Luke Mombrea

“I look for an integrity in my work that may be timeless, but I want to make work that is relevant to the things that are going on today.”

Luke Mombrea

Luke Mombrea is a composer originally from Oakland, California. His work spans many different mediums including concert works, art installations and scores for film and television, utilising folk materials, improvisation, microtonality and electroacoustic processing. Luke’s compositions have been performed by players of the London Symphony Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic, and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and NTS Radio; he was a LSO Soundhub Member of 2023-24, with his work ‘Black Gold’ premiering in May 2024. Luke has scored numerous award-winning films which have been screened at Cannes Film Festival, and on Apple TV+ and Mubi; his A/V work has been featured at the Barbican Centre, SXSW, The Wallace Collection, and Art Basel, and he frequently collaborates with New York-based artist Nate Mohler. Luke studied at UCLA, where he was introduced to the film music industry by interning and then working at Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions; he then traveled to London, where he graduated from the Royal College of Music.

Luke has recently relocated from London to Los Angeles, pursuing a number of different opportunities in concert composition and film; ahead of his move to LA, we spoke with Luke about balancing concert and film composition, Berlin techno, electronic processes, microtonality, body horror, and more…

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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Hi Luke! Thanks so much for joining me today. Your artistic practice balances careers in both “concert” composition and film music — tell me a bit about your musical journey, and how you got into composing for film?

Luke Mombrea: I studied at a school called UC Davis, which is close to where I lived in the Bay Area. I studied cognitive science — I grew up playing guitar, piano, stuff like that. [But] when I got to Davis, I took some composition courses. I started building up some pieces, and then I applied to transfer to UCLA — mainly because I wanted to get somewhere that was a bit further away from home. It was about me wanting a different environment. So when I go to UCLA, that’s when I started being involved with film, because I started knowing filmmakers. Even though I was a concert composer, they were like “oh, do you write music for film?” — so I started doing that a lot. And writing a lot of stuff for art installations: my buddy Nate Mohler, who I did the Soundhub [piece] with, was one of my first friends at UCLA. Me and him go back a long time.

There were kind of two things that happened around the same time I was graduating. I got accepted into this mentor programme called the Society of Composers and Lyricists; in a lot of ways, that was my introduction to the industry. It was completely free. To me, one of the best parts was getting to know other composers — a lot of them were professional film composers — we would go to composers’ houses, and things like that. Shortly before she died, [we] actually visited the house of the woman who wrote ‘September’ with Earth, Wind and Fire; it looked like a Wes Anderson house. The other thing that happened was, I got an internship at Remote Control Studios — the Hans Zimmer company. I [was] working for a composer called Henry Jackman. That was a big intro to the industry. Because you kind of don’t know you can do something until you see it. I didn’t know anyone who made a living in film and music. You got a sense for the ecosystem.

I had [a] concert music background — I have a background in playing new music. I’m influenced a bit by stuff in the Bay Area; a lot of the John Adams stuff, or Gabriella Smith. That was my attraction to concert music. But then the film music stuff also came, and I was like “oh, my style fits this well”.

So it was a more symbiotic development — your developing aesthetic lined up with film music…

It was exactly that. Some people get into film, and they’re like “film music is what I wanna do”, and they are film composers — that’s where their base is. For me, it synergises with other things I do. The ultimate goal for me in film is to [score] indie films; that stuff, A24, Neon, is more so my interest than Blockbusters. The style of music I write really has a chamber music focus; my film stuff can sometimes be orchestral, but I really embrace the idea of smaller instrumentations that need to happen in these smaller budget films. In a lot of ways, you need to be able to get a lot out of small instrumentations — and that’s what I’m interested in anyway. I look at it as an extension of what I do in my concert music.

Do you feel any differences, collaboratively speaking, when you’re working on a concert piece versus when you’re working with film?

When you get to be part of a larger thing, it gives you a very different feeling. When a director’s really happy with your work, you feel like you’ve shepherd[ed] their vision, in a small way. When you’re doing a concert piece, it’s so much about your own expectations of what you want to do with your work, and your practice.

Of course. It’s like you’re contributing to a shared vision, rather than it just being your own, and the vulnerabilities that come with that.

Totally. One thing I really notice when I’m writing a lot of concert music is, you kind of are grappling with yourself. It’s a very introverted process, in a lot of ways; because you can’t purely rely on technique as much. I always ask myself when I’m writing [concert music]: what do I want? What do I want to accomplish here? Versus when you’re working on film — sometimes there are micro questions within that — but the macro-thing is, I’m helping whatever the film needs to be. Which I do think is different to doing exactly what the director wants. At the end of the day, the director is the person who has the vision, it’s their film — but I do think the ideal situation to be in is [one where] you bring something to the film.

