Daniel Blumberg: Louder Than Words

Indie-pop stardom was never the plan for Daniel Blumberg – and winning an Oscar probably wasn’t on the cards either. The much sought-after composer, musician and visual artist, now back in the limelight with his score for The Testament of Ann Lee, has only ever pursued the freedom to explore, experiment and follow his innate curiosity.

It’s a wet January afternoon when Daniel Blumberg opens the door to his unassuming north London flat. But stepping into the Oscar-winning composer’s living room feels like entering a portal to another world. Beige filing cabinets take up an entire wall; inside them, he says, are tens of thousands of his silverpoint drawings. There is a sofa, shelves stacked with heavy art books and Persian rugs that belonged to his grandma. “These carpets are really good if you want to control the sound,” he says. “There was a whole drum kit in here the other day!” Normally, his recording gear stays in the bedroom, but today the living room doubles as a studio. Across the room, a tall eight-channel mixer has been racked up, alongside a keyboard. He says he’s lived here for 16 years.

Within five minutes, Blumberg is unzipping a customised tenor banjo from its case. His friend put a guitar neck on it, he explains, rapping it like a drum to show me its “weird resonance”. He thought it would work nicely for the gig he played last night with a trio of improvising singers at the Bloomsbury DIY space, The Horse Hospital. He didn’t end up using it. The doorbell rings: it’s the Japanese food he ordered for lunch, arriving later than expected. We squeeze past the silver Rimowa suitcases crowding the narrow hallway, and into the kitchen. The lightbulb has gone, and Blumberg hasn’t been around to fix it. I wait in darkness as he grabs the lamp from the other room.

Blumberg has recently returned from Los Angeles, where he was promoting the film he has just scored. Directed by Mona Fastvold and co-written by her partner Brady Corbet, The Testament of Ann Lee is a musical starring Amanda Seyfried as the founder of a Protestant sect called the Shakers. Today, 35-year-old Blumberg is one of the most sought-after composers in Hollywood. On the shelf behind me sits the Ivor Novello Award he won for scoring Fastvold’s second film, The World to Come (2020). Next to it is a BAFTA, and an Oscar.

“You should pick it up,” he says, catching me admiring the Oscar. “It’s like, madly heavy.” (It is.) Blumberg won the award in 2025 for his work on The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half-hour epic about an immigrant architect and his obsessive pursuit of his dreams. Since then, Blumberg has received a number of offers to compose scores for all manner of “weird, random films”. He doesn’t wish to be mean, but “I don’t want to spend my life making films that I don’t wanna watch myself,” he says. 

Looking around, there are zero traces of the kid who came of age in indie bands Cajun Dance Party and the even more popular Yuck. Except, perhaps, for the flat itself, bought with the money he earned from that period. The bands were successful, but Blumberg, a professional musician since the age of 15, wasn’t happy. “I ended up really questioning stuff,” he says. Like most young people, he was learning what he did and didn’t like. Unfortunately, he adds, in public. 

Privately, the teenage Blumberg was slowly becoming a cinephile. Born in north London, he is the middle child of three siblings. He never really learned to read music, though he played clarinet and piano as a kid. The family, he says, would sing in the synagogue, although there wasn’t much music at home. “You hear of people whose parents have these record collections and all that – it wasn’t really that stuff,” he says.

Growing up, Blumberg hadn’t exactly been exposed to art-house films. “It was more stuff like Schindler’s List or The Shawshank Redemption,” he says over the sound of a bubbling moka pot. At 17, he was browsing a charity shop when he picked up a DVD of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Killing. “It was like, judge a book by the cover,” he jokes. He went home and watched it; the next day, he purchased the director’s Dekalog miniseries – ten hour-long episodes set in a housing complex in late-Communist Poland. It was a gateway into an entirely different world. Blumberg binged films by Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni and Agnès Varda, mostly watching them alone. It was “the opposite” of sociable, he says, pouring coffee into two espresso cups. “Some people go on holiday, and that’s a really exciting experience for them,” he says. “I’ve had life-changing experiences watching films.”

There are two other moments that have been key in shaping Blumberg’s tastes. In 2011, a friend took him to see the avant-garde Japanese musician Keiji Haino at Cafe OTO in Dalston. It was his first encounter with live improvised music, and he was spellbound. The experimental music venue became a safe haven, and something of a second home. (He even gave it a shout-out in his 2025 Oscar acceptance speech.) Then, in 2015, he met the director Brady Corbet, who had cast Blumberg’s then-partner, the actress Stacy Martin, in his directorial debut The Childhood of a Leader. The pair hit it off, and Corbet invited Blumberg to the brass sessions for the film’s score, led by the late Scott Walker. Through Corbet, Blumberg also connected with Walker’s legendary engineer and sound mixer Peter Walsh. In 2018, Blumberg put out Minus, his debut solo album and his first release under his own name. Raw, plaintive and unsettling in its surprising moments of beauty, The Quietus called it “a statement of intent”. It marked the start of a long collaboration with Walsh. For Blumberg, this was the point “where I feel like my artistic work started”. He rolls a cigarette and smokes it by the window.

