Composer Ben Eshbach

STEVE ELKINS: Before I approached you about composing an original score for “Echoes of the Invisible,” I had the idea that the music should reflect one of the film’s central themes: how human perception changes at different scales, whether spatial (macro vs. micro) or time scales (fast vs. slow). My friend David Rothenberg makes field recordings of birdsong, which he drastically slows down until hauntingly beautiful melodies are revealed that normally go by too fast for the human ear to perceive. His project has expanded, he now records many different animals at modified speeds and performs musical duets with other species, including whales. I thought it might be fitting to use those recordings as a foundation for the score.

David Rothenberg Performing With Cicadas

David Rothenberg's Setup For Musical Duets With Whales

ELKINS (cntd): Later I began imagining a different approach that reflected the throat singing I filmed in Tuva. In Tuvan culture, the human throat is used as a microscope to unveil the inner harmonics of sound, just as physicists in Switzerland are using CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to unveil the inner life of the physical world. Both are attempts to better understand the nature of the universe and our place in it.

Ben In Drag Racing School (Right) And Test-Running Components He Made For Formula Pacific Race Cars (Left)

ESHBACH: Yeah, that’s the family business. My dad started it in the 1970s. We design and manufacture our own line of speed equipment for drag racing motorcycle engines. I began as a machinist when I was fourteen, running manual lathes and milling machines. Now I program all the CNC machines using CAD/CAM modeling software, schedule the productions, purchase the raw materials, tooling etc. Though the business is primarily a production facility, there are times when I have to stop everything I’m doing in order to make a one-off prototype or first article piece. Those are my favorite moments of the job. The challenge of designing any production process is always fun, but not as rewarding as having to break out the old manual machines to do some serious tool and die type work. 

ELKINS: How did you transition from that work into film and television scoring?  

ESHBACH: In 2013 I reconnected with a guy who had been a fan of my band, The Sugarplastic, back in the 1990s. He owned a production company and wanted me to score some stuff to picture. I had only recently acquired the tools to do that, so the timing was perfect. I jumped in head-first and have been going at it since. Of course now and then I have to stop everything I’m doing to turn something out on the Bridgeport mill! But most of my days now I spend making music.

The Sugarplastic

ELKINS: What was it like being on such an iconic label like DGC, which was a masthead for major sea changes in music of the '90s, the legendary home of Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Beck, The Roots, Elastica, Pere Ubu, The Raincoats, Queens of the Stone Age, Teenage Fanclub, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Weezer, The Sundays, That Dog, and so forth. That label encapsulated a special moment in time — especially in terms of bringing the underground to the mainstream — and I'm wondering what the experience of being part of that wave was like for The Sugarplastic.

DGC Records

ESHBACH: Being on DGC was a great time for me. I got to meet some very cool people and get a peek into that side of the music world. My current scoring occupation owes a lot to the exposure that the major label gave to me as a recording artist. Some of my most rewarding scoring opportunities have come from people who found out about me through the one record that The Sugarplastic released on Geffen/DGC. It was an OG Sugarplastic fan, Michael Badami, who first suggested that I score films. During our tenure at Geffen, he invited me and our bass player Kiara to the Sony Studios stage to watch Randy Newman conduct his score for Tim Burton’s James and the Giant Peach. Even though at the time there were no direct inroads to film scoring for someone like me who (a) could not read music or (b) was not a world-famous pop star, it left an enormous impression on me and kept me thinking about how I might get a foot in the door. Later, when DAWs and online self-publishing/social media gave a path for someone like me to be heard, I ran with it.

The Sugarplastic In Rolling Stone Magazine And Season 1 Of Gilmore Girls

[The Sugarplastic's 1996 Geffen Records release "Bang, The Earth Is Round" can be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBQWj6AFp_k]

ELKINS: My first introduction to your music was in the early 2000s when The Autumns—who I was drumming for at the time—began playing a lot of shows with The Sugarplastic. But not long after I started getting to know you, I discovered that you had been writing and recording these incredible compositions for orchestra, completely insane virtuosic pieces that pushed orchestras (and orchestration) to its limits, stylistically somewhere between circus music, Carl Stalling and maybe Debussy on a cocktail of speed and mushrooms.  It was shocking how radically different it was from The Sugarplastic and anything else you’ve done. What inspired this music?  Did it ever get released?  Will it remain a secret treasure trove you keep locked in a vault at home?

