Bryan Senti: Strings, Migration, and Finding Home
Bryan Senti explores the tension between classical's elite associations and his Hispanic upbringing, finding resolution by channeling his family's migration experiences into 'La Marea,' a work that bridges Latin minimalism and experimental composition.
Today we’re putting The Tonearm’s needle on violinist and composer Bryan Senti.
Bryan Senti won a BAFTA for scoring the BBC series Mood. He’s composed for films since 2015 and worked with artists like Feist and Mark Ronson. But his new album La Marea tells a different story—his father’s story.
La Marea takes Cuban migration and turns it into sound. His previous album, Manu, honored his Colombian mother through short violin pieces. This time, Bryan recorded with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra. The result mixes classical precision with Latin American folk traditions and ambient textures. He recorded it specifically for Dolby Atmos. 800 tracks of strings, all acoustic, creating what he calls the feeling of being adrift at sea.
In this conversation, we talk with Bryan about rediscovering the violin as an adult, how techno influenced a string orchestra album, and what it means to honor family stories through music.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Bryan Senti’s album La Marea)
Dig Deeper
• Visit Bryan Senti at bryansenti.com and follow him on Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, and YouTube
• Purchase Bryan Senti’s La Marea from Bandcamp or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice
• Bryan Senti’s previous album Manu
Collaborators and Musicians:
• Dustin O’Halloran - composer and collaborator
• Francesco Donadello - mixer, Synecdoche Music Research
• Justin Moshkevich - co-producer, Igloo Music
• Spencer Zahn - bassist, ‘Quiet in a World Full of Noise’
• Noah Hoffeld - cellist
• Rrose - techno artist
• Czech National Symphony Orchestra
• Andrea Franco - video director
Film and Television Work:
• ‘Transparent’ (Amazon) - TV series scored with Dustin O’Halloran
• ‘Mood’ (BBC) - BAFTA-winning score
• ‘Experimenter’ (2015) - film directed by Michael Almereyda
Musical References and Influences:
• Atahualpa Yupanqui - Argentine folk musician
• Pauline Oliveros - experimental composer
• Robert Ashley - experimental composer
• Philip Glass - minimalist composer
• Steve Reich - minimalist composer
• Brian Ferneyhough - New Complexity composer
• Jóhann Jóhannsson - Icelandic composer
• Mills College - Center for Contemporary Music
Techno and Electronic Music:
• Rrose: The Art of Production
• Movement Electronic Music Festival - Detroit
Educational Institutions:
• Manhattan School of Music
• Carnegie Mellon University School of Music
• Yale School of Music
• Colburn School
Historical and Cultural Context:
• Cuban Revolution - 1959-1960 emigration period
• La Violencia - Colombian civil war period
• Andean music traditions
Recording Technology:
• Dolby Atmos Music
• Calyx Mastering - mastering studio in Berlin
Labels and Publishers:
• The state51 Conspiracy
• Deutsche Grammophon
• Naïve Records
• Merge Records
• InFiné - Paris-based electronic label
Books and Resources:
• The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
• Scordatura - alternate tuning technique
• Violoncello da spalla - shoulder-worn cello
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(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: I'm going to ask a little bit about the importance and the impetus for you of telling your family stories now across a couple of different projects. What's that about?
Bryan Senti: Well, thanks for recognizing that. I mean, I feel like these two records are a diptych, and then after that I'm kind of set free. The impetus started because when COVID happened and the pandemic shut things down, I felt like it became my time to make a record. And it occurred to me that even though I was a string player my whole life and had done a bunch of projects for other people, I didn't really know what my perspective on the instrument was going to be.
And furthermore, I struggled with a bunch of things about the instrument and about classical music in general, I think, from grad school and from growing up. And my feeling was that one of the issues that I had, coming from a pretty blue-collar Hispanic family—my father was a minister and my mom was a dental hygienist, both of whom left their countries under duress. My father from the Cuban Revolution, my mother was an orphan in Colombia. Her father was killed at the beginning of La Violencia, which was their revolution, their civil war. Anyway, they were people who, while they really enjoyed classical music, for them it was a very elite thing and a fancy thing that they thought their child could go into. And I think that's true.
