Raffertie: From The Conservatory to The Substance

Graduating from the Birmingham Conservatoire with a degree in Classical & Contemporary Music Composition, London-based composer Benjamin Stefanski, aka Raffertie, first established himself as a producer and DJ, releasing the explorative yet subtly textured debut electronic album Sleep of Reason in 2013. However, within a couple of months of signing to the Ninja Tune label, Stefanski also found himself working on commercial media projects, including EA Sports’ computer snowboarding game franchise, SSX: Deadly Descents.

Further soundtrack-related work followed, including the ITV crime drama Strangers, Amazon thriller Alex Rider, and 2021 films Zone 414 and Bull, before returning to Amazon to score the American neo-noir action drama The Continental: From the World of John Wick. However, Stefanski has now moved into the Hollywood big league after director Coralie Fargeat decided the London-based composer would be the perfect choice for last year’s explosively stylised body horror smash hit The Substance. Using Ableton as his primary production tool, Stefanski’s electronic score is as dynamic and overpowering as Fargeat’s outrageous direction and imagery. 

First off, congratulations on The Substance - great movie, great soundtrack. Was there a particular genre or style of music that defined your interest in wanting to work in soundtrack, or at least the music industry?

It depends on how far back you want to go? When I was at college I knew I wanted to work in music, but didn't know if I was good enough to make a living from it. The teachers were quite pragmatic about the whole thing in the sense that they invited lots of people who made their livings from writing things like advertisements and said, look, you can be a composer and struggle to make ends meet writing music for yourself or you can look at applying your skills in different ways - advertising being one of them, and do what you love alongside that. So when I came into the music industry, I was hopeful that I could make a living from being a musician while keeping my eyes open about what the other opportunities might be.

You basically started off as a music producer?

For the first few years I signed to Ninja Tune, but their publishing arm isn't just music so the majority of my income came from doing advertisements alongside my artist project, which was quite beneficial for getting jobs in the advertising space. People always told me my music was quite cinematic, but I hadn't paid much attention to that until I got the opportunity to score a TV series in 2018. Once I did that job, it sort of snowballed. I find the combination of music, picture and story very rewarding because when those elements are put together they can create something quite moving and a lot of the jobs I've worked on have felt very exciting in different ways.

Your degree was in classical contemporary music composition and some students are disappointed if what they’re learning is more theoretical than practical. Was that the case for you?

There was a huge theory aspect to it, so I spent a lot of my time learning harmony and counterpoint, which is useful in many ways, but quite pragmatic. We had composer concerts a few times every term that we could submit work to, but I’d arrived at the actual technology myself and didn't show the tutors any of my electronic music until halfway through my second year. When I did play it to them, they thought it was good and that I should pursue or integrate it in what I was doing at the conservatory. I met some very interesting tutors who got me thinking differently, not only about instrumental writing but electroacoustic composition and tried doing a bit of sound installation stuff, but also ended up making lots of tracks that I could use in DJ sets. At that point, the electronic side went a bit more centre stage.

Did you learn anything from your student days that really stayed with you, be it practical, theoretical or philosophical?

The theory side teaches you a lot about context and where certain ideas in music come from, but there's so much about music that’s transmitted aurally. I went through a process of having an instinctual reaction to things before trying to learn the technical side. Once you’ve done that, it goes full circle and you have to try to find the intuition again because you don't necessarily want to be thinking technically all of the time. I don't know if that makes sense, but I guess the conservatoire was about stripping down what I thought I knew before building it back up with a more complete or broader knowledge of various compositional techniques. Everything that I do with my own music now is about responding instinctually to something as a feeling and trying to capture that. I've put out some new music recently - two tracks called "Can't Stop" and "Atlas", and heard a few people talk about the chaos that exists within them. I suppose that’s quite an interesting idea in and of itself - there's a sort of flurry of ideas, but within that flurry you try to shape the music into something that, hopefully, conveys a feeling of rawness or something transcendent.

You actually worked on the computer game franchise, SSX: Deadly Descents – a snowboarding game. Although not a soundtrack specifically, I’m guessing that would have been a good introduction to scoring?

Computer game music is interesting because, generally speaking, it's all controlled by engines. You have to think about it as being quite a modular format, so any eight bars can jump to any other eight bars and there are systems within the game controlling things. You usually have to create a couple of different versions depending on whether things are going well for the player or not, with the music subtly changing between those two states. As far as SSX was concerned, they wanted it to have this commercial feel with them having the ability to manipulate it within the game engines so you could feel the player progressing throughout the levels.

