Interviews
In Stonefly, looking at nature in microscale with a musical magnifying glass in his hand, he must have felt like a duck in water. There’s a very specific music coming from the grass and capturing that band with human instruments is a different pair of shoes. In the game we follow Annika Stonefly, a young and sometimes too optimistic inventor. We talk with Natureboy Flako. Not only about the game.
I was listening to all kinds of music growing up.
Chilean roots, growing up in Germany, living in England and in Germany again. I guess there have been many great artists’ recordings from different countries around you since your young age. What kind of music was mostly played in your family home?
I was exposed to an eclectic music collection in my family home. I was listening to all kinds of music growing up, spanning from lots of different latin american music, to jazz, to folk to soul to rock and other music harder to put in genre boxes.
I have to ask: why Natureboy Flako?
Flaco (Spanish, meaning slim guy) is one of my nicknames, which was mainly used within my family, so I ran with it. Only I changed the “c” to a “k” to avoid major mispronunciations. But it turns out there are a ton of people using “Flako” as their artist name, so I had to mainly change it to avoid confusion. I consider myself a spiritual person, but have no interest in religions. The one entity I consider my religion of some sort is Nature. Hence the name.
Your albums sound like fictional microworlds. Recently I’ve come across your interactive website for Theme For A Dream. Absolutely stunning and hypnotising! Are images inspirational for you when you work on sound?
Thank you! Those amazing animations were made by my dear friend 30000fps as well as the “Theme For A Dream” album website in collaboration with Cables and New Now. Yes, I find great inspiration in all kinds of visual stimulation, but it’s not my main source for inspiration either.
I really like your approach to the connectedness of everything and everyone. To the relation of one sound with another and how all things strive for a balance. Very useful in music. When you create, do you use meditation to put you in a right mood sometimes or maybe you consider recording itself as a form of meditation?
I don’t practice meditation as such, but I do zone in and out doing different things including music which could surely be considered a form of meditation.
With such a self-exploring way of making music, is it easy for you to find room for yourself when you collaborate with others? Especially when “the others” are game developers.
If you do let me do me, you’ll get the best and most interesting results. I can work within a frame of course, but need freedom within that frame to create something genuine. That was the case with the amazing team at Flight School. It was a great joy to work on the music for the Stonefly Game, as I was met with a lot of trust, which resulted in something really special.
With all the visual concepts for Stonefly and its plot that you needed to follow, was the making process much different to your regular one?
Every project and every piece of music is different and often requires different settings and approaches. But overall the most important thing is that I feel connected to whatever or whomever I work with on some level. It has to be real for me in order to be able to tap into my natural source of magic.
I would definitely love to get involved in scoring music for another game.
The Stonefly soundtrack was published on both streaming services with huge reach and vinyl for connoisseurs. Which release made you happier?
I tend to prefer something tangible, so a physical release on vinyl is always wonderful.
Would you welcome an offer of making music for another game? And if so, is there a video game genre you’d like to explore the most?
I’m always open to collaborate if I’m met with something interesting and people that are open to approach things differently. I would definitely love to get involved in scoring music for another game. Just like in music, I find all kinds of amazing things in different genres.