But, you know, we were always surrounded by more humble people. And our families were humble. And again, my father was a minister in the Latin church, in the Hispanic church, and there were dishwashers, people who had just come over.
And so anyway, I say that because, you know, for me I felt very privileged from my parents to have gotten a good education and go to Manhattan School of Music and study violin, and then Carnegie Mellon and then Yale. And that felt great. And I think at a certain moment in time, you know, maybe I even pretended to myself like, "This is—I could be a part of this aristocratic American class or something like that."
But it occurred to me, obviously over the years, that that was a form of perhaps self-hate and also it just didn't honor my family's story. And so I guess that became a problem for me. That became a problem for me with classical music in general. And maybe that's why I didn't pursue it in the more traditional sense—I just couldn't completely identify myself with it, as beautiful as it is.
And I feel like I'm almost disparaging some of the composers, but that's not the case, you know, for a lot of people. I think people can feel more comfortable in that space. But just with my family story, it didn't. So I felt like with Manu, I had to figure out a way to tackle this issue.
And so my way to tackle it was to look into Latin American music, look into Latin American folk music, figure out what I could bring to the performance practice of the violin that both honored my training as a classical person and also honored this story and connected the dots.
I feel like there was a lot of soul-searching in that, particularly with Manu. So I think with Manu, I started delving into my mother's story, particularly the vibe and ambience afforded through the vista of the Andean Mountains in Colombia. You know, something more salt of the earth. I think when I finally came to La Marea, I wanted to expand out and take some of that style that I had created in Manu and blow it out into something that could create larger compositional forms. Get more experimental, I think, in the composition itself, not just focused on the playing.
I can keep talking about this, but you know, one of the things that I did in Manu is, in a funny way, focus on articulations. Each piece—they were much shorter and they were, in a way, etudes, if you will, or short songs if you will. And I was able to focus on different styles. Pieces would focus on pizzicato, for example, or playing like a guitar or different arco articulations. And that felt really good in Manu. And then for this, I went into a much more experimental place.
Lawrence: You had a violin placed in your hands at a pretty young age, if I'm correct?
Bryan: Yeah. I was three. So it's a form of child torture.
Lawrence: I'm sure it's a little bit of adult torture too. (laughter)
Bryan: And parental torture. And I'm not sure—I mean, I don't know. I mean, I guess I'm gifted at it or was gifted at it. But it's a brutal instrument, and, you know, violin is a brutal, brutal instrument. It's almost sport to stay physically capable of doing all that at such a high level, particularly if you're going to try and be a classical soloist. But yeah, I started at three, started playing more and more serious pieces, and by the time I soft quit when I was eighteen, I was playing the Sibelius violin concerto and working through that.
Lawrence: Wow.
Bryan: And then I had a panic attack regarding the whole thing because I just knew I wasn't the person who could—I didn't have the temperament. You need to have a certain temperament to be a soloist. And then again, as an orchestral player, as beautiful as I find the orchestra, I didn't see myself going through that audition process and playing similar rep for the rest of my life either.
So I took a break from it, but I also, you know, my teachers at the time were like, "Well, maybe you should do some composition." And that's what got me into composition—taking a break from the violin at eighteen.
Lawrence: What was the evolution of your relationship with the instrument? You had this experience at eighteen of, you said, soft quit. Was the intention always to come back? Did you know it was a soft quit at the time? How did you frame it?
Bryan: No, I thought it was quitting. (laughter) For me it was quitting. I mean, again, you start at three, and when you're in your younger adolescence and if you're good at the instrument or good at any instrument or good at any sport or anything, probably you feel a sense of pride about it. And it's what makes you special. And I think that's a beautiful thing. And then by the time you start to get older and you start to get into this more semi-professional zone, then the stress of the reality of the whole thing starts to come together.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Bryan: I mean, I really feel it's almost like playing a sport. So for me it was like hanging up my cleats at eighteen and being like, "Thank God this is over. I don't have to run to the bathroom before a concert or something like this." And I'm forty-two years old, so I missed this magic moment, I think, right after I quit. Beta blockers and performance theory and flow state theory and all this stuff started to come into play that really helped performers get out of stage fright and get out of that situation.