What specific soundtrack work had you done prior to being asked to score The Substance?

The first full TV series I scored was in 2018 and one job led to the next. During the pandemic, I did some music for the Michaela Coel show, I May Destroy You, and then I worked on the John Wick prequel, The Continental, which was a really interesting experience because I got to work with the London Contemporary Orchestra and people have subsequently come to me for that combination of electronics and orchestra on a lot of projects. Relatively speaking, I was still quite new to scoring, and then The Substance came along at the beginning of last year.

How did that chain of events begin?

My agent messaged me in December saying there might be something coming along and to keep January free. Then I got a request to send a reel, which is just a collection of tracks from previous projects and the director, Coralie Fargeat, responded really positively to about five or six of those. After I met with her, we were away and the only major issue was that we didn't have much time. They wanted the score to be ready for the Cannes Film Festival, so everything had to be mixed and submitted by the end of April. We got to work straight away, but time sort of became more and more compressed until, in the end, we were still writing music while they were mixing it. It was highly pressurised, but I had such fun writing the score and it was amazing working with Coralie despite the time constraints.

The movie is pretty outrageous. What was your initial reaction to watching it and how quickly did you begin to shape and formulate ideas?

So, like most people, my initial reaction was “what have I just watched?” I'm always looking for something that moves me in some way – and don’t mind how that’s achieved, but it needs to provoke a visceral response whereby I really want to be involved with a project. With The Substance, I could really feel the rage coming out of the screen, particularly in the final third act and the way that the movie crescendos. I was so arrested by what was coming out of the screen and thought the storytelling was amazing. I loved all the symbolism and the fact that there was very little dialog, yet I was still gripped by the story – in fact, it was probably more powerful for there not being much dialog. In terms of ideas, the film was already very well temp’d [temp = temporary music, used for reference before the final soundtrack is inserted] when I first saw it and felt very well put together, but Coralie was very clear that the temp was not the score but a broad view of how she saw it moving up and coming down. She described where she wanted musical parts to be quiet and where she wanted them to go full throttle, and that was really helpful because people sometimes get a bit wedded to the temp and can't really hear anything else. Again, because there wasn't much dialog, there was a lot of space for the music to either link directly to whatever was going on or pick out the subtext, so the ideas came pretty quickly from the initial demos and there were probably three elements that stood out and underpinned the entire score.

At that early stage, are you looking for a specific sound or sounds that will create a narrative for the entire movie?

There was a sound, which we kind of hear at the start of the title and extended out, and I remember Coralie saying that’s the sound of The Substance. It became a sort of little motif, essentially, and then there was this idea of the two sound worlds between the characters Elizabeth and Sue. The Elizabeth sound needed to have a more organic, natural beauty to it, but we also talked a lot about Hollywood nostalgia. In the movie, she’s an actress who’s moved into a different stage in her career, so we began referencing scores from movies like Vertigo and Citizen Kane. Then there was the world of Sue, which is about what it means to be youthful but with a sort of hyper-real, synthetic, manufactured element to it. That's where the idea for the kick and the really low, subby bass line came from, and we just put those separate ideas together to create ‘The Substance sound’. I remember there's a scene where the camera spins around to see Sue in a cat suit just before she's about to go on stage and when we put the sound to picture the hit of the snare just lined up perfectly with the cut. It was one of those moments where we thought, that’s it – that’s the sound world. Beyond that, there's also this collision between the two character’s worlds, and as that happens the movie becomes more messy, harsh and violent – and that was fun to play with too.

In horror films, silence is obviously used as a mechanism to induce fear. How do you balance that with the impulse to create sounds at certain points?

A lot of it depends on good performances and I think there are some extraordinary ones in this film, so at those points you don’t need additional music telling you what you should feel. There's a good example of this in the activation scene where Elizabeth injects herself for the first time, and then the birth of Sue follows. The first time I saw the film, in the lead up to being injected there was no music, but in a slightly later version some had been added. I remember talking to Coralie and saying, I don't think we should have music here because it makes the scene feel so much lonelier and that puts you more into the character’s headspace. On some projects, you don't get performances that are quite that good and so the scene might need a bit of help, but here the story is so well told, performed and executed that you can let moments stand by themselves without the music. The other thing to consider is that if you start big, it doesn't leave you anywhere to go, so it's really about collaborating with the filmmaker and knowing where to push and pull. As much as I like my music to be heard, it's also about not overkilling the whole thing.

