Tim nelson on composing the soundtrack for i think you should come to america (2017)

Timothy Nelson composing ‘iron eyes’ and ‘noble savage’ tracks for I Think You Should Come to America, which is Nelson’s and Kuc’s third collaboration (previously they worked together on In the Same Room and Fluchtpunkt).

Timothy Nelson: 'When Kamila Kuc asked me to provide a score for I Think You Should Come to America, I knew that I would not see any of the footage before composing the music, so rather than discussing any specific imagery, I first wanted to know what the tempo and overall mood of the film would be. For several of the cues, I wished to establish a sense of place and strove to convey an impression of the wide-open expanses of the American West. With these “soundscape” cues, I tried not to be overly specific with regard to anachronism and chose a retrospective viewpoint that might refer inclusively to any time from the present back several hundred years. One major theme throughout the suite of music involves the subjective nature of observing one culture through the eyes of another and acknowledgement of the inherent inaccuracy of such a perspective. One way in which this was expressed was by exchanging features and characteristics of the musics of the two cultures. The pentatonic scales of traditional Native American music are in some instances throughout the score voiced by European instruments such as a conventional string quartet, while conversely, some of the cues involve the scales and modes of Hebrew liturgical music being played by the wooden flutes and percussion indigenous to Native American cultures.'

Tim Nelson is a film composer, sound designer and multi-instrumentalist session musician/producer. He has since 2007 been a frequent collaborator with award-winning filmmakers/animators the Quay Brothers. As well as appearing on recordings with other artists, Nelson has released, to date, twelve albums on the Nimyonta label. Instruments that have featured on his various albums include an eclectic array of 'bowed strings, modified and unmodified guitar-like instruments, flutes of various types, circuit-bent objects, ukelin, theremins, hurdy-gurdy, medieval small pipes, mellotron, organ, piano, zithers, trumpet, clarinet, cymbals, voice, wind-up toys, shortwave radios, tympani, bells, chimes and gongs.'

See also I Think You Should Come to America (2017).