But before that, in the eighties and nineties, it was just white knuckle. (laughter) Just white knuckle it. Do you got it or do you, you know, it was like Whiplash. So for me it was like, "Oh, I just can't do that. That's just crazy." So yeah, you hang up your cleats and it's a sad affair. And then I did composition and I started to feel—you know, just for me it was like learning something new. And even though I was in college for it, I had a really good understanding of theory and ear training and all this stuff from the violin and repertoire. So for me, composition was easy just to get the hang of early on.
And so I felt really good about that, then eventually went to grad school for that. Then my fear was while I was in grad school that I was like, "Oh crap, maybe I'm not going to make enough money doing this." And a teacher at the time messed me up at Yale, unfortunately. He'll go nameless, but I think he probably meant it as having faith in me. But he was like, "You're not going to be a teacher. You're not going to be a professor." And now, ironically, I want to be a professor and I think I would be a really good professor, but I think at the time he was probably right. He's like, "You've got to go out and write music." I think instead of following that completely, I assisted Rufus Wainwright for several years and then fell into advertising and then worked my way into film.
And this was all in New York. I got two films into Sundance, met Dustin O'Halloran, who's been a dear friend of mine since then, you know, all these years. And he invited me to help him on this TV show called Transparent. And he's like, "What instruments do you play?" And I was like, "Well, you know, I guess I play violin, you know, I still have the violin."
Lawrence: I guess I play violin! (laughter)
Bryan: And so I start to play for him on these sessions. And he's like, "Dude, what are you fucking talking about? You play violin." I mean, but by then it was a lot of half-assed, random, just playing sometimes on people's records or whatever, but not taken seriously.
And then after that I was like, "Oh shit, you know, maybe I did leave something on the table with this." And then the pandemic, you know, years after that, the pandemic happened and it was a time to focus. So when the pandemic happened and I was like, "I'm going to do this record that's going to focus on strings," I ended up going on Thumbtack and calling a violin teacher who, as luck would have it, was a student of my former teacher back in New York who was living—who was teaching at the Colburn School. And I had this Rocky moment where I was like, "I need you to get me back in shape, man. This has been too long. I obviously know my way around this instrument, but I need to get all the technique back and all this stuff back." And in this very funny moment, in my later thirties, this guy's yelling at me the way my Russian violin teacher was yelling at me when I was ten years old, getting me back in shape.
And I just practiced. I honestly, during the pandemic, I also had a newborn, but I practiced four hours a day, like it was back in school.
Lawrence: Wow. How long did it take to get back on your feet?
Bryan: Honestly, probably a year.
Lawrence: Wow. What's the milestone there? Is it just a feeling or like objective?
Bryan: I—
Lawrence: I feel like it's being able to play Bach like a Bach sonata, you know, those Bach solo pieces. You had the experience to know what a challenging piece would be.
Bryan: Yeah. I mean, I'm not going to say here that I could play a Sibelius violin concerto, but can I play Bach? Yeah. Now I can play Bach, but it took a whole fucking year to be able to play that, you know? (laughter) I mean, that's like really thinking about—I mean, back to the basics, like what is fourth finger vibrato, what's the mechanics? Just, you know, getting out of playing in such a sloppy way where you completely understand what your wrist is doing, how you're pronating your right hand, the difference between a Russian and French bow hold. Now the irony of it, though, was that when I was younger, violin is such a technical instrument that all this stuff is just like lore. You know, your teacher—people would travel all over the world, for example. If you knew somebody in Amsterdam, a great professor who could teach you how to do up-bow staccato, you know, an up-bow ricochet staccato, and you felt that was the best person in the world to teach you, people would fly all over the world to meet with that professor and meet with that pedagogue. And you have barely an understanding of—I mean, you're going through puberty. What do you even know about Russian French bow holding or understanding the mechanics? It's so intense at that moment in your life. Later on, you can actually receive all that information as an adult. And you know, maybe you're not as fast as you were when you were a kid, but the advantage of years of experience in music and just your own emotional development as a human being actually is really positive.
And then the other thing I want to say is, is it TuneBase or there's these other websites that, now anything like Hilary Hahn will be on YouTube telling you how to play a certain passage. All this stuff has been demystified with the internet that was not the case in 1993, you know? It's somehow a much more inviting time. It's a much easier time to learn, I think. The adverse of that as a child, like if you're thirteen years old, is you go on Instagram, you see a thirteen-year-old prodigy play—you know, fifteen, thirteen-year-old prodigies play a piece that you'll never be able to play in your life. And that's obviously terrible, and we can blame Facebook.