You mentioned your background in new music performance — what drew you to composition, initially? Do you feel like your musical background had some sort of impact on you going into film music?

You know, a lot of the music I do is electroacoustic — and my first experiences writing music were not for ensembles, they were electronic. I remember when I was fourteen, fifteen, I’d listen to songs, and I’d try to make sounds from them. I became really interested in making sounds, doing sound collage [with] synths, stuff like that; I’d just do it as a hobby, something I thought was interesting and fun to do. And then, when I started getting opportunities to write for ensembles, I took some of that approach. In a lot of ways, that’s really what attracted me.

Both my parents are therapists. One thing that is interesting [from therapy] is that on some level, I do think people often try to get back to something that was important to them when they were a kid, or when they were younger. For instance, Ableton’s not the most efficient DAW for film — I’ve used tons of other DAWs — but I use it a lot, because it was my first. In a lot of ways, the approach of melding sounds, and using loops… that’s what attracted me. Things like minimalism, sampling on some level — bending sounds with LFOs — that is my north star of what I think about. It’s funny, because some people think I’m very classically-minded — I guess I have that training, but my core thought process is very rooted in sampling, and generative MIDI devices. Things like that.

I really resonate with that. I do feel like it’s becoming more acceptable, even on the more “classical” side of new music, for notation to not be your first musical language — or a language you’re fluent in.

Exactly. I don’t know that I would’ve been doing this if that wasn’t the case. On some level, when I first started doing composition, I did feel a little bit like a late bloomer — which is weird, because I started when I was seventeen, eighteen. But I came from instrumental playing, and my composing experience was making electronic music, and doing stuff with Max for Live. Like, some people thumb their nose at the idea of doing film music, or installation — but most people are like “oh, that’s cool! You should do more of that”. Even a lot of people who write music that is completely unrelated to film, or installation, or AV work, still think that that’s a very valid form of expression.

You mentioned working with Max for Live. Tell me a bit about your approach to electronic and electroacoustic music — where do you tend to draw inspiration from in electronics?

So much of the stuff I draw from is not from the concert world. I know that’s common, but what I mean is: a lot of electronic music — the stuff going on in Berlin, the label PAN — is way more important to my artistic practice than [something] like IRCAM. Not that I don’t respect what they do, or find it interesting — but in the electronic zones of what I do, so much of what I draw from is completely outside of concert music.

Me and my buddy Sergy Berinov produce techno; he’s really into the Berghain, Berlin scene. You know, the academic stuff I hear out of there [is] far less interesting [than] the non-academic stuff I hear out of there. Especially when Berghain does their non-techno nights, when they have Sunn O))), PAN, or Arca play there. I have a huge interest in that kind of stuff; if you ask me what modern German composers I’m inspired by, I wouldn’t name almost anyone — but if you asked me what German electronic musicians I’m inspired by, I can name a huge amount of them. 

I think the most interesting electronic stuff going on is outside of the world of research. There’s sort of this bridge in electronics between process and results. I find that interesting — so much of the electroacoustic music in [an] academic sense is very process-driven. A film composer told me this, and I think about this [a lot]: they said the composition is what comes out of the speakers. You know, it’s not what you write on the page, necessarily — in some practices, it’s more important — but if you’re doing an electroacoustic piece, it’s about the sound, and how that translates. I think the people that are doing the most interesting things are actually not in an academic setting. That’s what I really like about Ben Nobuto’s music. Ben’s embracing something like sampling — which is considered, in many ways, to be “vulgar” and “unimpressive” to many concert [music] people.

How have those influences informed the ways you use Max — or your “instruments” in electronics, so to speak?

That’s a really good question. I just talked with someone about this recently — there’s a lot of approaches to Max. To use a food analogy: there’s some restaurants that grow all the food, have a farm there, make everything from scratch. That’s [like] something when you’re building all the instruments, you’re building reverb algorithms, sampling algorithms; that is more much more of a mathematical approach to Max. 

What I do, in many ways, is use Max like a modular synth. Say you have a plugin, [and] you can twist the knobs further than they go — and you can make a new knob, that does something else — that’s how I use Max. People ask me “how do I learn Max?”, and I can only give my process; if I build devices, I’m always referencing something else, from looking at other devices. In a lot of ways, I’m creating my own recipe for the patty, but I’m not raising the cow, you know?

