussive quality to these kind of cheesy, short strings. They have a certain energy. Even though the orchestra sounds much bigger and expansive, sometimes it's just not as... direct, you know? I started learning what those particular sounds tended to be and making sure that I included those when I took it to orchestra. I’d say, “Yeah, they’re right here on these faders, that sound you like. It's right here!” Then mix it in with the orchestra.
Synth History: Do you have a big sample library of all the percussion you have in here that you use?
Danny Elfman: One of the first things I'll do, as soon as I get an instrument, is sample it. I want it in my library. Even though it's great coming out and playing real instruments, film music is a very fluid thing. Frequently you’ll do big chunks of music and then the film changes. Film gets re-edited and you're changing everything and very grateful not to have to play all the live parts all over again.
I used to try to redo big drums and everything live in the studio, but it's really hard to record that stuff. I started evolving to the point where I would sample the percussion and play the synths—those would stay—and only the orchestra would get replaced. What the director is hearing in my studio is the final percussion.
Synth History: Do you have a favorite genre of film to compose for?
Danny Elfman: I don't. I only know what I can't do and from the very beginning I wanted to be as eclectic as possible. I learned early on that romantic comedies were torture for me. They have to be kind of twisted for me to get into it. Just a straight romantic comedy was as close to a film scoring nervous breakdown I'd had in my life. Generally, I was happiest no matter what the genre was as long as I kept switching gears. If I could follow a big action film with a comedy, follow the comedy with some weird, little crazy film, and keep moving, then I'd be happy. It's repetition that drives me crazy. That's why I didn't last in a band.
Synth History: Oh really?
Danny Elfman: I admire bands that can go on a year-long tour and play music from 20 or 30 or 40 years previously. There's an art to that, but I don't have that. If I was on tour for more than six weeks, I wanted to shoot myself. Seriously, I’d think, “I never want to play this song again,” and I realized how that's a problem. Being in a band, you just can't keep playing new music. You have to play music the audience wants to hear. I understand that. I went through periods where we would do concerts and I purposely wouldn't be playing older songs, but I felt like that was disappointing the audience. When I saw Nine Inch Nails two years ago, would I have been happy if they didn't play anything from my favorite albums from the 90s? I wouldn't have. So, I get it. I've been on both sides. I eventually just thought, if I'm going to perform, I need to play music that my audience wants to hear up to a certain point. But there were certain songs where it's like, never shall this be played again.
“Weird Science” was the first. I wrote it as kind of a fun goof—literally, driving home in the car. John Hughes calls me, describes this thing, and I'm hearing the song in my head. I run home and we record it, and then, this horrible video happens. At the time, a big chunk of the year was going to scoring films, as opposed to being in the band, and it was the first time doing a video that I didn't have anything to do with. I just walked in and between the video and the song, I could never play it again. Even though people would call out “Weird Science”, I’d go, “Sorry, I just can't do it.”
So, it's a personal thing and it made me aware. By the time I hit the 90s, I knew my time with Oingo Boingo was limited. I kept trying to tell them that I couldn’t keep doing it, and they’d go, “Because you're a film composer now,” and I'd go, “No, it's not because of that. It's because it's an internal wiring problem.”
I began to realize in that period that there are some performers that are made to be performers. First off, how does anybody in theater do eight shows a week on Broadway or anywhere? You're doing the same thing every night and you have to be able to embrace that. It's the same when a band is out there touring. I never could have done theater, that kind of theater—The Mystic Knights were changing it up every year. One of my favorite bands was a band called XTC. I remember when Andy Partridge, who was one of the main songwriters, wouldn't tour anymore. Everybody was horrified, but I understood.