Lawrence: Demoralizing.
Bryan: Yeah. Demoralizing. We can blame Meta, Facebook for that. But on the other hand, you want to learn how to play Bruch, you want to learn how to play a Paganini caprice, you could have every measure of it dictated and have somebody Skype in to work on a particular passage. So that part of it's really cool. And I've used those sites actually just to figure out different techniques. So that's been really cool.
Lawrence: You talked earlier about when you were talking about Manu and you were talking about some of the folk-inspired elements from the Latin American experience. I have a couple of questions about that because it's a knowledge gap for me. Is the violin an instrument in those traditions, or did you have to find a way in? And if so, or regardless, what kind of technique adaptation do you have to bring to the table there?
Bryan: There are string instruments that are like the violin. All that stuff was imported through the colonial move from Spain and Europe in general. So the violin's in there. I think, in terms of adaptations, it's also adapting to play something that sounds like a pan flute or the different instruments that you would find in Latin American culture. And just kind of—I think in general, getting into this more folk place, which, what's beautiful about some of the folk music of Latin America, I'm thinking specifically of Ecuador and the Andes, you already have this kind of allusion toward minimalism, and probably a lot of that is probably coming from Western African influence also. You have this beautiful, oddly spiritual minimalism that's coming from this music. So just getting into these techniques, though, that are—they're humble, but they also lend themselves to a kind of magical realism that music suggests. But yeah, there's so many composers and artists I think of, like people like Atahualpa Yupanqui. But yeah, there's a lot of composers that I was referencing.
Lawrence: It's interesting to me because it strikes me that there's a resonance between your evolution, not only of your relationship to your music and to your instrument, but the technique seems to rely less on just being about virtuosity. Something about this deeper resonance or even plugging into a different tradition for a while forces you into a different sort of psychological construct almost. I don't want to be too heavy-handed, you know, in my word choice here, but it just seems very interesting to me that it seems to serve where you're at and to serve your experience well.
Bryan: Yeah, I mean, in what respect are you saying?
Lawrence: I'd say—
Bryan: In the sense that, like, for me as a person, it's making me grow as a human or—
Lawrence: Yeah. It seems more—how, let me try to articulate this better. It feels from listening to you like, it doesn't surprise me that this is the path that you went down in terms of exploring a more earthy, less academically hung up—
Bryan: Yeah.
Lawrence: —form for a little while.
Bryan: Yeah. I mean, I don't know. My wife right now is reading The Artist's Way. You know, which I think is such a—I haven't read it, or maybe I read part of it at different times, but she keeps showing me these passages that, you know—and in order to create a perspective, you have to build this narrative from inside. And I feel like that was my problem, but I feel like that's a lot of people's problems in their own life. I mean, regardless of whether or not you're a musician or an artist, I feel like, you know, why do you choose to be a lawyer? Why do you choose to be a doctor? You have to make sure that you've done the requisite introspection to make sure that you can own these choices. Otherwise, should you meet any roadblocks, which you're likely to in life, it just leads to depression because you feel like you don't have agency over things. And I think I relinquished a lot of agency.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Bryan: And by the way, I think this is a Northeast thing. (laughter) So you're from the Northeast, you know, we're in pursuit of trying to make a life for ourselves. And we're in pursuit—we have these goals of maybe having a family and a nice house and arriving at some level of status. And all these things are very heralded things in the Northeast, you know, our Northeast ambition and—
Lawrence: They're like unchallenged assumptions around ambition.
Bryan: Oh man. There's another book, but I can't—it's this book Constellations that has a great poem. I wish I had all this stuff dialed up. The book is called Constellations, so that's a great poem on ambition and just how ambition's this wonderful fuel that you use in your youth to get you started. It's like a rocket where eventually the fuel evaporates, and then what, you know? And then what do you do with this? Then it can become a curse because ambition doesn't serve you at a certain point. You have to move on to serve other things. You've got to serve your family. You've got to serve your partner. So I say that only because for me, things had been kind of just random choices, seemingly random choices about career and music. And you know, particularly when you work in advertising and film, you get a lot of directives to compose in different styles. And I'm not saying any of that's bad. Obviously you need to make a living. But at some point, if you do want to connect with music and writing music for its original purpose, which is self-expression, you're going to need to work on what that narrative is.
