EDITORIAL

INTERVIEW

Karlotta Skagfield on scoring science with emotion for the European Space Agency’s Seas of the Sun documentary

Words by Katie Hawthorne

Icelandic composer Karlotta Skagfield grew up under the mysteries of the Northern Lights. “Even when you’ve seen it a thousand times, it makes you realise how small we are – and that there are endless possibilities in the world,” she says, her eyes sparkling. “When I was little I always thought, there’s something more out there.”

When Space Rocks asked her to score their official European Space Agency documentary film Seas of the Sun: The Story of Cluster (produced by by Alexander Milas who co-directed with Ryan Mackfall), it felt like a cosmically good fit. The strangeness and spine-tingling sense of scale in Skagfield’s music, which fuses her classical training with experimental sound design, is a natural companion for a documentary about mind-bending science, heartbreaking explosions and deeply human feats of perseverance and ingenuity. Using Spitfire Audio sounds, including tuba, foghorn, drones and siren-song, Skagfield’s score translates the film’s complex scientific adventures into a visceral, emotional experience.

Seas of the Sun (still courtesy of ESA)

A ground-breaking investigative mission, ESA’s Cluster project used four satellites to analyse the impact of the Sun’s solar winds on the Earth’s magnetic field. The project was first proposed in 1982, but it took almost two decades of research and international collaboration before the satellites were successfully launched in 2000. The satellites then spent almost a quarter of a century in orbit, changing the way we understand our planet and the science of the space weather which surrounds it.

The majestic auroras which shaped Skagfield’s childhood are caused when solar winds push through our planet’s magnetosphere – and she brings the same sense of wonder to her score. “The connection was perfect,” she smiles. “When I approach a project it’s always very feelings-based; I’ll start by hearing a sound in my head that could fit with the emotion.” She accompanies the film’s vital Northern Lights scene with intricate layers of reverbed vocals that sound both earthly and uncanny – as if the human voice is in concert with something greater.

I really wanted to create something new

Growing up, Skagfield received a broad musical education. Her mother and grandmother taught her piano and guitar, and she performed in a covers band, performing everything from Britney Spears to Tracy Chapman. She was always fascinated by film scores (“I loved Hans Zimmer, John Williams”) and credits her sister with a life-long love for Celine Dion (“Her voice is so big, the ballads are so big, I was obsessed”).

Seeking classical training for her voice – and perhaps inspired by Dion’s theatrics – Skagfield studied opera for six years at the Reykjavik Academy of Vocal Arts – but the artform’s firm sense of tradition began to feel restrictive. “You have to do what’s written, and I learned that I really wanted to create something new,” she says – so she moved to London, to study Songwriting and Production at BIMM. But even there, Skagfield felt unsure of her future.

I thought, I’m too niche in my music. It won’t translate, and people won’t like it...but I let go of that – and now I just do what I do.”

Embracing her uniqueness paid off: Skagfield’s first commercial project was to compose music and vocal arrangements for the enormously popular Netflix series Vikings: Valhalla. A rush of commissions followed, including for dystopian Icelandic short film Sense and the fantasy video game Runescape Dragonwilds, playing into her talent for unusual sounds that hold real depth of feeling.

I knew the music had to be impactful – but also that it couldn’t overpower the scene

Seas of the Sun is Skagfield’s first foray into non-fiction, but the documentary still handles shocking, cinematic subject-matter. The first scene she worked on was the film’s climactic third act, which chronicles a failed launch which destroyed the four ESA spacecraft in June 1996. Remarkable archive footage shows the launcher’s dramatic explosion, but also the shock, and then grief, washing over the faces of the scientists watching below, many of whom had spent their careers preparing for this moment.

“It’s horrible,” Skagfield says, quietly. “It’s like their child blowing up. I knew the music had to be impactful – but also that it couldn’t overpower the scene.”

She began by making a sound bed with heavily manipulated drones from LABS Harmonic Flights, “to have tension and sadness underlying”, and buried some slightly off-tune vocals in there too, to create an uneasy sensation. She then used a foghorn sample (originally from the LABS Foghorn library, but manipulated with the Originals Media Toolkit and her own voice), to build up to the explosion – “almost like a countdown”.

Seas of the Sun | Trailer

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In tribute to the devastated scientists, Skagfield wrote a melody to follow their facial expressions and initially used a cello sample to perform it. But she felt that the moment called for something “stronger, but more delicate at the same time”, so the documentary’s co-director and producer Alexander Milas connected her with cellist Jo Quail: “She played it so beautifully, with exactly all the expressions, and everything came together to convey this feeling,” Skagfield marvels. “The scientists work their whole lives to help the earth, but I didn’t know about it before this documentary. It feels like something everyone should know.”

Seas of the Sun often uses music as a metaphor. One striking moment reveals actual Cluster data turned into music, in a sonification project by Shane Embury and Klaus Nielson, while comparing the delicate instruments onboard the satellites to “a string quartet picking up on the melodies and tempo of the ambient plasma, […] gathering the music of the universe as scientific data”.

In her own composition, Skagfield embodies this metaphor when she gives voice – through her own vocalisations – to Cluster 2, the first of the satellites to return to Earth after twenty-five years of service. But re-entering the atmosphere means inevitable destruction for Cluster 2, and the footage is extraordinary – both celebratory and mournful. With the last Clusters due to end their journeys in August this year, Skagfield hints at a further collaboration: “ESA want to make people more aware. That’s all I can say for now.”

With a score that helps us to feel the invisible movements of solar storms, as well as the heartbreak and triumph of thousands of European scientists, Seas of the Sun opens a new chapter in Skagfield’s career of sonic exploration. “You can convey everything with music,” she enthuses. “I never know where it’s going to take me.”

For Seas of the Sun, Karlotta Skagfield used the Originals Media Toolkit and Originals Epic Brass and Woodwinds, as well as LABS Symphonic Trombones & Tubas, Foghorn, Harmonic Flights and Siren Songs libraries.