Composer Arli Liberman has made a name for himself creating soundtracks for films, TV and top sporting events. He speaks with Christopher Reive about the art of scoring.
There is music to be found in everything.
A strike thuds against a punching bag. A wave crashes into the side of a boat. Someone recites a monologue. It’s all music in the right hands.
For Arli Liberman, those sounds are the keys to something deeper.
“There’s a moment with any project and any brief that I get to make music that is not to a screen,” he explains.
“So now I’m making the music and I’m imagining that somebody’s blind and they can’t see the screen. How can I paint the pictures that they’re trying to tell me?
“So, I don’t score the images, I score the idea; the feeling, the heart, whatever is there to be scored, and usually that lends itself to the best results for me.”
From his recording studio in central Auckland, the 38-year-old taps into those sounds to build worlds through his music. On the walls hang posters of Israel Adesanya’s documentary Stylebender and the 2019 film Savage. A bottle of Estrella Damm with a limited edition America’s Cup design sits on a display.
They are just a small selection of the projects Liberman has lent his expertise to.
But scoring for film, television and sport wasn’t exactly the route Liberman expected to go down as he worked towards a career in music.
Originally from Israel, Liberman picked up the guitar in his teens and began working as a session guitarist.
“At the time where I had to go to the Army, I didn’t go to the Army because I was already a professional musician. I just wanted to play music, and the universe works in a funny way,” he recalls.
“When I got the release from the Army, I got invited to play with an Israeli-Palestinian band called White Flag, and that was incredible.”
He was about 18 at that time and came under the tutelage of award-winning producer Mark Smulian.
It was a piece of advice from Smulian that ultimately paved the road Liberman would walk in his music career.
“I had this massive distortion rock and roll guitar, very high testosterone guitar playing. When I was playing with them, it really choked the mix. I mean, it really made it that I was cancelling all the acoustic instruments with my sound,” Liberman says.
“He was like, ‘Yo, this is not going to work ... you know, it’s probably time to let you go.’
“I was like ‘no way. What can I do? What can I do?’ and he said, ‘You have to find the back door of the electric guitar sound’.”
That sent Liberman on a quest to first figure out what that even meant, then put it into action.
“It means so many different things, but in a nutshell, one of the things that it means is to find a way to not be as direct and dominant with the sound. It’s to find a way to give that sonic information, but not in a direct way. It’s much wider, much more gentle, but very, very powerful,” he explains.
“Still come from the place of power and beauty, but in a very graceful way.”
Moving to New Zealand in 2009 with his partner at the time, it wasn’t long before Liberman was playing in bands and working with artists here.
Before he shifted, he was made aware of elements of New Zealand music through the vocals of Whirimako Black, who featured on the self-titled album from British electronic duo 1 Giant Leap, singing in te reo Māori.
Liberman says he got the opportunity to tour with Black, while his experimental guitar sound and interest in looping have seen him soundtrack live meditations, art installations, as well as recording and releasing music as a solo artist.
While he can’t pinpoint how exactly he learned the art of composition and how different instruments and sounds work together, he says it has been a natural process.
“I mean, obviously I know theory and I can speak to musicians, but it’s all vibes. Try not to think about it too much,” he says.
“I’m taking the guitar and I change the pitch of it, so it’s becoming like a bass, or I make it sound like it’s strings or make it sound really like anything but guitar.
“Particularly when I was doing the meditation bits, I was making all those super emotive bits. There’s a person talking on top of it, and I realised like, ‘Whoa, I better stay away from the dialogue’, and that trained me to create stuff that supports dialogue but that doesn’t go over it.
“Around then, that’s when, people like my [current] partner ... she said, this has to go in the cinema, and I was like, all right, cool.”
One thing has led to another for Liberman, but it was a project with the All Blacks Experience that saw him kick the door down in terms of soundtracking sport.
Just before the pandemic, he was approached to provide a sonic element for that, when he put together a morphed rendition of the national anthem, which only becomes clear towards the end of it.