Once you see the temp, do you immediately begin to create a library of sounds that have a commonality or is that a constantly evolving process?

It does evolve, but I usually try to select two or three pieces to start working with and there's a reason for that. For example, I don’t know if you’ve ever used a Fairfield Circuitry Shallow Water guitar pedal, but it modulates the pitch and makes things wobble, which gives the sound a sort of watery, gloopy feeling that fits perfectly with a lot of the body fluids that happen in the movie. So on a very basic level, you’re kind of looking for points of inspiration and that was one that I instantly reached for. Then I had this idea of creating a synthetic world for Sue and reached for my Pittsburgh Modular Taiga synth and the Analog Rytm, which is where a lot of the drum sounds came from. I was just trying to get as much out of those as possible, plugging things in and recording for seven or eight minutes. Normally, I wouldn't work like that and would try to have more quality control but, again, Coralie wanted me to send her everything and she would listen through it all and say, minute one to three works really well or there's two seconds there that I really like. From that, we started to piece together a palette and sound world that felt like The Substance that everything could springboard from.

Are pedals one of your main points of inspiration when it comes to sound processing?

Without wanting to sound trite, there's something nice about being able to touch knobs and faders because it feels a little more interactive. The computer takes quite a lot, but doesn't give very much back, whereas with some bits of equipment you can slightly turn something and think, oh, where's that come from? That’s inspiring and leads you onto something else, but having said that, most of the sound generation I did for the track I mentioned earlier called "Can't Stop" actually came from Ableton Live’s Resonator device. I basically created the sound I was happy with and processed it through pedals, but the core sounds you're hearing are directly from Ableton and there's something great about that type of precise digital sound. All of the percussion is from Ableton’s Wavetable synth and it's a really short, gnarly-sounding kind of digital. Ableton is definitely my favourite canvas to work with.

Have you found that Ableton has specific benefits for soundtrack work?

For me, the benefit is that it's become so much a part of the way I work and I can work quickly using a lot of Ableton’s algorithms within the sound design. Even if I'm recording something from outboard, I’ll put it into Ableton, pitch it around and stretch it out. That process has become so much a part of how I work that I don't even really need to think about it – it’s a very quick way to experiment, and Ableton makes that very easy.

You touched on using Ableton algorithms for sound design, but can you explain how they work in more practical terms?

I’m talking specifically about Ableton’s audio algorithms like Complex Pro, or Beats, which is really good for giving things a chopped up feel. It may not even necessarily be a rhythmic thing, sometimes I'll just switch the algorithm on and play with the envelope slider until you get something that sounds almost unintelligible or create interesting judders and sounds that kind of move across each other, which is great for creating something interesting from a static sample. Other times, the algorithm can create a more gentle kind of pitch shifting effect that’s not too perceptible, but when you put it to its extremes you can get some quite interesting artefacts introduced into the sounds, particularly in the higher registers. It creates a remnant tone of the natural voice but lower in pitch and I like that sort of natural/unnatural crossover.

Playing with those types of sounds must be really appealing, especially as dissonance is such a vital part of a horror score…

It is fun, but bringing it back round to what I was saying before, that’s the intuitive element of Ableton – it just feels like an extension of whatever I'm trying to do. Having used it for such a long time, I don't have to think too much about it and that’s particularly useful when you’re working in an industry that’s so time dependent.

The closing track, "Pirouette", is quite lovely and I saw some images of you playing what looked like prepared piano to compose it?

It wasn't prepared piano, but it was composed on a slightly old piano that actually belongs to a friend. I was supposed to be looking after it while he's between studios, but it’s been here for the last three years. It probably needs a bit of maintenance, but it's nice to have real instruments amongst all the electronic textures to add a bit of depth and a more human element. With The Substance, the electronic elements have a certain unpredictability to them because most of the sound design is about twiddling things, but it’s also good to occasionally ground the music in a sound that people are familiar with on an emotional level. I think they call it intertextuality, where you rely on your understanding of a sound that you’ve heard before. I also worked with a cellist to create some other unusual extended techniques, but the human element still comes through even though it's all part of the sound design.

Follow Raffertie on Bandcamp and Instagram

Text and interview: Danny Turner
Photos courtesy of Amba Pittard-Watt + SCRT