Today we’d like to introduce you to Phil Lober.
Hi Phil, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
At age six, I found myself entranced by certain music. I had a Gameboy Color and a Game & Watch cartridge at the time, and the options menu in the game played a track that I fell in love with. I would leave the options menu running for hours just to hear it on loop.
I had a good sense of rhythm at the age but no structure. Piano classes helped, but ultimately I was stubborn to play things that didn’t emotionally resonate with me and instead would spend hours on songs that would. I began to create songs from my little keyboard which had a four-layer track recording ability.
When I was 13, a contest in my middle school showed up for composition. I wrote a song with manuscript for piano; it was the first song I’d ever written out on paper. It happened to win the contest but for me, it was an important milestone in what makes a song, a song. A completed work.
The next year, I began writing music for fan-made video games online. I was a huge fan of Bionicle from Lego, so I found a musical home within the fanbase there and became a “department leader” of music for some film projects. This put me in months of writing orchestral music and associating elements with the imagination, for example epic landscapes with grandiose tutti chords.
At 16 I scored a film called ‘Children of the Wind’ by Daphne Schmon and was given the award for ‘Best Original Score’ at the X-Dance Film Festival in Salt Lake City. It was an incredible process of scoring and it’ll never leave me. The whole team was inspiring and very productive.
Two years later, I began to get into trailer music after being convinced by a few close friends. After a huge amount of trial and error, I managed to get a couple of tracks into the industry. But still no cigar! Until a year later when my music was used in a small TV spot for Avengers: Age of Ultron. Ever since then, I’ve seen many theatrical campaigns use my music.
After usage of my music in the final trailer for the film Aquaman, I was approached by director Cooper Karl to score a film called ‘Sightless’. Using nothing but a portable setup, we would meet in multiple places to progress the score, whether at my studio or his. It came out a solid film and is now available to watch on Netflix.
In between all of this, I’d planted a musical seed of simply letting my soul create. This made me not only start creating solo artist music just for the enjoyment of it but also intrigued me to listen to many varieties of music that most in the orchestral music communities don’t promote as often, such as vocaloid, cumbia, folk-country, neo-soul, and many more. I guess the stream of consciousness I had after listening to all these genres culminated into a writing process that brought these worlds together. My track ‘Alive’ was not liked at first for its use of vocaloid, but then accepted. I realized that music, and life in general, can’t fall under labels and be 100% accurate. It is purely playful. So I created what my playful heart would want.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Not at all after 2019. I, unfortunately, had a bad eye surgery and constantly am experiencing shaking/earthquake effects. The four-year journey I had simply getting over these issues mentally is so profound that I am not even sure at this point where to begin with it. But now I am on a path to finding out ways to fix this. There was a point where I was writing music for Hollywood editors in a closet in a barrio in Mexico (and their pay was saving my life). But even that closet had beautiful memories of building acoustic panels and other treatment. So Yin-Yang, we need the roughness or we’d forget what’s smooth, yeah?
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I write music for myself, music for films, games, television and trailers. I specialize in music for visual media and my tracks have been used in the trailer campaigns for Aquaman, Avengers, Minions, Pete’s Dragon, Abominable, and The Way Back. People tell me I have a signature sound and that I produce music that is very identifiable as ‘Phil Lober’. I don’t hear this so much, I’m just writing as I see fit, so it helps when I listen to my fans and peers for knowing what sets me apart.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
I have great hope for new composers to have easier access to the art of composition. The business itself of composition however, is another story. I think AI will absolutely dominate unless we do something. There are already programs that generate melodies and chord progressions straight from a machine-learning neural network algorithm. Why would the soul seek this? I’m hoping for laws to be passed that regulate specifically melody generation via AI.
That being said, even the technology of today never ceases to surprise me, some VST libraries having 16 different mic positions to mix between and round robin, the process of sampling the same note multiple times so that it sounds slightly different every time you play it, in order to sound realistic.
I predict that the industry will become increasingly international. The internet is changing so many things and we are seeing an increasing number of composers from places we didn’t see them from before.
Contact Info:
- Website: musicofphil.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/musicofphil/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/philloberofficial
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phil-lober-0b8241194/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@phillober1632
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/lobrofficial
Image Credits
Yádin Verdoux
