According to conventional wisdom the ideal working environment for a musician is free of external stimulus. Indeed, some of us go to great lengths to isolate ourselves from any kind of sensory distraction – be it visible, audible or otherwise. The assumption being, the less there is coming in from the ‘outside’, the more we can bring out from the ‘inside’.

But what happens when a musician turns this scenario on its head, introducing a constant stream of audio-visual stimulus into her workspace? This is precisely what producer and songwriter Lucrecia Dalt has done while writing and recording the music for two upcoming releases. Having recently settled in Berlin, her curiosity about her new home and her interest in cinema converged in an unorthodox, yet highly productive compositional technique. Dalt turned her studio into a screening room and, instead of absorbing classic works of New German Cinema in her leisure time or as a break between recording sessions, she let the films’ imagery, sounds and atmospheres envelop her and find its way into her music.

Dalt explains how this technique came about:

It all changed with my record Syzygy. For me, a stimulating working environment needed to be overly saturated. Juxtaposed information coming from lines of opened books, movies playing on another screen, a window opened to let the loud street background be present inside the room, music from others, flatmate making music, flatmate having sex, flatmate asleep, oscillating noise in my head – I needed to overlay my music with these elements to be able to move forward. These random clusters of information brought about interesting accidents that became a sort of new working techniques. But the accidents that stood were the ones happening when I was interacting with films: while recording I used to play them back on mute and sometimes, just randomly, I would turn up the volume for a second while playing back the stems I was working on. These random and brief sounds worked as deflectors – little seeds containing other possible prospective melodies. This began in my last six months living in Barcelona. Then when I got to Berlin I applied for and received a scholarship through the Musicboard to develop this "technique" and explore the more extensive entanglements between the emotional dynamic experienced during the viewing of films and during the music production process, just to see what could happen. I chose German cinema simply out of my new context. With this method I worked on my two upcoming releases: a self-titled EP that's coming out in October with Other People and one LP that's coming out with the label Care of.