And I have to say, and maybe this is the point that you're suggesting, it's helped me in other aspects of my life. It's helped me become a more centered person, to know myself a lot better, so that I could interface with my wife and my children. I just started having children at the time I was starting to write Manu, and boy, does it feel good to feel that in ten years' time when I can actually talk about music with my own children, I could be like, "You know what, this is something that I actually felt. This isn't just the sixty-second commercial that I wrote for Nike, a score where they told me to mix hip-hop with classical. This is something that, in some ways, traces a family story and perhaps will be insightful for you at least, so that you can understand your father better."
Lawrence: When you were speaking a moment ago, I was thinking about these biographies and stories we have to tell. And I think I was thinking about every time I go to a gallery or an exhibition or something or a show and I read the artist's statement, and nine times out of ten, I think, "Really? That's how you want me to think of you?" I can't even get through some of them, and it's like, it makes me feel dumb and uneducated and unaware, and I'm like, "Man, this is such a barrier. I don't know if I would want to meet this person in real life." (laughter) I mean, that can happen. Certainly don't want to talk to them.
Bryan: I hope that's intentional on their part if they're trying to be that off-putting.
Lawrence: And believe me, it's probably more me than them. Living in Italy while you're working on, or at least now living with this music about Latin American displacement—does geography come into play at all? Do you get a different perspective, or is that a string I shouldn't be grasping at?
Bryan: No, I mean, what's funny about this record is I finished it right before leaving. And now the record—it just took a long time to mix, very long, and to export and handle—but the record takes on a new significance for me while being here. So we came here because we were running out of money after the writer's strike in LA. In tandem, the city also got very expensive and we had two kids. So none of it's the city's fault. My wife had just gotten citizenship a couple years prior during Trump's first term, and we were just like, "Oh, well let's see if we can get other citizenships." You know, just it would be interesting, more as a gag to be honest with you. But then when we were having some economic difficulties, I was like, "You know what, let's see what's going on with entertainment. Let's settle our finances and let's have a sabbatical year in Italy." Which sounds amazing for a lot of people.
But, you know, we ended up—you know, the economic situation was sufficiently rough. And then when we got here, obviously you can't read a book by its cover. Italy has been amazing in many, many respects. But, you know, we're also learning that it's very difficult to work in Europe, and my wife is learning that too. And no place is perfect. And right now the world is very chaotic. But it made me think about how, you know, I never asked my dad before he passed—I would've been, I should've—I wasn't mature enough to even ask these kinds of questions, to think in these ways. But I wonder if he thought he would ever return, and it's obvious to me now that people make moves for their family and because of events, and you're swept up in these events, and you don't really know the implications of it as they're happening. And I'm pretty sure we're going to return to the States, but it's also not something that's a given either. You know, life happens where you can get stuck someplace, or maybe things take off in a different place. And so I'm in Italy, I'm at the comune, I am at the municipio, you know, I'm learning Italian, and I'm, in a way, also applying for Italian citizenship. I'm an immigrant, you know, I'm kind of an immigrant at this moment, granted in a weird first-world way. But it just made me think of my father's story and not have it be so abstract. And I think when I was starting to write—I don't think the record is abstract in that way, but it was abstracted in the sense that my view of my father's story was an observer's view, the way somebody reads a book or somebody watches a movie. And it's a very funny feeling to feel like you've—it's like the end of The Shining (laughter), you know, when Jack Nicholson sees himself, or when they see Jack Nicholson in the photo. It's like all of a sudden, now I'm in the movie.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Bryan: And I'm experiencing my own La Marea. So that maybe didn't inform the writing, but it's informed my reception of the writing of the record, being here, and in a way has made it oddly much more emotional, which was already very emotional when I was writing it at the time.
Lawrence: You mentioned the sort of difficulty with the mixing process and getting the record just through post-production. I'm curious. I wanted to ask you a little bit about the recording in Dolby Atmos.
Bryan: Which by the way is just—it was a mistake. It should have been out last week or whatever it was. It's coming out tomorrow or something like this. So, you know, maybe this podcast could let people know.