Japanese Electronic Music Pioneer Tomita

ESHBACH: I think that most people think of Tomita’s “Snowflakes Are Dancing” as a pioneering synthesizer record, and that the way it was recorded is just a fun-fact about the record. But I think that this is backwards. I think that what makes it a pioneering record is the way it was assembled — and that the sound source (synthesizer) is largely incidental. Of course I’m exaggerating the incidental role of Tomita’s synthesizers, but I’m doing it in order to reframe the project. Seen this way, “Bells Through the Leaves” is a second-cousin to Tomita’s “Snowflakes” on more accounts than just being another collection of Debussy pieces arranged for the wrong instrument. My medium was guitar, so I’m safe from anyone mistaking me for a pioneer. 

[Tomita's "Snowflakes Are Dancing" can be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWlSenLsXCI&list=PLGltXnm_5ITYjEwdJ_lWgQBr0kwWcpYbW]

ELKINS: I’ve been exploring Tomita's work more extensively since you originally introduced me to him. Have you heard about his process of using electromagnetic emanations from various stars and constellations as wave forms for the sonic textures of his music?  Or his concerts involving mixing tracks in a glass pyramid suspended over an audience of 80,000 people?  Or his early use of “surround sound,” in which speakers move around the audience in helicopters and sea barges equipped with kabuki fire drummers and the largest fireworks displays of their time?  Apparently, Tomita's classic albums like "Electric Samurai: Switched on Rock” (1972) were responsible for worldwide popularizing of several aspects of synthesizer programming, including polyphonic sound and early use of speech synthesis later re-popularized by Radiohead and the voice of Stephen Hawking.  I also belatedly discovered that he partially scored one of my favorite films of all time:  Chris Marker's "Sans Soleil"! 

Chris Marker's "Sans Soleil" (1983)

[Note: Drawing a labyrinth of poetic connections between Pac Man, shinto rituals, panda funerals, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” penis sculptures, travels in Iceland and Africa, cat temples, and matriarchal cultures, “Sans Soleil” is one of cinema’s great explorations of culture as a mediation of human memory and also collective amnesia; a prayer that attempts to repair the web of time by collapsing past, present, and future into a moment wherein the psyche forms itself and the heart opens. “Sans Soleil” is also a prophetic pre-internet meditation on the unreliability of images as mediations of our past, and the myriad ways the digitization of images affects the human mind, personal and global histories, and the balance of political power.]

Carl Sagan And Immanuel Velikovsky

ESHBACH (cntd): As a child and up through my teens I was interested in science as a body of knowledge just like anyone else. In my early twenties I began taking interest in science-as-method, first through analytic philosophy but then through sociology and history. I started reading historians doing deep-dive synchronic histories of old scientific controversies and sociologists doing in situ ethnographies at research sites. This kind of scholarship blurred the distinction between method as traditionally conceived (the rational, rule-based in-laboratory procedures) and the methods, practices and procedures of science culture that happen in journals, colloquia, lab meetings, funding councils and policy symposia. Remarkably, no one did this before the 1970s. Sociologists and anthropologists had embedded themselves in everything from Trobriand Island exchange systems to the workaday lives of New Jersey longshoremen. And then in the early 70s someone said, “Hey, I wonder what we’d find if we applied these observational methods to people who do science for a living.” And so began the great empirical inquiry into science itself.

So my reading interest for the last two decades has been this research that approaches science as an institution situated; with a history, employees, ethics councils, journals, budgets, policy implications, a relationship with the public and so on. There’s a lifetime’s worth of rich research on these topics. From a sociological account of the “public understanding of science” movement in the U.S. and Great Britain, to the linguistic and rhetorical features of scientific research papers. From the effects that the replication crisis has had on fields of medicine and psychology to the ways science editors decide which stories get print space in their publications. From patterns in the dynamics of public science disputes in the media to the historical relationship between university research and the military. The list is virtually endless. Right now I’m reading a history of the legal status of forensic DNA evidence. 

ESHBACH (cntd): You use the word “unorthodox” to describe this approach to science, but this approach has been mainstream curriculum in most big universities for the last thirty years or so. So from a scholarly perspective it is orthodox. But I think that you're right that it’s an approach to science that’s fundamentally different to how the public holds science in its collective imagination. I think that this is part of what Sagan was lamenting: that the science-friendly man on the street knows what a zygote is but he doesn’t know what the deductive-nomological model is. 