My hearing was also getting destroyed, so that really made it an easier decision. I'll never forget this one night at the Universal Amphitheater. We played two nights. Because we already did a soundcheck for the first night, the second night we did what you would call a ‘mic check’ —you plug in your guitars, make sure the amps come on, you go up to the mic and you say a few words, maybe you play part of one song, just see if everything's working, then you split. I went up to the mic, and I said, “Check, check,” like that. And it was like a bomb went off! It was so loud. I screamed at my monitor man and said, “What the fuck!?” And he goes, “Danny... that's where you were the last 20 minutes of the show last night. That was your level.” When you’re a singer you have to hear yourself and I had asked him to keep bumping it up. We did over two hour long shows. I eventually realized that I was already developing tinnitus and it was just going to destroy me. I had deafness in my family already. It was the very beginning of in-ear monitors back then, but I didn't trust them, because I’d been in the studio so many times getting feedback through headphones. Everybody who's ever been in a band with headphone monitoring has had that moment where the engineer hits the wrong button and hits you with full feedback. When it happens, you just throw your headphones off and all you can do is just sit down for a half an hour and just let it go. Let your brain settle. It’s like getting an electric shock that just totally frazzles your system. So, I was afraid of putting something in my ear that might do that. Now, there's protection against that and I use in-ear monitors, but I didn't trust them back then.
Synth History: As a musician, the scariest sense to lose is probably your hearing!
Danny Elfman: Yeah, exactly.
Synth History: Growing up, my parents had a very small VHS tape selection and one of our tapes was Nightmare Before Christmas. We would just watch it on repeat. What was it like hearing your voice come out of Jack Skellington on the big screen?
Danny Elfman: It was cool, but I was so much a part of the process for two years—I wrote the songs first, before the animation, then I would see rough versions of it. So, I was constantly involved as it came together. It was still very cool to see it all done, but it was a long process of seeing it a quarter done, half done, three quarters done, getting a sense of it.
I'm used to being on a movie for three months, so to be on a movie for two years, I was really invested. I poured so much of myself into it. The fact that you had a tape and a lot of other young people did makes me very, very happy, because the movie didn't do well when it first came out. Nobody understood it.
I did a two-day press junket in Orlando, Florida—a press junket is where you do two-minute, three-minute interviews all day long—and every journalist asked me the same question, “Not for kids, right? It's too scary for kids?” and I would say something that I must’ve said 200 times over those two days, “Are your kids afraid of Halloween?” they’d go, “No, they love Halloween,” and I’d go, “Well, then the movie is not too scary for kids.” Then they'd say something like, “We hear Santa Claus gets tortured,” and I’d go, “He doesn't get tortured, he gets inconvenienced and he's not even terribly upset by the end, it’s all OK.”
Synth History: [laughs]
Danny Elfman: My daughter, Mali, was about 10 then, and she was totally into it. I'd play her
all the music.
Synth History: The music is so good!
Danny Elfman: Thank you. So, it means a lot to me that the movie got a second life and held on. It’s so rare for any movie to get a second life. I just feel indebted to Disney, because when it came out, Disney didn’t understand what it was. To be fair, how could they? They did one preview for kids. You get a bunch of kids that are expecting The Little Mermaid and they get a rough, unfinished version of The Nightmare Before Christmas. They're not a happy bunch of kids.
There was nothing to compare the movie to. They just let Tim go off and make it. I’m grateful for the fact that [Disney] figured out there was something there and jumped back in and put energy into it 10 or 15 years later. Most studios wouldn't have done that, they would have just gone, “No, that ship has sailed.” And fortunately, Disney is really good at having a longer view and seeing the potential. Clearly, the business decisions they've made, Marvel and Lucasfilm, you know, which everybody considered suicidal and crazy at the time, have worked. Here I am performing it at The Hollywood Bowl in places I never would have imagined.
Synth History: It has a cult following!
Danny Elfman: The best part of it is that it’s still pulling kids. People send me videos all the time with their kids singing a certain song and it makes me so happy, because this was the movie that everybody thought was not for kids.
Synth History: Myself and a lot of my friends — we're all Simpsons fans. What was the process like for creating that theme? Did you have any idea that the show would become such a cultural phenomenon? I guess a lot of things you're involved with have become cultural phenomenons.