For me, basically, nothing I’m doing is so outrageous that I need to reinvent anything. I was talking to Liam Dougherty, who I used to live with — [he] does a lot of things in Max, he [does] drone and electronic music, and builds his own instruments — we were both in agreement on this: a lot of the things that you need to make a piece exist. The reverbs exist, the samplers exist. I find that some of the academic music that uses Max is so process-based, that the result isn’t actually interesting — it’s just about creating a new process. It’s kind of like “why reinvent the wheel?” But what I do think matters about Max is: like a modular synth, you can hook anything up to anything else — you can push any parameter to any level you want. It’s like a very, very custom instrument for the thing I need it to be; I can be as precise as I want.

Of course. I feel like the reasons I’ve found it difficult to learn Max are because of those pressures to be fluent in its programming language before doing anything…

One thing I realised is, I was trying to create new Max devices that no one’s ever heard before — but I actually realised that it was more about ego. In the sense that, I wasn’t doing it because it was making the piece better; I was doing it because it gave me a sense of intellectual superiority, or it superficially validated my work. Like, “why does my work matter? Because I’m doing something that hasn’t been done in the process” — which was actually leading to a less interesting result.

The way my Max patches [now] become complex is in the routing, more so. Knobs controlling other knobs, parameters controlling other parameters. For instance, here’s something you wouldn’t be able to do unless you [used] Max: say you wanted an LFO that moved at a random speed, say from 0 to 100, on some effect. You can do that in Ableton, but what you wouldn’t be able to do is [say] “okay, I want it to lock for five seconds when it reaches each side” — so when it goes to its maximum/minimum, it stays there. So am I inventing the waveform? No, I’m not — but I am being really precise in how it activates.

How does that work for you in practice? I’m reminded of how you treated the electronics in ‘Black Gold’, which you composed as part of the LSO Soundhub scheme…

In ‘Black Gold’, the more input they get, the more a different distortion starts to get mixed in. It’s not a linear distortion; it’s kind of this stacked algorithmic thing that happens, that I set up. A big part of that, is that we had time to do a workshop with the LSO players — I recorded a bunch of things. And even though the piece doesn’t use any sampling, I started sampling and testing it in different distortions; I found out [that I could] use Max for Live to create a distortion that, in different parts of the piece, creates different distortions and transitions between them. For instance, in the second movement, there [are] cello parts that are much more equivalent to the way distortion on a guitar would work. But then in the third part — because of the level of input — you get waveform distortion that is almost more like changing the essential waveform of the input. Almost like FM synthesis.

I still use plugins — especially in film, where I use plenty of plugins to get the effects I need. Sometimes, I have a ton of effects… -laughs- But a lot of my pieces that use live electronics are really influenced by Saariaho, in the sense of simplicity: you have three effects, and I make those effects really precise. And so, like cooking for myself, I know how much salt — how much distortion — I use. I can look at the distortion output, I know what it’s emulating, what it’s doing, and I can tweak it.

But to have that control, you need to have a deep understanding of what that distortion is doing. There’s much more confidence in that approach that making something very complex…

No, totally. I think something that’s really important to me is: I really believe in the idea of sense memory impacting pieces. It’s not an accident that in ‘Black Gold’, I have a section that sounds pretty much like a drum kit — and I distort the cello and bass like a guitar. That’s on purpose. I want people to think about that, because I want a stark contrast to the first movement.

But sometimes, I don’t want something to sound familiar — I want something that is familiar. One thing I really like about Ben Nobuto’s music is, he is really conscious of the way that peoples’ cultural perception impacts his music. And he will reference things like video game sounds or memes, things like that. I don’t have the same sort of practice, or sense of humour, that Ben has, but I still do some of that in my music — maybe I’m less in your face about it, but it is still a sense.

For instance, [at] the end of ‘Black Gold’, I actually have a hymn [ed. Come, Jesus, Lord, With Holy Fire!]. It’s an aleatoric thing; I broke up the hymn into different notes, two sections of chords, that’s in just intonation — it’s this thing happening in composite. A lot of people said, when they heard that piece, that it sounded like choral music there. And I was like “it is choral music!” -laughs- That’s intentional. Even though it’s in four part harmony, it’s in just intonation, it has granular delays… I want that to be part of what they experience.