I met Carl Sagan in 1987, ten years after he wrote that Velikovsky essay and by which time modern sociology of science and Science Studies was in full bloom. It occurs to me now; I wonder if by then he’d become acquainted with the humanities and social science disciplines that were developing a picture of science as something more than a “body of knowledge.” I hadn’t discovered them yet at the time of our meeting. I wonder if he’d have appreciated it.

ELKINS: The “typical” way you mentioned science is perceived in the collective imagination is fascinating to me. There is a type of religious culture that perceives science as a competing rival of religious truths. And there’s a corresponding type of science-enthusiast who sees science as a substitute for religion, perpetuating this kind of binary thinking about the two. To me, this is a profound mischaracterization of both and the processes by which each establishes facts and mediates “truth.” I’m thinking of Lorraine Daston, for example, when she says “Quests for truth and quests for objectivity do not produce the same kind of science or the same kind of scientist.” We see this played out in debates about global warming, and elsewhere.

Didn’t you once befriend the magicians Penn and Teller, and join a dogmatic atheist group they led? I wonder where they fall in this spectrum, and what you learned from that experience.

Ben With Penn & Teller (And Friends)

ESHBACH: In the mid-1980s I hung out with Penn and Teller. Mostly Penn. They turned me on to the style of skepticism that was mainly concerned with distinguishing science from “pseudoscience.” They didn’t run an atheist group, but they were way ahead of the curve with atheism and debunking fringe beliefs. They got me into the literature that was published by Prometheus Press and convinced me to join the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP.) Penn and I attended the Skeptics meetings at Caltech. That whole culture became my stomping grounds for a number of years. So it was during this time that I was attentive to the ways science and religion are different. My attention to the more nuanced ways that science and religion are similar came later. 

I guess the lesson I learned was this: There’s a fairly well-maintained fence around the intellectual territory that a Skeptic is encouraged to explore. With all the talk of open-mindedness and free inquiry, the exit boundaries of the Skeptic’s intellectual space are braced by what I call the Deterrence Literature: books and essays written to discourage you from engaging directly with ideas that are suspicious to the Skeptic community. They’ve read the relevant pseudoscience so that you don’t have to, and they provide you with Cliff’s Notes that are critical of the ideas. You are “informed” in the context of a critique. This way you never get a charitable picture of that which you’re expected to oppose. It’s exceedingly difficult to recognize that you are being organized in the context of being educated. It appears obvious when it’s happening to others.

ELKINS: This sounds like the echo chambers we now see at work in news outlets, social media algorithms and contemporary politics.

ESHBACH: Yes it does, except that the theaters you mention are designed for people who aren’t expected to follow an argument further than one or two ply. The Skeptic stuff is more sophisticated because it’s made for people who recognize that epistemology is upstream of politics. Every good Skeptic knows himself some epistemology. You won’t find political echo chambers with Steven Toulmin, Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, E.O. Wilson, B.F. Skinner, Stephen Jay Gould and Francis Crick having served at one time or other as fellows of the Committee. The Deterrence Lit works even on Christian expats who should know better, having just converted from a belief system that deterred them from reading Darwin and Dawkins by the exact same means. In fact it appears to me that the secular Deterrence Lit is modeled on the anti-Darwinism books written by Duane Gish and Henry Morris and published by Creation-Life Pubs in the 1970s.

Ben and Steve At CERN's Large Hadron Collider (Switzerland)

ELKINS: It was incredible to have you join me when I filmed at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.  How did that trip fit into your personal inquiries into the nature of scientific practice?  Were you surprised by what you discovered there, or did it confirm feelings you already had about science?

[Note: More on the purpose of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (and production photos from the trip) can be found here, https://www.steveelkins.net/Photography/Switzerland-CERN/]

ESHBACH: I was excited to see the human aspect of CERN, not so much the technical aspect. I don’t remember being surprised by anything, but I was definitely informed! It was great to see/hear the people at CERN go about their daily business. My favorite memory, just because of my personal interests, was when we got to unpack ideas with Joe Incandela — the particle physicist who was the international face of CERN at the time. Most people know him as the guy who made the public, televised announcement that the Higgs boson had been confirmed. But we got to talk to him about Bertrand Russell and glass blowing and the Aristotelians and the nuances of experimental observation. He was one of the high points of the trip to CERN for me.