Danny Elfman: That was a pure goof.
Synth History: Yeah?
Danny Elfman: I mean, I saw the pencil sketch version of the titles. I met Matt Groening, the creator, and I loved the idea of it. But I said, “You know, this is definitely just for fun. No one's gonna see this thing. It'll probably play three times.”
It was really fun to write. I got the idea when I started talking to him in his office. Seeing it the first time, I heard a theme in my head and I said, “My sense is doing something real retro, like a Hanna-Barbera that never was.” I think it’s because of the beginning—the driving. It reminded me of the Flintstones. Even though they're ‘running’, it's still like a driving intro, and it has that kind of energy. I said, “If you want something kind of crazy, something retro, I'm the guy. If you want something contemporary, I'm not,” and Matt was like, “That sounds good.”
I went home and made it the same day I had the meeting with him. I did the whole thing top to bottom on a cassette and sent it to him. He called back and said, “Yeah, done. Cool.” It was one of those rare, quick and easy things. Generally, it’s not that way.
Synth History: Do you have any current go-to software or hardware synths?
Danny Elfman: I'm so much more a software synth guy than hardware. The reason for that is because I do film and films are constantly changing. Each year I find myself going more and more software-based, because once it's down, it's following that that cue forever, real simply and easily as opposed to analog, where you have to do a performance. If you have to cut up [an analog performance] eight different ways, you might have a problem with how it's cutting together and what it's doing. So even though I love getting my fingers on knobs and playing with them—and I still do, more so for my new records than for film—I’ve tended to get into software.
In the beginning I used Emulators, but then I got into Virus, which was something I really dug—a hardware synthesizer that comes with a software interface. I still use Omnisphere a lot and Zebra. There's a half dozen things that I end up with frequently, but I love the big, deep library of something like Omni, where it's quick and easy to mess with the sounds and fuck them up. That's one of the first questions—OK, here's a sound I like, now how do I fuck it up in the best possible way? They make it easy to do that. Zebra is a little less intuitive and a little harder to work with. When I got into Big Mess, I started pulling out more of the drum machines and goofing around, because that's not going to change a million times. When I lay down a part in a song, I may cut a little bit out, but the song is the song, and it's going to stay that way. So if I get a performance off of a synth that I really like I can keep it.
Synth History: Do you have any favorite effects – like plugin effects or pedals?
Danny Elfman: I use Soundtoys a lot. Between Guitar Rig and Soundtoys, I feel like I could do so much. I do my own electric guitar on films and to a certain extent on the albums, too. If I really want to mess it up, I pull up Guitar Rig and just pump it through seven different digital plugins that really, really mess it up. I love those two quite a bit.
Synth History: You have this whole room kind of dedicated to percussive instruments. Do you think that there's a specific reason why you're drawn to percussion?
Danny Elfman: It was one of my early interests. When I got to high school, I had musical friends that got me into music. Just the luck of going to a new school and making new friends.
One of them was a percussionist—a drummer; another was a classical composer—or trying to become one—and a trumpet player. The classical guy really brought me into music that is still my favorite: Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Prokofiev and the other Russian composers, which was a revelation. The drummer is still a percussionist up in the Bay Area, William Winant. It was a very talented little group of high school friends. We started messing around with Steve Reich and Terry Riley and listening to a lot of Harry Partch. The idea of interlocking rhythmic parts became kind of part of my consciousness. So then when I went off to Africa later, I was already really interested in percussion and now I'm sending back all these percussion instruments from Africa.
There was a point in my life where I thought that was my future: to be a percussionist, ethnomusicologist and instrument builder. Because Leon Schneiderman and I, in Oingo Boingo, built a lot of our own instruments. You know, The Mystic Knights. It was always just a part of my life.
Synth History Exclusive.
Interview conducted editor-in-chief Danz.
Photographer Ambar Navarro.
Photo assistant Max Flick.
Grooming Lizbeth Williamson for CloutierRemix.
Special thanks Berit & Melissa.