“When we had people like ex-All Blacks and people from the executive that came to have a listen to it in the studio, they said to us, ‘that’s exactly how it feels before you’re going out. It’s just a feeling that the reality is changing; with the adrenaline, everything is whipping us into almost a different dimension.’ They all say the same thing.
“All I can think of for all those sports is I’m just trying to target the heart instead of the mind. I’m not trying to sell any product. I’m not trying to sell anything that is not there.”
That has been his modus operandi in the sports soundtracking space ever since, as someone who never would have picked himself as a “sports guy” trying to convey key messages and themes through his music.
As part of the process in soundtracking feature-length productions such as Adesanya’s Stylebender and Dame Valerie Adams’ 2022 documentary More Than Gold, it has been important for Liberman to get an understanding of who the athletes are away from the cameras when their guards are down.
“All athletes have, it’s almost like somebody injected software [where], when the camera’s on, what they’re saying is very predictable because they have to protect themselves not to say anything stupid, so you can’t really see the actual person.
“[When] I worked on Stylebender, we really bonded, and I drew all the sounds out of him. He’s got a beautiful speaking voice, and I sampled his sound and morphed it into instruments and the whole skeleton of the score is made out of him. Then on top of that, I would compose stuff that made me feel emotional about the stuff that we don’t see, like there is something happening that we don’t see.
“That was my formula with him and also, to an extent, with Dame Valerie Adams, but those are full-length movies; the canvas is massive for me to massage it in slowly.”
It’s a different story when developing theme music to be played on the broadcast of a live sporting event.
In his work with the America’s Cup, which he has provided the theme for in the past two editions, it’s a case of getting to the point quickly.
Much like the theme music for football’s Champions League or ESPN’s SportsCenter, Liberman says theme music for a broadcast needs to have that sting that lets the audience know the show is about to begin.
“It’s almost like an alarm clock that you’re in a bar and you hear that sting and you’re like, okay, cool, it’s starting, so [you] need to be really concise and really make sure that the melody that you make makes my heart sing. That’s what I’m looking for.
“Then there is all this decoration process of what are the instruments that we want to put in there to dress it up, in which way, because that’s when the real kind of fun and mess begins. That can take a few months to go between everybody and all the cultural advisers and all the levels of the people in the company.
“A lot of last-minute changes. It’s a wild job, that theme music business.”
Even in that context, he tries to bring the sounds from the subject matter into the recording process. For the America’s Cup theme music, Liberman used sounds from Emirates Team New Zealand’s AC75 Te Rehutai captured by several microphones on the boat. For Liberman, native sound is everything.
While there are similarities in some areas of his approach, there’s an important distinction between the two types of soundtracking he has done for sports-related content.
“When I get to do a score about a person that is, like, the best at what they do in their life and we’re looking at somebody and seeing what are the consequences of that and, by the way, they’re an athlete, I look at all the stuff and the athlete is the last 10%. I really focus on the actual person,” he says.
“But in America’s Cup, for example, that’s when we’re focusing on the brand of the sport ... to come up with a theme music about a sport that’s been here [for 174 years] and everybody’s having an opinion about it, it definitely can get your brain thinking weirdly.
“Everybody has an opinion of what America’s Cup is – or any cup to any competition – so I really have to make a huge separation and make sure I’m only working on that, and not have any cross projects that are not sport theme music. Sorry, that was the longest answer I could give you.”
While his decision to explore the cinematic world of sound has led him into the sporting realm as well as providing soundscapes for a host of other film and television projects, Liberman continues to find time to produce original music, working on an atmospheric album titled Traces alongside Rhian Sheehan, which is expected to be released soon.
He has come a long way from the young man told to find the backdoor of the guitar sound, but it’s a road he continues to explore.
“That basically spun me into this journey that I’m still on today of finding my own voice, keep developing it and finding different ways of expressing myself, building worlds through music. It’s an amazing journey.”
Christopher Reive joined the Herald sports team in 2017, bringing the same versatility to his coverage as he does to his sports viewing habits.