Composer Ilari Heinilä recently completed the score for Sebastian, which premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. The film, which was directed by Mikko Mäkelä, is now in theaters and follows 25-year-old freelance writer/aspiring novelist Max, who finds excitement as a sex worker named Sebastian. Max meets men via an escort platform and then uses his experiences as Sebastian to fuel his stories. As his debut novel finally seems within reach, he struggles to remain in control of his double-life, reckoning whether Sebastian is merely a writer’s tool or something more.
Photo (top): Ilari Heinilä
Heinilä describes his music for the film as "organic electronica.” He played with the duality of organic sounds and electronic production techniques to achieve a sonically-adventurous and richly-textured tapestry.
Sebastian
“Writing and recording the score for Sebastian began with deep conversations with the director, Mikko Mäkelä,” he explains. “We discussed the mood and feelings we wanted the music to evoke, and how it could enhance the film — especially in scenes without dialogue. From the very beginning, we knew it needed to be minimal and electronic, but it still had to convey warmth and a sense of sadness. I aimed to create a strong and unique musical identity for Sebastian, one that would be an intriguing blend of organic electronica, capturing the essence of the urban loneliness felt by the main character, Max.”
Heinilä used Ableton Live 11 as his main digital audio workstation, and DSI Prophet '08 as his primary synth.
“I like to limit my tools a bit when I start a new project because it encourages me to dig deep into those instruments, making the score more recognizable by keeping the palette quite simple.”
Heinilä created some demos with the rough cut and shared them with the director.
“After a short period of demoing the score, I found the right direction and mood for the film,” he recalls.
He recorded the contrabass and piano at the early stage of the process, and then sampled those recordings and experimented with them extensively.
“There are many cues where you don’t even recognize the original instruments because they’ve been processed and rearranged in various ways. I played with the sounds and assembled this musical puzzle using mostly Ableton Live’s plug-ins. However, my trusted allies in music production — the Dynacord VRS 23 and Dynacord Echocord Mini — also significantly shaped the final score.”
Sebastian
When almost everything was done, he had one final piano session at Lammaskallion Audio in the Finnish countryside. The studio is located by a lake and close to where the Finnish national treasure Sibelius himself lived in the 1900s.
“My ambient-like organic electronica took its final shape in late 2023, and I couldn't be happier with the result. Even though I didn’t have any specific references for this project, it features a similar minimalistic synth-based approach to Cliff Martinez’s score in Drive, and you might also hear some similarities to Oliver Coates’ beautiful score in Aftersun.”