#davidkirshenbaum

David Kirshenbaum will perform at L@TE: Cine/Spin on Friday, April 19, 2013 at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. The event will start at 7:30 PM. We talked to David to hear about his music experience and his approach to scoring Keystone Kops' short film, "Love, Speed, and Thrills." Here's what he had to say:

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I’ve been writing, playing, and recording music since I was ten years old.  A kid’s interests are constantly changing, but the first time I played a piano I knew music was what I wanted to do, and over ten years later I feel the same sense of excitement from creating sounds as I did then. My goal when making music is to elicit in the listener some of the same emotions I experience while playing it.  While some people feel discontent for the current state of music, I feel really lucky to live in a time where technology has allowed more people than ever access to creating their own music and to be able to work within such an expansive and collaborative musical landscape. In addition to my own music, I’m always trying to work with as many different musicians as possible and am always excited about the potential for a new project.

What experience do you have with creating music for films, if any?

The first film that I worked on kind of happened by accident. I posted a song that I had recently finished at my home studio online and a student at Boston University working on her thesis film contacted me to see if she could use the song. I ended up scoring more of her film, which then won the Redstone and Redstone West Film Festivals. I also scored a movie that recently went to the Brooklyn Hip Hop Festival. The majority of the music I wrote for that film was for a scene at a middle school talent show, so I wrote it from the perspective of what kind of beat a 7th or 8th grader would make, so it was really fun to write music like I was really young again.

You will be scoring the short film at the beginning of the event, “Love, Speed, and Thrills”, what has inspired your new score to this classic?

I really want to see if it’s possible to evoke a different emotion than the one that a viewer might initially perceive from the film. I think that sound plays such a large role in what a viewer experiences when watching a film that this is a really cool opportunity to explore that idea and play around with their emotional response. It also goes along with it being a comedy that there is comedic quality to music when it is counterintuitive and that can be just as powerful a form of comedy as the actual imagery.

Other than scoring films, what kind of music do you make?

I think it’s kind of twofold. I do a lot of writing on my own, which is more stream-of-consciousness, it varies in genre because it is very reflective of the place I’m in when I write it. And then I also do a lot of production and co-writing with other artists, which I think is more deliberate, I’m trying to accommodate their preferences, and not to say one is less valuable than the other, but they are just two different approaches to making music.  I think both, in combination with each other, lend themselves to making music for film. That’s how film ended up being this third step.  I originally started making my own music, went on to produce other people’s music and then ended up composing music for film.

It’s your first time performing at Cine/Spin, how are you approaching this task and what are you excited about?

I think what’s really exciting about Cine/Spin is that it falls in line with a lot of my musical projects lately. I’m really interested in electronic music and how that’s performed and the idea of live performance using instruments with aspects of DJing is something that I’ve been trying to develop for my live performances. Since this is a DJ centric event, it will be interesting to see how I can incorporate what the DJs are doing but also incorporate a live element that will hopefully be exciting for people.

Where can we find out more about you and your future musical projects?