Of course — even though there’s all these complexities within, combining that with simplicity is what creates such a jarring effect. It reminds me of Robin Haigh’s PhD about microtonality in tonal music…

He does that really well. You know what I think he [Robin Haigh] does that’s really interesting? I think there’s two things in some of his pieces he combines really well: he contrasts microtones, which are so alien, with groove — which is so visceral. A lot of Robin’s pieces you can just bob your head to. -laughs- Like, even if you don’t know them, you can bob your head to them — but they also have microtones, which is very contrasting [with] these two things. There are some moments in ‘Black Gold’ that have microtones — but I don’t think it’s a challenging piece to listen to at all.

In a lot of ways, I think the idea of things translating, and coming across, is so important. I think a lot of people don’t think about this enough — even if your piece becomes popular, it’s only gonna get performed a limited amount of times. The truth is, very few people are gonna hear it; even with a Mahler symphony, even with Beethoven’s 5th — how many times in a lifetime will people hear that all the way through?

In terms of what’s coming up for you: you’re currently putting together an album of new chamber music, that’s slated to release in late 2025. I understand a lot of the pieces on the record will be inspired by folk music and environmentalism — can you tell me a bit more about the themes that inspired the album?

In a lot of ways, a lot of my work is programmatic — this is why I think I fit as a film composer. One thing that really inspires so much of my work is growing up and listening to a lot of folk music, playing folk music; it was really my first exposure to music that was important to me.

You know you have some memories that you know you’ll never forget? I really distinctly remember driving back from UCLA, driving back to the Bay Area — and the whole side of the mountain was on fire. It looked, like, apocalyptic — and we’ve just had the fires in LA [as well]. Growing up in the Bay Area, in Oakland, one of the things I appreciate is that I’m among a lot of nature. I really do think Northern California is one of the most beautiful places in the world. I remember being surrounded by trees, redwoods, and that being such an important part of my growing up. Some of my most fond memories involve nature, despite growing up in a very urban environment. So it’s one thing to hear about global warming, and to obviously believe in it — but when you see that happening, the effects climate change has, it really does have an emotional impact. 

If there’s one thing I have to say in my music — that’s what I have to say. You know, I’m going back to LA for a bit, and I do think about: even if everything goes well, do I want to live there? Because it’s not sustainable — you can think about your parents’ house burning down, things like that.

Of course — are there any particular elements of that contrast that you’ve tried to channel during the creation of the record?

One thing that I find so interesting, that I want to contrast in my music, is these places — Silicon Valley, for example — which is, in many ways, so incredibly destructive to the environment [with] AI, Google. And all of the people in those areas will go to Yosemite, and be very pro-“easy to follow” things like recycling — while being very destructive to the environment. And so I thought about that contrast between incredible environmental beauty, and the machine of [an] economy that is California. I’m from a beautiful state, in my opinion — but you see this horrific negligence to this stolen land (that’s a factor too). And the people that are part of the destruction of this land also like to enjoy it.

A lot of the things I want to contrast in my music are things like just intonation, which to me represents the natural overtone series, and folk music, which represents the cultural interpretation, the past relationship with nature — with electronic music. It’s a conflict within me, too; I use technology, I’m part of all of this stuff, and I genuinely love electronic music. A professor of mine once told me that something that really stuck with [me] — that some of the most interesting ideas you have are when two things rub up against each other that seem conflicting. That’s so much of what my practice is about — my love for electronic music, and my love for folk music; exploring those contrasting things, [and] where they can be beautiful.

Do you feel like this idea — combining folk music and electronic music, in a way that reflects humanity’s destruction of the environment — is something that particularly resonates in composition today?

There’s a philosophical level that everyone composes music on — but then there’s also a level of core interests in what you like to hear. For me, I realised that’s what I wanted to do; I have an interest in folk music and electronic music on a visceral level, but I also have a philosophical perspective on those things too. I feel like that wasn’t something that was represented enough in music. I think we have a lot of pieces representing nature, [and] a lot of pieces representing technological things — but I don’t think there are a lot of things that directly fuse those things, or are interested in their intersections.

The other thing I care about in my music is: a lot of my music, I want to be music that can only be made today. There’s this thing about timelessness that I think is very important — but Blade Runner is very 70s, and that’s okay! It doesn’t make it bad. There’s some music that’s very of its time. I look for an integrity in my work that may be timeless, but I want to make work that is relevant to the things that are going on today. One thing I came to appreciate about my own work — which sounds wankery -laughs- — is when I can talk to people that are electronic music producers about my work and my practice, and they can relate to what I do. And I can talk to concert music composers, and they can also relate to what I do. I don’t know if I’m in touch with that; I just am one of those people, I produce techno. I’m not somebody from [the] outside, trying to borrow a couple things to splice my work up — I really am one of those people.

