In the Netflix film Little Siberia, the everyday life of a small village is shaken up when a meteorite falls through the roof of a car. According to the town's mayor, the meteorite is very valuable for the future of the slowly-dying village. Joel, the village priest and a veteran peacekeeper, ends up guarding the meteorite in an old museum before it is sent to London for a more detailed evaluation. But the meteorite gets a lot of attention, and while Joel tries to protect it from amateur and professional criminals, he also tries to unravel an even greater mystery surrounding his own life.
Dome Karukoski directed the project, which stars Eero Ritala as Joel. Malla Malmivaara, Tommi Korpela and Martti Suosalo are also featured. Panu Aaltio (pictured) composed original music for the film, which began streaming in March. He recently took time to share with Post details on his approach.
Panu, what was the overall vision for the music in Little Siberia?
“We started searching for elements that would evoke the cold environment, surprise the audience and give a sense of the existential level of the story. I started the scoring process very early on, so there was no temp track. It was particularly important here to start with no preconceived notions about what the music should be, because I wanted to create a unique signature sound to the film.”
How did you collaborate with the director and other team members?
“I read the script even before they started filming, and we discussed with director Dome Karukoski what we thought could support the film the best. Dome had a really long playlist of various types of music that he had been collecting while writing the script, but he said this movie will require something different, as nothing in the playlist really stuck out. So, I knew we needed to start searching for unique and novel sounds.
“A key collaborator to the score was the editor, Harri Ylönen. I started composing at the same time he started editing, so we made the decision to stick to using only my music in the temp track, which led to a lot of really inspiring back-and-forth discussion and collaboration on the score. Being able to listen to the actual music that would be in the scenes also informed the editing for Harri.
“When I began playing around with the types of metallophone sounds you typically find in gamelan music, that became the first instrument that Dome latched onto, as he felt those almost sounded like icicles. We went through a lot of different types of instrumentations together, slowly adding to the palette only those elements that really resonated with the film.”
Were there any particular themes or motifs you wanted to highlight?
“I wanted to give a voice to the meteorite that crashes into the village, as the meteorite is basically a character in itself. I imagined the meteorite as talking to our main character through its motif in the music. It was created out of my daughter's voice and is somewhere between music and speech, which helps it sound like some sort of communication.
“One thing that stuck out to me already from the script was that there was a metaphysical and existential angle to the film, and I felt the music should be able to add to that magical realism that makes seemingly random things seem purposeful. I originally wrote the main melody in the film for the traditional Finnish instrument jouhikko. It has this offbeat and erratic feel to it, which lets the audience know they can expect almost anything. I started to explore how the main melody would sound with different instruments, and I ended up incorporating the melody also into the vocal, as well as into the celesta, which plays it at a really slow speed to give an ethereal quality to it.
“Since the main melody has a recognizable rhythm, I was also able to use it in the percussion as a purely rhythmic theme. I think this is the first score I've done where the same main theme is played both by a melodic and non-melodic instrument! It was an immensely useful narrative device to be able to subtly tie together the whole film under this single theme, regardless of the instrumentation.”
What was the timeframe for composing the score?
“I began composing at the same time that editor Harri Ylönen started editing, which is quite early for a typical film score. I really loved this workflow, as it made the scoring process so much more collaborative. I got a ton of valuable feedback simply from watching the cut evolve and hearing how my music was being used. At the same time, it let Harri react to the music and adjust the edit based on what the score was developing towards. I feel the music became a particularly integral part of the film's narrative this way.
“Once the edit was finished, we sat down with Dome and just went through each of the cues that had made it to the edit so far. We noted things that weren't quite working yet, or elements that were still missing, and I started a full pass through the film with an emphasis on making the thematic structure of the score whole.”
What would you say were some of the bigger challenges?
“I think the biggest challenge was that there was no reference music that worked for this film. Dome had a really long playlist that he had been collecting while writing the script together with screenwriter Minna Panjanen, and he felt nothing precisely fit the film. So, I truly started from scratch, which is artistically the best place to be, but also terrifying because you have nothing to fall back on if it doesn't work!
