‘At Night’ Film Soundtrack Creator Elvin Brandhi Interview: Locarno

In At Night, British filmmaker and artist Beatrice Gibson’s first feature-length film, the nightly sights and sounds of Paris interweave with the stories and conversations of six women – from hopes, dreams and sexual desires to worries about the future.

Rhythm and mood are key elements that make the experimental and “autofictional” movie, which world-premieres on Saturday, Aug. 8, in the Filmmakers of the Present competition program of the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival, a special kind of cinematic ride. Just ask Locarno’s artistic director, Giona A. Nazzaro. In a chat with THR, he described the movie as “this nocturnal, ambient film where you can almost hear music that makes you think of Brian Eno. If At Night were a record, it could be music for lonely people at night.”

Written and directed by Gibson, At Night features cinematography by her long-time collaborator Ben Rivers and editing by Liyo Gong. But the music doesn’t come courtesy of Brian Eno. No, it is the creation of Elvin Brandhi.

If you don’t follow experimental music, here are some basics to know about her. Elvin Brandhi is the pseudonym of Freya Edmondes, an improvising voice and sound artist who was born in Wales, but has become a citizen of the world. Her music features unusual beats created from field recordings, her own voice, tape, vinyl and instruments. She is also part of all sorts of music collaborations, including father/daughter “noise-improv berserkers” Yeah You, Pollution Opera with Nadah El Shazly, the duo Avril Spleen with Joseph Jadam, the band PFL with Peter Kutin and Lukas König, and the project Bahk with Daniel Blumberg.

At Night, which features an array of Gibson’s non-professional actor friends and influences as they discuss and explore such topics as sexuality, money, motherhood and mental health, is the musical artist’s first-ever feature film soundtrack. And it seems fitting that she collaborated with Gibson on this film that press notes call “a love letter to friendships, relationships, and the quiet yet poignant stories women share together but rarely to an audience.”

Brandhi took time out of her busy schedule to talk to THR about the creation of the soundtrack for At Night, her other music work and whether we may be able to hear more from her on future cinematic journeys.

The artist confirms that the work on At Night marks a new step for her. “It’s the first time I’ve done a soundtrack for a feature film,” she tells THR. “I did a couple of short films with friends, and I make my own music video-type thing. So I consider myself more of an audiovisual artist. I think in both realms, but this was obviously very different. I’ve worked with Daniel Blumberg a little bit, hanging out with him a lot in the process of The Brutalist and then the Anne Lee film, [The Testament of Ann Lee]. I was doing quite a lot of vocal stuff, also with [avant-garde improvisational vocalists] Phil Minton and Maggie Nicols. And Daniel has been creating this nice bridge between the experimental scene in London and Hollywood cinema.” 

So, this must be a good time for Brandhi to get her first feature film soundtrack under her belt, you may wonder. “It was probably helpful for me to get involved in the experience of how to make a soundtrack,” she confirms, but notes that it required a different focus from her usual work. “It was quite a unique experience, and I had to adjust a little bit how I think about composing. A lot of my music is quite in your face and trying to be as present as possible. But with a soundtrack, you have to almost make it sneak in from the sides, or be somehow invisible, coming out of the background.” 

Given that Brandhi works a lot with field recordings, how did the Paris setting of At Night play to her passions? “What was really nice about this film was that the metro is such a big center of the narrative, and that’s already quite a noisy place,” she tells THR. “It has a lot of the kind of frequencies and ambient noise and things that I might feel like field recording and be inspired by anyway. So it was this perfect entry point for coming into that film world.”

Gibson and Brandhi have all sorts of connections but made their acquaintance by coincidence. “I met Beatrice for the first time at [the experimental music festival] Borealis [in Bergen, Norway], but only very briefly,” the music artist recalls. “We were in the same taxi going somewhere, and I was playing, and she was screening something. I think she knew of my music, and then a common friend, Leonardo Ruvolo, from Alcamo in Sicily, put us in contact because I also did his residency, and she’s living in Palermo [in Sicily] now, so there were various coincidences.”

And the women quickly got along. “When we started working together, we became very good friends immediately,” Brandhi shares. “And working on At Night was a very intimate and special process.”

But what was this process like, and how early did Brandhi start crafting music for the film? “Beatrice wanted to have as much sound as possible before even starting to shoot. So I did get sent a first draft of the script, but that did get changed as the film went through different shifts,” she recalls. “We spent a week going through ideas before any shoot. I sent her some drafts of things that might work. And she had one reference of a song that she really liked, which was actually from a collaboration I have that is called Insin [with Palestinian producer/MC Bashar Suleiman]. The track is called ‘Kidney Spears,’ which is a little bit more dreamy. I’m also singing in that. So I tried to send her other things within that kind of dynamic.”

When Gibson started shooting in Paris, Brandhi also came to the French capital. “I was taking some recordings when they were going into the metro,” the musician tells THR. “And there was originally even a scene of me performing in Paris in the film.”

All in all, the soundtrack came together in an ongoing collaboration. “There were some core themes that we developed, and then little bits that needed a very specific kind of mood or dynamic,” she says. The collaboration also included editor Liyo Gong. “She is really amazing,” says Brandhi. “She’s also a DJ, so she has a very strong sense of the musicality in film and in how she edits.”

Crystabel Riley also contributed, drum sounds, to the soundtrack. “I asked her if she would contribute some drumming that I could weave into different parts of it,” Brandhi recalls. “She was actually involved in the film, doing some of the makeup, because she’s a makeup artist as well as a musician.”

Fans of the artist’s work may get to hear more from her in feature movies in the future. “I definitely would like to,” Brandhi tells THR. “I would be really up for it; it was really interesting entering the story and composing from a different perspective.” She adds: “I saw her playing live for the first time last year, and I was just so blown away because she’s such an incredible performer, and her stage energy is so engaging. There’s this warmth and tension as well. It feels very urgent. I was just watching her and felt the state of mind of the women in the film echoing in her performance.”

Concludes Brandhi: “It was really special for me and Bea that she was part of it.”

The creative mentions that she has also worked with video herself, and being involved with At Night inspired her to return to more of it. “In the lockdown, I did a lot more filming and editing stuff, so I feel that this soundtrack world is also a nice potential way to get back into the editing of my own film material,” she shares.

Not that Brandhi doesn’t have all sorts of music stuff in the works. Including an album with Berlin-based Kenyan musician KMRU under their name A|||oy, which will be released on KMRU’s label offnot. “He is associated a bit more with ambient music. But we have so much in common and are both fans of each other’s music, even though it might seem like we have quite contrasting dynamics,” she tells THR. “There’s a strong similarity in the way we work with field recordings and sounds, textures and spaces.” Concludes Brandhi: “We’ve been collaborating for three years now, and we have an album coming out that we made between a couple of residencies, one at [Swedish electroacoustic music and sound art center] EMS in Stockholm, and then one in [Max Richter and his partner Yulia Mahr’s] Richter Mahr studio in Oxfordshire. We just listened to the test pressing, and it was really exciting. We’re both singing, and it’s completely different from both of our works.”