How do you feel like presenting these pieces in an album format has impacted the compositional process?

What’s interesting about the album is, the album has concert works, but a lot of the works on the album can only be done in a DAW. I was on the New Amsterdam Composers’ Lab programme in 2024, and one of the founders — William Brittelle — says he’s become progressively more interested in the medium of his work being the studio. I’m still interested in concert works, but I don’t want [it] to be incidental that it’s an album. I want the fact that it’s recorded to allow me to do some things. Even the way they’re mixed: I have all the instruments recorded, but then I have the layers of electronics recorded on separate tracks, so they can mix all of them separately.

The other thing I’m really interested in is mic’ing instruments. I do a lot of amplified things, and a lot of electronically processed things; I do a lot of things with contact mics, clipped mics. I very rarely use explicit, regular mics that are staggered up. I think it’s because it’s an interesting dichotomy to have the sound in the room — the [acoustic] instruments — and even if they’re playing right next to each other, I have the sound isolations in each instrument. I can put an LFO on the flute [for example], but not anything else.

It’s almost like a “mark of the craftsman” thing, right? Where can we hear the essence of the sound, or where it comes from.

I think no matter what, the essence of the original sound always comes through. Even if you fuck up an acoustic instrument in a million different ways, it never sounds like a synth — it sounds like something else. Even if you mess it up to the point where people wouldn’t be able to say “oh, that’s a string [instrument]” — I think even people who don’t know a lot about music would go “I don’t know what that is, but that’s a really weird sound.” It gives you that feeling — that very particular feeling.

In your experience, do you feel like there’s starting to be more of a crossover between the contemporary music and film composition spheres?

Absolutely — I think in London, there’s a lot of those. The LCO [London Contemporary Orchestra] does that really successfully; they play some new music, but they do a lot of film stuff. Then you have 12 Ensemble, [who] record film scores, but are also doing a ton of concert music. I worked on The Wild Robot — that is by a composer [called] Kris Bowers, and he used Sandbox Percussion. Son Lux hired yMusic on Everything Everywhere All at Once. A buddy of mine at the LCO said that Son Lux are doing a Marvel movie now — and I think they’re using yMusic for it too.

The barriers are breaking down. I do think a lot of “film music” people look at “concert music” people, and they actually push them away, as well; sometimes people outside of concert music think that concert music was the way it was 70 years ago. I think there’s a big changing of the guard in that area. I do think Mica Levi’s Under the Skin score was a big breaking down of those barriers; that score was really taking a concert composer, and having them do a film score, and keeping a similar idiom. And so many film composers love that score.

I think this might seem obvious, but sometimes, some people in new music don’t get enthusiastic about music. -laughs- I think it also comes from this place of being “elevated” above it: “oh, I’m too whatever to praise something”. And you kind of go, if you’re not juiced by this, then why do this? I think it’s about leaving yourself open to be excited. I’ve gotten into films, into concert pieces, by people I didn’t like personally — I came in with my arms crossed — and in a lot of ways, I think that when you come in like that, it hurts your perception, whether people want to admit it or not.

Of course — and I imagine that translates across mediums, as well. You’re open to so much more if you look for the fun in the art you’re partaking in.

I still feel that way, too. I really like John Adams and Steve Reich, and stuff like that. And some people totally roll their eyes at that type of stuff. But for me, that stuff is still exciting — [even if] it’s not the most always-relevant to my practice all the time. It’s really easy to play the game of: this is too known, or this is too performed, to like it. I think that it’s easy to get cynical and overly critical of others’ work — but I always try to keep that excitement I first had when I started composing.

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Learn more about Luke Mombrea and his practice at:

• https://www.lukemombrea.com/
• https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10543880/
• https://www.instagram.com/lukemombrea/

References/Links:

• Earth, Wind & Fire – ‘September’ (1978)
• Rev. C. Wesley – Come, Jesus, Lord, With Holy Fire! (1902)
• Robin Haigh, ‘Composing Millennial Nostalgia: Microtonal Techniques as Tools to Express a Twenty-first Century Malady in Tonal Music’. PhD thesis, University of York
• Blade Runner, dir. Ridley Scott (1982)
• The Wild Robot, dir. Chris Sanders (2024)
• Everything Everywhere All At Once, dir. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (2022)
• Mica Levi – Under the Skin soundtrack (Rough Trade Records, 2014)