“I initially tried some approaches that were too conventional, and Dome felt those were not right for the film, so I opted to go for a fairly experimental style, creating an off-kilter mood with elements like the meteorite motif using my daughter's voice. I actually was a bit afraid to play that first experimental demo for Dome, because I thought it might be way too weird! But after hearing the opening sequence, Dome clapped his hands together and said ‘That's it! It's excellent. Great job Panu.’ That was such a relief! We now had something that was clearly original to this film, and which defied expectations in a similar way to the film's narrative, so I knew we could make it work from here.”
You mentioned some of the unique instruments or techniques you used. Can you elaborate?
“The synthetic voice instrument that I used for the meteorite motif was a result of pure experimentation. I asked my partner, who is really into Finnish poetry, if she could find me a poem with an interesting sound that creates some connection to the meteorite. Our nine-year-old daughter read an Eino Leino poem called ‘Ukonlintu ja virvaliekki’ - which roughly translates to ‘The Thunderbird and the Will-o’-the-Wisp’ – holding a single note. I took those recordings and sort of scrambled them, and that created this synthetic instrument with a sampler. It almost sounds like the meteorite is speaking at times, but due to the constant pitch it sounds musical.
“The folk instruments were key to the overall sound. First there is the Finnish jouhikko, which is a traditional string instrument. It's got a wonderful raw sound compared to regular string instruments, and due to its lack of a fingerboard it has this wonderfully unpredictable quality to the tuning as well. It really evokes the locale in this film for me. We had an amazing jouhikko player, Ilkka Heinonen, who just nailed every crazy thing I threw at him.
“The jouhikko is complemented by another folk instrument, the nyckelharpa, which is a Swedish keyed fiddle brilliantly played by Emilia Lajunen. It provides some really key emotional moments with its beautifully melancholic tone.
“This score is really big on eccentric percussion, and I was incredibly fortunate to get the amazing LA-based percussionist Pete Korpela on board. He is originally from Finland but has lived in LA for a long time, and is one of the most sought after percussionists in town. He came up with lots of different timbres and approaches to different cues. I don't think I know the names of half the percussion instruments in this film! I was just really blown away by what he did.
“There's jazz and folk vocalist Aili Ikonen, who brought a wonderful fusion of these styles to the film. The eccentric main melody is performed by her in an almost scat style, evoking some jazz associations, but then we also have the traditional belting-type folk vocals.
“Last but not least, we have a string quintet to create a solid emotional foundation around all the more experimental stuff, and another amazing LA-based studio musician, Andrew Synowiec, played some great guitar tracks to propel the cues forward.”
Little Siberia is described as a ‘crime comedy.’ How did you balance the different tonal elements?
“There's a recurring use of tension and propulsion in the score to keep the crime story going. For the comedy aspects, we didn't want the music to sound funny in itself, but it could underline some of the funny aspects in our main character Joel. In one case, I used strange percussion sounds to portray Joel starting to lose his mind over how everything has gone wrong, which adds to the comedy that arises from the absurdity of the situation.
“Dome also wanted to tell a bigger overall story with the score, so I searched for ways to do all these things in a way that conveyed the metaphysical and existential level. This is where elements like the celesta and the metallophones in the percussion became essential, creating a layer of magical realism that ties seemingly unrelated events together.”
Your work on the Tale nature documentary received praise. Does your approach differ between scoring for documentary and fiction films?
“Documentaries can be more open-ended, and the music is often less literal. The nature trilogy's producer and director, Marko Röhr, described my music as giving the same feeling as the one he gets when being in nature. Especially in the earlier nature films, I found the jump from narrative fiction a bit hard at first, because the scenes did not have a similar structure to what I had been used to. Once I approached it more like I was writing a symphony, it started to make sense.
“I think this, combined with my deep conviction for preserving nature and protecting animal rights, is also why the music in the nature films became the most personal of all my scores. They seem to resonate with audiences as well, as concerts with a live orchestra playing my music to the picture of Tale of the Sleeping Giants have been playing to sold out concert halls for a while now.”