Blumberg has been celebrated for making dissonant, ‘experimental’ music, but he also has a gift for writing transcendent melodies. During the pandemic, he taught songwriting at Goldsmiths College in south London. Although Fastvold and Blumberg have been friends for more than a decade now, she was also a fan of his songwriting. She wanted him for her musical retelling of the life of Ann Lee, the 18th-century religious leader whose gospel included gender equality, celibacy and ecstatic devotion to God. Her script used real Shaker hymns as placeholders for the musical ‘numbers’. It was May 2024, and Blumberg had barely left the sound mix for The Brutalist: he would have just four months to write or adapt all the songs, with the shoot locked for that August. After that, he was expected to spend two months on set.

“Loads of things were nerve-wracking about it,” he says. For one, he’d never done a musical. He wasn’t particularly into them, either. “My mum used to play Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat in the car a lot, on cassette. Me, my sister and my brother knew all the lyrics to that.” He watched The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy’s New Wave homage to Hollywood’s Golden Age musicals, thinking it might help. It didn’t. He enjoyed the film, but it wasn’t relevant to what he and Fastvold were making. “I thought: Well, they’re not going to be singing every word.”

Blumberg jumped straight into his own research, ordering every book about Shaker music he could get his hands on. “The first thing I’m looking at are the instruments they used,” he says. And what instruments would they have used in the 1700s? “None!” Blumberg chuckles. The Shakers’ worship songs would’ve been performed a cappella; his starting point was sounds that could be made using only the body. It reminded him of improvising singers like Phil Minton and Maggie Nichols, who he’d collaborated with at Cafe OTO. He and Fastvold were interested in the Shakers’ more primal expressions of sound. “If you go and see Maggie perform, sometimes she’s just using sounds, or it’s wordless singing,” he says.

He started to learn more about the Shakers’ songs, attending a music workshop at the Hancock Shaker Village, a living museum in Massachusetts. “It was just me and two tourists,” he says, pulling up a video on his iPad. He plays a clip of himself singing with one of the museum workers. The tourists, he says, refused to join in.

“I’ll show you, actually. I’ll bring it in,” he says, disappearing for a moment and returning with a hardback book of Shaker hymns from the shelf. “See, there’s no sharps, there’s no bass clef. They didn’t do harmonies, apparently.” Like the Shakers’ much-admired furniture design, their music had a quiet grace. “It’s quite Japanese,” he says. “It’s simple but exquisitely designed, and for a purpose, so I related it to that.”

Over the course of the afternoon, Blumberg will show me many things: a microphone shaped like the letter T that “doesn’t pick up road sound”; a sweater knitted by his sister Ilana, a copy of the one designed by Kate Forbes and worn by Adrien Brody in The Brutalist; a lithograph of a Tottenham Hotspur player by the artist Rose Wylie, on his wall; and more than a few videos. He’s excited to show me pictures of a set of church bells he rented for Ann Lee (he wanted to buy them, but they cost £70,000) and a flow chart drawn by the documentary filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi that he’d like to get framed.

Blumberg created the soundscape for Rossi’s haunting 2025 documentary Below the Clouds. Set in Naples, in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, the film builds to an otherworldly underwater scene in which fish drift around submerged ancient statues. Rossi, who Blumberg met years ago at a film festival in Istanbul, had shown him the footage. Rossi’s brief was for sound design rather than a score, with the note that he didn’t want it to sound like instruments. Blumberg immediately thought of the saxophonist John Butcher, whose Resonant Spaces series sees him performing in unique acoustic spaces. He also enlisted his regular collaborator Seymour Wright, who Blumberg describes as “part of my creative process”. Blumberg remembered a recording of Wright pouring water into a plastic saxophone while playing it. “It didn’t sound like a saxophone, but had this quality of breathing through a vessel.” He was excited about working with Rossi, whose previous films hadn’t featured a score. He assured the director they would give it a go: “If it’s not adding to it, we’ll just put it in the bin.” 

Still, he travelled to Baia, in Naples – known as the ‘underwater Pompeii’. He hoped to recreate the sound. “Conceptually, it sounds like it could work,” he says, “but sometimes it sounds bad when you listen.” 

Blumberg gives the impression of someone who just wants to try things. Success doesn’t seem to have blunted his curiosity; if anything, it has unlocked it. Getting signed at 15, he says, “cut off ambition for me”. A record deal, he adds, was never his dream. “I realised I wanted to be free.” He aspires to be like the 92-year-old painter Rose Wylie, whose print hangs on his wall. Wylie’s acclaim came later in her life, but “she’s still doing the same thing she’s done her whole life”, he says. “Her ambition is to wake up every day and make a painting or a drawing.” Art, he says, is not reliant on anything other than making it. For now, drawing is Blumberg’s focus, while Corbet puts together his next film. He’s not doing another score until then.

The process of recording an enormous piece of work like a film score is “quite extreme, emotionally”, Blumberg says. Other art forms, like drawing, are, he says, “a bit healthier for me”. It’s important for him to draw a lot “because it’s much more steady”, he insists. In March, he’ll exhibit his drawings in Paris. Still, there is the matter of getting them in order. The gallerist took one look at the filing cabinets and told him to get on top of his archive. It’s a big job, one he’s yet to properly tackle. “The thing is,” he says, “I’d rather be drawing than using a scanner.”