"I've done some music for films and I really enjoy doing it"
About this Quote
There is a quiet refusal of hype in Ikue Mori's line: no grand theory of cinema, no tortured artist mythology, just the plain fact of making music for films and liking it. Coming from a musician whose career has often lived in the experimental margins (and who helped define downtown New York’s more adventurous sounds), that understatement lands as a kind of aesthetic stance. It suggests someone who treats scoring less as a prestige sideline and more as another instrument to play.
The intent reads practical: film work is labor, collaboration, problem-solving. Yet the subtext is liberation. For an improviser and sound-shaper, film can be a constraint that sharpens the blade. A scene’s timing, mood, and narrative demand become an external structure - a way to focus a musician’s vocabulary without sanding off its strangeness. The phrase "some music" also gently deflates the industry’s tendency to over-credit or over-brand composers; Mori positions herself as a contributor inside a larger machine, not its auteur.
Context matters: experimental musicians have long toggled between autonomy and commission, between the club and the grant, the gallery and the soundtrack. Saying she "really enjoy[s]" it reads like an argument for permeability between those worlds. Not everything has to be a manifesto. Sometimes the most radical thing an avant-garde artist can do is admit pleasure in applied work - and imply that the boundary between "art" and "utility" is, for her, just another sound to bend.
The intent reads practical: film work is labor, collaboration, problem-solving. Yet the subtext is liberation. For an improviser and sound-shaper, film can be a constraint that sharpens the blade. A scene’s timing, mood, and narrative demand become an external structure - a way to focus a musician’s vocabulary without sanding off its strangeness. The phrase "some music" also gently deflates the industry’s tendency to over-credit or over-brand composers; Mori positions herself as a contributor inside a larger machine, not its auteur.
Context matters: experimental musicians have long toggled between autonomy and commission, between the club and the grant, the gallery and the soundtrack. Saying she "really enjoy[s]" it reads like an argument for permeability between those worlds. Not everything has to be a manifesto. Sometimes the most radical thing an avant-garde artist can do is admit pleasure in applied work - and imply that the boundary between "art" and "utility" is, for her, just another sound to bend.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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