Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Erik Nordgren. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Erik thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I grew up playing music and spent a lot of time as a teen exploring both classical work and modern styles, but there was a particular period of time in the early 2010s where the concept of becoming a film composer and working on the sound for motion pictures & television really crystallized into a goal. While I was in high school, my dad showed me Amadeus for the first time, and the scene where Salieri furiously looks through Mozart’s original scores just completely blew my mind. The music changing with every page turn, building to an overwhelming climax where he drops them all on the floor, jumpstarted an obsession with how sound, music, and film interacted with each other. Until that point all the music I was used to had perfectly timed beginnings and ends, so to see that kind of classical music being chopped up and edited in service of a film had me itching for more. A couple years after this, I saw The Social Network for the first time, which changed my perception of music in film entirely. I had never heard a score like it – incredibly angular with these dense, moody electronics punctuating action that I had traditionally thought orchestras needed to accompany. The film even features a classical piece recreated on synths, reminiscent of Wendy Carlos taken to the extreme! Almost immediately after seeing it, I remember picking up my guitar and seeing just what kind of sounds I could create, how far I could push the envelope into something close to overwhelming. I still credit that score as the impetus and one of my biggest inspirations for the education and career in music & sound that I’ve dedicated myself to.

Erik, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a composer and a post production audio engineer, and I’ve been doing music & sound professionally for about 8 years now. I’ve been playing music since I was practically a toddler, but became serious about scoring films and doing sound when I was graduating high school. Rather than assist composers and intern at studios out of college, I decided to try a different route by freelancing and building my brand on my own. This proved to be a lot more difficult, and I started out with no connections and no real credits to bring to the table, but over the last several years I’ve steadily built a network of studios, creatives, and directors across the entertainment and advertising industries. With my work, I try to be a one stop audio shop providing audio editing, mixing, sound design, and original music services as a complete package, or individually should the need arise. Film and music have been passions of mine for nearly my whole life, so at heart I create music that serves a story, whether it turns heads or keeps you immersed in the moment without ever noticing it’s there. Entertainment and media are tough industries to stay afloat in, so I pride myself on the fact that I built my audio brand from the ground up, and get to keep building it with my friends and colleagues. I also have a deep love for the audio post process and the role it plays in taking a project across the finish line. When you’re creating your best work, you want it to sound like your best work, and I want to get it there!

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

At the end of 2021 I had to make a serious decision about where my career was heading. I was enjoying moderate success as a composer, but my day to day job was starting to really become draining on my creativity and my mental health. I was living in New York at the time, and both of my friends & roommates had made the decision to move out of the apartment we shared at the end of our lease. I had just moved into that apartment 10 months before, and was dreading repeating that process, so I made a choice. At the beginning of 2022, I chose to quit my job and leave New York entirely to spent some time with my family. I moved in with them in Colorado, where I started to play piano again and take a serious look at my career path. I ended up finding work out there at a major TV network, which influenced my decision to move to Los Angeles after a year in CO and continue my career in post audio. It was a major decision, and felt jarring for several months to have left so much of my life behind on the east coast. I still miss many things about living in New York, but I’m grateful every day for the new chapter of my life that I started out west.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I wish I had known about the importance of, and had the access to, the massive film libraries that sites like Kanopy and Criterion provide. When you’re studying music and sound, you can parse out the exact mechanisms of how they work, learning each and every note and transcribing all kinds of scores, but to me the most vital piece of one’s creative journey is exposing yourself to as many films as you can. You have to watch films from all over the world, in as many languages as you can find, and you’ll start to see these deviations and experiments with sound that contradict what we’re used to in American cinema. When I started to watch films more seriously and really go outside my comfort zone, that’s what broadened my idea of what music in film and sound for film can be. In a wider sense, the things that influence and inspire you can come from literally anywhere, and you have to be willing to go looking for it.

Contact Info:

• Website: eriknordgren.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/boltpaper
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nordgren-erik/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/nrdgrn

Image Credits
The Wages of Sin! poster by Zak Dennis