We were delighted to speak to Beda Senn and Louis Edlinger the two creative minds and composer behind the recent West One Music release Alpine Noir. The album used traditional Alpine instruments in experimental ways and is full of dark, mysterious underscores featuring natural sounds with dissonant strings and foreboding tension beds.
Guido Schulz, West One Music’s Sales and Marketing Director for DACH and Poland shared a few words on the album and why it is a very exciting addition to our catalogue – ‘Over the last couple of years we’ve experienced a huge trend in successful Scandi Noir TV Series. West One Music Group has catered to these specific needs and produced tension albums that reflect the dark & eerie emotions of these Noir crime series.
This specific genre has lately been adapted for other countries and regions, for example for the Netflix Original “Blackspot” where the series plot is set in a mountain village in France. This inspired us to develop a new Crime Noir album that is created with typical instruments that are found in alpine areas in Europe. With Beda and Louis, we are very lucky to have found the perfect collaboration for the creation and production of this incredible new album Alpine Noir.’
Tell us a bit about your musical background and how you came to create this album for West One Music Group?
BEDA: Since the beginning of the 90s I have been working as a music consultant. I started out by offering personal music consulting for people who were very fond of music but had no time to go to record stores.
Then (concept) commissions for dance theatre, fashion shows, exhibitions, events, restaurants, bars were added. In between, I was always working as a DJ, especially for background music for events and fashion shows.
In 2005 I started at Swiss Television as team leader of SRF Musikberatung. This is about advising all editors in the selection of music for reports, documentaries, and features. In recent years, the music consulting job has increasingly changed into a music concept job.
And, of course, part of the job is to generate suitable music for this kind of background music.
In this function, I had more and more to do with production music sounds.
Since the middle of 2018, I started to develop and realize concepts and ideas for new Production-Music with all this experience. Sounds and concepts that do not exist yet or only very few – and that means breaking new ground.
Due to all the long-lasting contacts and the good open exchange with all the Prod-Music publishers I got the opportunity to develop a concept for modern alpine sounds for West One Music in 2019 via Guido Schulz in cooperation with Louis Edlinger & Andreas Suttner.
LOUIS: I am originally from Munich, but studied Composition for Film in Zurich (graduating in 2018), here I met Beda at an SRF TV pitch for the students. From there we worked a lot together. Beda knows many people from the industry and so I met Andreas Suttner, he works at BR TV in Germany. As we all come from mountain regions, we all have been in contact with traditional music since we were young. This gave us the idea to create an album where we have modern influences and traditional instruments coming together. As we had the feeling that there was a gap in the market for this kind of music.
How did you come up with the initial concept for Alpine Noir?
BEDA: We originally had a slightly different idea which was based on one part on new alpine sounds and on the other part on modular versions, where the main motif is varied. After we had taken the Alpine Noir direction on the advice of West One Music’s Adam Stokes and the rest of the Production team – we found it very inspiring and fascinating!
LOUIS: First we had a different concept when we approached West One Music, bit then we spoke with Adam and the rest of the Production team and together we came up with the idea to create a kind of dark, organic influenced sonic sound for the album – as there is a lot of TV series at the moment which needs this kind of tracks. Beda then had the idea to work with a percussionist to get very special sounds which you simply cannot get with music samples – same with all the recordings of Accordion, Clarinet, Dulcimer, Tuba that I did.
I had musicians in my studio, and we experimented for sound that is not too mainstream – a very contemporary music approach basically.
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How did you work together and with the West One Music team to create the project?
BEDA: My role was more of input & feedback – also from the point of view of the everyday life of a music advisor and with the basic concept in mind.
LOUIS: My composition process was as following: record instruments as the first step – meaning I wrote some sheet music for them and then we experimented together on what we can get out of the instruments. Like hitting a tuba with soft drum sticks, or brushing the dulcimer, or recording only the clarinet claps.
Then I would create a general structure of the song, adding analogue synths, running the recordings through several reverb and delay pedals, just trying to stay organic.
After I wrote the tracks, Rob the percussionist added some percussions and sent them to me. Same with Andreas, he recorded Cello. I then decided what else the tracks needed…there are a million different aspects, so this was one of the hardest parts, as all the percussion just sounded so amazing.
Then we finalised the tracks with the Production team at West One Music before I spent days mixing all tracks, creating reduced versions…30 second and so on to fit different placements.
What do you think makes the album so unique to the West One Music catalogue?
BEDA: I think that besides what Louis has already sketched out, the power and force of the mystical sound of the tracks on the album are concise and, in its kind, unique and novel.
I think we capture the essence of ‘Alpine Noir’ very well with the help of the musicians involved and Louis’s knowledge of this new world of sound.
LOUIS: The extended techniques of the instruments, the crazy percussion sounds and of course the songs itself. By that, I mean the mix of modern electronic vibes and traditional instruments coming together.
It is a super organic sound but also has this Zeitgeist feel!
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