Ben, Steve And Crew During Production At CERN's Large Hadron Collider (Switzerland)

ELKINS: Absolutely. I'm still in touch with him fairly frequently. He sends me amazing stuff, like the image of the moment he discovered the top quark through a detector he designed and built in the 80s. The top quark is one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe. It’s not easy to find since its lifetime is about a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. He's also been telling me about an experiment he's designed that he believes will solve the mystery of dark matter. He wants me to document it.

ESHBACH: Another high point was when the CERN cafeteria cashier kept letting you and me get beers even though it was against CERN rules at those hours.

ELKINS: Ha! That's right! I have so many great memories from that trip: climbing around in CERN’s outdoor particle collider junkyard, meeting CERN’s in-house punk band The Armpits, meticulously documenting the physicists’ favorite dirty jokes, and practicing card tricks on each other in that weird apartment with a shower in the middle of a kitchen. Meeting physicists who were building replicas of the LHC out of Legos, translating its data into music, testing what happens to matter when it is heated to 100,000 times the temperature of the sun, and inviting bands like Deerhoof to perform in their magnet test facility.

[Deerhoof's CERN Performance Can Be Seen Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZqQGbSnSTA]

ESHBACH: I remember when we all went to that smokey fondu place by the Rhône river and stuffed ourselves with wine and cheese slather. I remember on the bus returning to our apartment after a day at CERN and then suddenly realizing that we were the only people on the bus making any noise. And boy were we loud! I remember a giant statue of Freddy Mercury on Lake Geneva in Montreux. I remember our CERN host driving us through the countryside where Voltaire had lived — a hero from my youth. 

ELKINS: How crazy that Voltaire lived there in the 18th century and wrote about "possible worlds" without knowing the world's largest machine would be built directly under the soil he walked on to study related ideas. Another highlight for me was meeting Lisa Randall, whose 5-Dimensional Warped Geometry Theory was being tested at CERN. And physicist Steve Goldfarb, who never lost an opportunity to prank CERN’s lawyers, stoking their deepest nightmares about my film by writing them earnest emails saying things like: “I want you to know that the nude scenes were not my idea.  For some reason, Elkins thought that naked analysis in the control room would help to sell the film.  I am still skeptical, but am willing to do anything for modern science.”

[Steve Goldfarb also writes and performs boogie tunes about the CERN's experiments: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WShZVxPZETw&context=C3b87d82ADOEgsToPDskK4HyoihIrGVbaJ27myI0Yu]

ESHBACH: I remember a lot about that magical trip! [Ben’s account of the trip can be read here: http://beneshbach.com/cern.html]

Ben and Steve In Geneva

ELKINS: How funny that neither of us had any idea back then that you’d wind up scoring “Echoes of the Invisible” nearly eight years later. Talk about coming full circle! It’s so great to have your fingerprint on this film as you were a presence in this project from the beginning, through friendship, conversations that sparked ideas over the years, and traveling to CERN with me. I’m ecstatic that your stunning score became a closing chapter to all the memories.  I look forward to following your work as it evolves. You’ve already worked with some incredible orchestras and studios to realize your scores. 

ESHBACH: I’ve had the extraordinary pleasure of hearing some of my writing/orchestrating played by some amazing musicians all because of help from people who are much further along in this business than I am. A composer named Mateo Messina has been especially inspiring and helpful in this journey. It was through him that I’ve heard some of my work played by the Northwest Symphony Orchestra at Benaroya Hall in Seattle, and in some recording sessions at both Capitol Studios and Warner Brothers. In every case it was the orchestra’s “failure” to be mechanically precise that breathed real life and personality into the music. Also, hearing my music played by someone else — including the work of the conductor — forces me right into the moment unlike anything else can do. It’s an incredible feeling to have all time sucked out of the room. I wonder if this is something that one acclimates to or if it always keeps its shine. I hope I get to find out!

Ben Eshbach In The Studio With The Sugarplastic & Devo

For more on the music of ECHOES OF THE INVISIBLE: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Making-ECHOES-OF-THE-INVISIBLE/The-Music/