Biography
Composer Julian Brink initially focused his training on writing music for motion pictures and launched his professional path in that domain before issuing the solo recording Utility Music during 2022.
Born in Johannesburg during 1989, Brink first picked up his mother’s guitar at the age of ten and later performed with rock groups throughout his teenage years. Although he remained unable to read notation until age nineteen, exposure to cinema scores—particularly those composed for the films of Paolo Sorrentino and Paul Thomas Anderson—sparked his compositional curiosity. The 2007 release of the latter director’s There Will Be Blood, featuring a soundtrack by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, prompted Brink to commit fully to becoming a composer. He completed undergraduate studies in guitar before relocating to the United States and obtaining a master’s degree from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. In 2015 he settled in California to enter the film-music industry; there he wed actress Maddie Hasson, and the couple continues to reside in Los Angeles.
Brink supplied the scores for Amir Motlagh’s Three Worlds in 2018 and for No Longer Suitable for Use in 2021, the latter of which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and received coverage in The New Yorker magazine. That same year he placed Utility Music with the Sono Luminus label. The album repurposed material originally intended for an unfinished film project and scored it anew for piano, harp, and string trio. Sessions took place amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with each musician laying down parts individually in a pop-music fashion inside home studios located in Los Angeles, New York, London, Frankfurt, and Hamburg; subsequent layers of instrumental and toy-instrument improvisations plus non-instrumental textures were then incorporated. Engineer Brian Losch was enlisted to produce the sonic impression that all participants had performed together in a single room. The album’s title simultaneously evoked the German notion of Gebrauchsmusik and the practical, circumstance-driven conditions under which the recording occurred.
Born in Johannesburg during 1989, Brink first picked up his mother’s guitar at the age of ten and later performed with rock groups throughout his teenage years. Although he remained unable to read notation until age nineteen, exposure to cinema scores—particularly those composed for the films of Paolo Sorrentino and Paul Thomas Anderson—sparked his compositional curiosity. The 2007 release of the latter director’s There Will Be Blood, featuring a soundtrack by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, prompted Brink to commit fully to becoming a composer. He completed undergraduate studies in guitar before relocating to the United States and obtaining a master’s degree from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. In 2015 he settled in California to enter the film-music industry; there he wed actress Maddie Hasson, and the couple continues to reside in Los Angeles.
Brink supplied the scores for Amir Motlagh’s Three Worlds in 2018 and for No Longer Suitable for Use in 2021, the latter of which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and received coverage in The New Yorker magazine. That same year he placed Utility Music with the Sono Luminus label. The album repurposed material originally intended for an unfinished film project and scored it anew for piano, harp, and string trio. Sessions took place amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with each musician laying down parts individually in a pop-music fashion inside home studios located in Los Angeles, New York, London, Frankfurt, and Hamburg; subsequent layers of instrumental and toy-instrument improvisations plus non-instrumental textures were then incorporated. Engineer Brian Losch was enlisted to produce the sonic impression that all participants had performed together in a single room. The album’s title simultaneously evoked the German notion of Gebrauchsmusik and the practical, circumstance-driven conditions under which the recording occurred.
Albums