Lawrence: Yeah. No, that's great. I've talked to a lot of artists in the creative music realm over the last year or so who are increasingly embracing the format, which is fascinating to me because I think our first wave of releases in those immersive formats were basically just shoehorning old classic rock albums into Dolby Atmos, and there were no native productions that took advantage of the format.
Bryan: Yeah.
Lawrence: And so I'm curious about—is the Atmos format something you're composing for? How aware are you of, what's the relationship with that format as you're entering the project process?
Bryan: In this particular record, it was front and center. And I think, you know, I had a conversation with Francesco Donadello, who mixed the record, and he was invited to—I don't know, maybe this is a top-secret military institute. I don't know. But it was definitely a specialized institute in Germany where people are developing special algorithms so that people using binaural headphones can experience Atmos. The reason why I say military is all this stuff usually comes from the military. It's like tricking people into thinking that sound is coming from different places, up and down. Obviously we use it in the entertainment realm, but all this stuff has militarily applications. But the reason why I feel like it's valid and has always been valid—I mean, music in the Renaissance period, people composed for elaborate locations, obviously. Crazy, you know, cathedrals and churches where people could have, in a Circus Maximus, musicians surrounding. And so this to me is an extension of that. But I feel like, to be honest, when Atmos first came out, I'm probably like most audio people who are like, "Gimmick. It's a gimmick, you know." (laughter) But the funny thing about it is, particularly when you're in a proper Atmos room, you realize that of course the human being, the human ear can understand and the human brain can understand all these different elements.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Bryan: We do it all the time. That's how we're able to walk and not get vertigo and drive a car and all these kinds of things. Because of that, it is an opportunity to just expand the fidelity to which we hear things. And as people embrace the medium, we're going to be able to create more and more work that utilizes the medium to its full effect. To your point, you know, a lot of records that are using Atmos are simply folding down a stereo mix or unfolding, as the case may be, into an Atmos mix. And that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about for real, like using a motif that is escaping from a center left upper channel. You hear it as a leitmotif, and you can understand things in different ways, understand composition in different ways throughout.
That said, in terms of my composing for Atmos, I would say that I'm certainly in my nascency. So there was a lot of this was done in collaboration, and some of which was at the direction of Francesco Donadello, and I'm grateful for that. But in terms of it being created for this purpose, one of the things that's bananas about this record, which was done also in Manu, but this record is humongous in comparison to Manu—every single string is recorded with multiple microphones. Every part with multiple microphones. And there's a lot of parts, you know. I don't even—to be honest with you, there could be seven hundred or eight hundred tracks. La Marea is Guardians of the Galaxy size in terms of tracks, and it's just strings. And this is another thing to mention because some reviews come in—I mean, I've said in the press release that it's influenced by electronic ambient music, but there are no electronics in this record. There are no electronics. This is all strings. And there's some gentle—I mean, gentle—there's some post-processing to the string, like some of, for example, a string will go through a delay or a specific reverb or EQ. And then in "Tersura" specifically, I used an oscillator that was to detune so that the parts could weave together in a way that creates this binaural effect. Certainly in the headphones, but in Atmos is completely bananas. Good Lord. You know, it's like an oscillating color field painting. Just all these waves coming in of multiple passes of string orchestra running through oscillators. Incidentally, the funny thing about that too is that that actually could be performed live even without an oscillator, but just through some sort of, almost like Brian Ferneyhough level insanity, like writing every single oscillation dynamic-wise of an orchestra, if you want to get to that level of granular insanity. So instead of putting the orchestra through that, I actually just put the orchestra through an oscillator. But anyway, the point is, is that it's all strings.
Lawrence: Is there a live presentation of this music?
Bryan: The live presentation of this music as right now is going to be me playing to tracks and manipulating stuff live. But to be honest, I think you probably know this. It's coming from a classical background and coming from a performer background. My vision and dream would be to have this stuff performed live. I mean, it can be performed live. It's a lot of scordatura. It'd be a logistical nightmare.
