Johann Johannsson Quotes

I don't think we'll ever use the same sound techniques.

The rush of creating sounds and mixing sounds is always an interesting challenge, especially for someone like me, who doesn't know about sound.

I'm interested in creating a little sound world for songs, really crafting it, building it, and making it like a little doll's house with little things inside it, staircases and rooms and everything kind of relates to everything else. I've never seen it as drums, bass, guitar and vocals in very separate spaces.

I am a sound freak. I could play around with sound forever.

I like to explore a lot of textural, arrangement aspects in the studio.

I always created things, layered things on top of each other. That hasn't changed at all. With this first album, it was basically a celebration of that process of inventing and building sounds.

I don't have session players come in and guitars, I'm doing the drums, I'm doing the scratching, I'm doing every sound you hear and that's always been my way. And not only that, I'm very meticulous about it just sounding right.

The first time I experimented with sound design was on 'Fruitvale Station,' where I recorded the BART train and manipulated it.

I like to create a sound and then leave it behind.

To me, finding sounds, or even recording, is a compositional process. The studio is kind of an instrument.

I knew absolutely nothing about recording. I had this four-track recorder, and I'd plug my electric guitar right into it, which sounded real bad. I moved any fader that made a drastic change in sound. I thought that was cool - that it was communicating something. I didn't have the skills to do anything subtle. It was just like screaming.

We incorporate various electronic devices - the echo plugs and things like that. Actually, all we're trying to do is make that sound musical. As opposed to just making sounds, we do musical things with them.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

You can get so many sounds out of one record. Every record can be used in some way.

What I'm dealing with is sound. I don't pretend to be dealing with music. I'm just dealing with sound elements, textures and sounds.

My producer, HH, makes sounds, so I'm writing to his beats.

Sometimes I listen to music and I wonder how did they get certain sounds.

I like to use effects, but a lot of the time I just can't deal with these tracks with all these artificial sounds.

I always relish the idea of collaborating with the director on creating the sound world, the sound spectrum, and the sound environment of the film. I use every means at my disposal to create a score that is as strong and powerful to enhance the director's vision for the film.

What really excites me is the production. I get in there and change a lot of stuff.

When I do a remix, I try to think about what I don't have in my bag and create something to fill that gap.

I know all my different formulas to get certain sounds. I've been doing this so long that I don't experiment anymore. Or let me rephrase: I've been doing this so long that I don't have to experiment as much. You always want to evolve and change, but if I go in and I know it's a certain type of song, I know exactly where I'm going to place the mics.

'Lemonade' is made out of bubbling, fizzing, popping, and 'Hard' is made from metal and latex - they are sort of sculptures in this way. I synthesize all sounds except for vocals using raw waveforms and different synthesis methods as opposed to using samples.

All of those 10cc 'Not in Love'-type synthetic choir sounds on 'Replica' are all from the Omnisphere. We used a lot of that.

Music feels so environmental to me, especially the process of working with synths or mixing. I started thinking about music as a psychological landscape as well. It's a landscape of the mind.