Lawrence:
Bryan: You know, I'm sure normal classical orchestras would scream and complain, but is it possible? Yeah. Money's the object. Exactly. I mean, this is the reason why, man, I'm doing records this way. It's like I—there's no way. If I got a commission and wrote this, they would be like, "You're nuts. No, absolutely not." (laughter) This is not commissionable. You can't arrive at this kind of music at commission. So I just have to do it. And then, you know, maybe in the future if people like my music, they'll spend the crazy amount of money it requires to perform live.
Lawrence: Tell me about your interest in techno.
Bryan: Dude. Techno, I got into—I'd say this, I owe a lot of my excitement in techno to my co-producer Justin Moshkevich. As regards to this particular record, he did a very great thing and he invited me to go to the Movement Festival in Detroit. And I saw a set of Rrose live. And I was just floored. Just, you know, techno—a good friend of mine, Paul Corley, who's also a great musician, people should listen to his music, told me that what's great about techno is it's all about perspective. It's music reduced to fundamental elements like a kick drum, a snare, or you know, a kick drum, hat, and these gestures that you can just—you know it, but every single one of those gestures that you manipulate, even subtle gestures, allude to sexuality, allude to a different place, allude to different culture, allude to all these different kinds of styles, but it's not necessarily difficult in it. It's not complicated to understand. And it's in its construction, it's or on the floor or more complicated rhythm, and you know, you repeat and create these gestures. Anyway, point is that Rrose's set was just so unbelievable to me. Just so elaborate rhythmically that I fell down a wormhole with this person. Just reading up on how they created, how they worked, and learned that they went to Mills College and knew people like Pauline Oliveros and Robert Ashley and all these, the far left wing of classical music. It's so far in the left wing that the core classical community doesn't even really know who these people are. That's like an experimental class that you get at the end of your degree that may mention these people.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Bryan: But I knew those people and I was like, "Oh, this is amazing." And what I loved about their set was that—it's avant-garde techno, but the feelings there are not dissimilar to other techno, but in the sense that it allows you to feel lost.
The rhythmic complexity would allow you to feel lost, and then there would be these moments where things kind of emerge and all of a sudden the rhythm would come together and things would lock. Those were those exhale moments that you would have as a listener, and where you'd be like, "Wow," and you'd get this rush like you were on ketamine. Even if you were on ketamine, you know, (laughter) you'd get this rush. So it just felt amazing, and that kind of music—I went home right after Movement and worked on "La Marea," the title track of this. And I was like, they probably got that inspiration too from classical music.
But getting it, seeing it in techno felt really important because techno, again, drawing a connection to folk music—techno is of the people, you know. Techno's not about showing up in a fucking tuxedo to Lincoln Center. It's about a three a.m. ecclesiastical, you know, religious experience you can have at three in the morning in the dark.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Bryan: So for me it felt like a connection point and helped me, quite frankly, construct that piece, which for me is the central piece of the album.
Lawrence: And you say that that impacted your conceptualization of tempo, meter? Is that how it manifests?
Bryan: Yeah. Exactly. There's an article that he did for Resident Advisor, it's like "Art of Production," where he talks about emerging properties and these more experimental pieces where, you know—oh, what's the word? Oh, I forget what the term is, but these—oh, yeah, process-oriented music, you know, where—
Lawrence: Like generative?
Bryan: Like generative process, you know, which was very, actually, obviously popular from Philip Glass and Steve Reich and all this stuff. It could create these audio shapes and audio illusions, like phase music, you know, like Steve Reich. But he, you know, they came at it from an even more weird avant-garde place where, for example, like, I think there was one piece, I'm not sure if he wrote it or if a teacher of his wrote it, where they're just rolling on a huge gong for half an hour, that kind of a thing.
And then all of a sudden, halfway in, you start to hear the other tones and the harmonics develop. But in fairness, in that set that he did, it was all, for me, what came together was the rhythmic aspect of it, and also the feeling of feeling lost.
And that's kind of amazing too, because particularly today in a world of playlist music, making things difficult for people, or the feeling of loss, which could assume that the composer doesn't know what they're doing—people don't want to be in that space. People want it to feel like, "I am a genius," you know. If it's gospel music, it's like, "I am a really amazing composer. Everything is as it should be," or, you know, we have sleepy-time playlists, piano music. But for me it was an interesting challenge to have stuff in different meters that are out of time. And being in that avant-garde world, but also kind of letting it drift.
Letting it drift, letting it emotionally feel like, "Where are we?" only for it to come back and then do that a couple times until you get this amazing release at the end. And then another thing that I got even with the end that they did in their set was that it wasn't—the bass drop is obviously a fundamental, famous part of techno, but they didn't have the bass drop in that traditional way. The bass, the whatever would be technically the bass drop—you would know that moment had arrived, but then somehow, either the bass would crescendo in so it felt like it was blooming out, or it felt like it was always evolving. And that was also an interesting idea that I took from Rrose, which is that when the big orchestra comes in at the end of "La Marea," it's not like the orchestra comes in like it's Wagner. You know? It's not like Tristan und Isolde. Which is a wonderful gesture, obviously, but it's been done. It's like, no, the orchestra comes in kind of subtly. You're like, you know, and then as you start to breathe through these different sections, you're like, "That's orchestra." And it's very loud, you know? It's like then it becomes really huge and takes over the whole space.
Lawrence: Like this different approach to catharsis or resolution.
Bryan: Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And to me, that felt really important.
Lawrence: That's really neat. So you started the conversation—this is really artful. I'm going to end with something that you started with. That's good. If I was a comedian, this would be my callback. You said early on that, you know, you're kind of done—you did the family work. So now what?
Bryan: Yeah. I mean, so now—well, I have to say I feel very inspired. I feel like it's a time, it's a time for artists to really convey the importance of, you know, of humanity and human expression. I feel like the world is obviously in a crazy place, so even the smallest gesture is valid. I mean, it's incredibly valid. I mean, for somebody to even make music about, you know, what's going on stateside in one small area of all the political things that are happening would be a huge gesture because there is this push right now to make everything seem like it's all right and it's okay, and just forget about it and don't look on your phone. There's this push to disassociate.
And I understand that, obviously, because we all have to be aware of our mental health. But that self-expression is so important so that we know that we're all in this together. So, yeah, I don't know. I feel very excited about talking about current situations.
Also, I think it's a moment to, and I've told this to other artists who are friends of mine, we're in a beautiful moment talking about diaspora and talking about different people's cultures. We all come from someplace. And there's been this homogenizing of, and I would say this is the case even for Western music. There's this homogenizing of the form into a Top 40 song, you know? And there's a lot of opportunity to look into one's history, to look into one's story, and try and personalize this experience and talk about where we've come from and how we interact with whatever is the zeitgeist at the moment. In terms of something that I'm doing right now, I'm working with a friend of mine, César Urbina, who's an electronic artist who's on InFiné in Paris and France. And he's also from Mexico originally, working on something that's going to be more pop-focused, you know, and work on something that's more improvisational and now actually uses electronic music and could perhaps even play in, you know, a club or another contemporary setting.
So for me that's really good because I've been—you know, La Marea, certainly even more so than Manu, is serious. You know, I put quotation marks there, but it's more serious work just because it's more intense and more introspective. So something that feels more ephemeral and more in the moment feels like a good next step so that I can recalibrate and figure out what I'm going to say next.
Composer
Bryan Senti is a BAFTA winning Latin American composer, multi instrumentalist, and producer. His debut crossover LP, Manu was released on the French Independent, Naïve to critical acclaim and his upcoming album "La Marea" will be released on October 10th via British Independent, State 51. Recent collaborations include various projects with the composer and violinist, Francesca Guccione such as Flight from the City (Revisited 2025) originally composed by Jóhann Jóhannsson, Killing Horizon with experimental composer and guitarist Dom Bouffard, and Quiet in a World Full of Noise with Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn out on Merge Records.
His film and TV career began with Michael Almereyda’s “Experimenter” which premiered at Sundance in 2015 and since then he has composed for multiple films and TV shows including the BAFTA winning series Save Me (2021) by Lennie James with his frequent collaborator, Dustin O'Halloran . Most recently he scored the Apple + series “Cowboy Cartel” (2024) and the BBC musical, “Mood” (2023) by Nicôle Lecky which garnered him a BAFTA award for Original Music.
His singular perspective on the violin, extensive production experience, and cinematic touch give him a unique sonic signature; His album Manu was described by John Schaffer of WNYC’s New Sounds as “A really striking record… [an] excavation of the violin as a global instrument”.
Bryan currently resides in Italy.
