Swiss Composers Michael Künstle and Matteo Pagamici Transform Orchestra Into Living Synthesizer on Dimensions

Transmission 230: Interview with Michael Künstle and Matteo Pagamici

Michael Künstle and Matteo Pagamici are a Swiss composer duo based in Zurich who have earned international recognition for their film and television scores. The pair met at the Zurich University of the Arts where both studied music for film, theatre and media, and began collaborating in 2020. They won the Golden Eye Award for Best International Film Music at the Zurich Film Festival.

Title: Dimensions
Artist: Matteo Pagamici Michael Künstle
Release Date: 2025-08-08
Genres: Avant-garde, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music
Label: self-released
Description: Swiss composers Michael Künstle and Matteo Pagamici discuss their orchestral debut Dimensions, recorded at Abbey Road and releasing in August 2025.

Their notable work includes scoring the Netflix series “New Heights” (2021-2024), the first Swiss series acquired by Netflix and released in 190 countries, and composing for the French-Swiss crime series “Hors Saison” (2022). They have also scored advertising campaigns including Etsy’s Super Bowl 2024 commercial and Samsung’s global Tokyo 2020 Olympics campaign.Their debut album “Dimensions” was recorded at Abbey Road Studios with a 92-piece orchestra and is set for release in August 2025.

What first led each of you toward making music? Was there a specific moment or experience that started everything?

[Michael Künstle] I started playing drums when I was very young, probably at age four or something. Later, when I was about eight or nine, my dad would make music with me. He played guitar and sang.

We would go every weekend to make some music together. That’s where I quickly discovered that you can write your own songs. You don’t have to play someone else’s music.

You can just do it by yourself. That’s the very first moment I acknowledged that you can compose music yourself. You can make it yourself.

That’s what drew me into it.

[Matteo Pagamici] I think for me it was quite similar. I started playing guitar really early, at around the age of six. At the same time, I also started writing music with my dad.

He was really into electronic music and had bought one of the first versions of Cubase. He was experimenting with synths and everything. So it happened in parallel—playing and composing music both felt like a natural process.

From the start, I was writing music and experimenting with sounds, getting really fascinated by it. If you start something like that so early in your childhood, it almost feels like learning your first language. It feels so natural.

How did the idea for Dimensions first come about? What drew you to the idea of working with a full orchestra rather than electronic instruments?

[Michael Künstle] Well, I think because both of us were working already with big ensembles, we’ve written scores for symphonic orchestras before and also for smaller ensembles. So we were always familiar with the symphonic scope of music. But I think the first spark that laid the groundwork for Dimensions was our first project together—a Netflix series (Neumatt), the first Swiss production picked up by Netflix and made available, I believe, in every country where the platform is accessible.

There, essentially, we wanted to explore something much smaller in scope. So we didn’t want to have an orchestra to work with. We wanted to find something much more modern than probably what we both worked with prior to this project.

It was connected to the story of the series, but also something that interested us in general. What we did was we had the idea to record acoustic instruments and alter them electronically, or the other way around—record electronic instruments and see what interesting sounds you can get out of them, and then have acoustic instruments imitate these synthesizers or things that only exist in the electronic world.

That was a very experimental spark of an idea back then. But with Dimensions, we sat together and asked ourselves, okay, is there something within an entirely acoustic setup that we can explore that is also part of our language already, of our mutual musical language? That is where we feel we can explore something musically.

I think we just dug deeper into these ideas—why don’t we let acoustic ensembles imitate the techniques that only exist in an electronic environment?

[Matteo Pagamici] As Michael already mentioned, our collaboration started with the Netflix series. I think one thing that really fascinates us both in music is just experimentation. Sometimes we’re in our studio for days and weeks and maybe even months, just lock ourselves in and experiment with sounds and try new techniques.

After a few years of working together, we had gathered this big repertoire of playing techniques for strings, but also for synths, for woodwinds. A lot of things were maybe a bit too abstract to use in film music or it wasn’t the right project to use them in. At some point we got the idea that we really have to make our own musical project, as opposed to just working for a film or a TV series or an advert, with all these musical ideas that we had collected throughout the years.

So, yeah, in a way, Dimensions is also the result of our very personal musical experimentation that we did throughout the years of working in film music together.

You recorded with a 92-piece orchestra at Abbey Road. Was there ever a moment during that session when the scale of it all hit you?

[Michael Künstle] No, it’s interesting. I think we’ve been five or six times at Abbey Road now for sessions. One time at Air Studios—that’s Hans Zimmer’s favourite studio—and always with smaller ensembles.

For me personally, the big session with the 92-piece orchestra was the first session where I wasn’t nervous at all. Surely it was because I’d gotten to know the environment and the people. You really feel comfortable there.

But it’s funny. With so many people, you don’t really see each individual as much as you do when you work with 10 or 20. You get to know everyone in the breaks, you talk with everyone, and sometimes it’s even more personal—and that can be more stressful.

With the big orchestra, it was very exciting, obviously. But it also wasn’t much different than with a smaller ensemble, because all the processes are the same. After so many sessions, you know what can go wrong, so you double and triple check everything.

For me, it was one of the most relaxing sessions, to be honest.

[Matteo Pagamici] I think when you record at places like Abbey Road with world-class musicians, you always have one moment where it really hits you. Even if you’ve been there many times and you’ve made a mock-up for your compositions and kind of know how the orchestra is going to sound, then they play the first note and you’re always blown away. I don’t think there’s a number of times you can do it where you get used to it.

It’s such a crazy moment where you feel the magic come alive in the room—so many musicians playing the same music together. I don’t think it’s something that can even be captured in the recording. It’s something you have to experience there, and it lets you understand the music in a very different way.

Suddenly it’s real. Before that, it was just in your head or inside your computer, and then the music is in the air. That’s so exciting.

How did you divide the roles while working together—was it clearly structured or more fluid?

[Michael Künstle] I think over the years we’ve managed to find several compositional steps—some where we work closely together, and others where everyone works on their own. With this project, similar to how we’d approach a movie or a series, we met and developed a concept we wanted to explore. A concept clear enough to know where to focus, but open enough to allow all the freedom we wanted to take with the music.

Once we discussed that and agreed on which directions to explore, each of us wrote five tracks. So each of us wrote five separate tracks, and then we recorded them. It’s like with the films we work on—something magical happens.

If someone knows us closely, they immediately know who wrote which piece. But if someone doesn’t know us at all, I think the whole album sounds like it was written by one hand. In every piece, there are the same core ideas explored in different ways. That’s something extremely interesting to me—taking the same idea Matteo takes and ending up with something quite different.

Then you hear the other person’s piece and think, wow, there are so many things we can explore within just a few conceptual ideas we defined at the beginning.

[Matteo Pagamici] I think the collaboration aspect is strongest in the planning—making the concept together, finding ideas and techniques that interest us both. We’re very thorough and precise with the process. We clearly define where the album should go musically and emotionally, and all the concepts with the playing techniques, and also the idea of using the orchestra like a synth.

After that planning phase, we could have written anything individually and it still would have worked for that concept, which is really amazing. So it’s more about agreeing and using the same language—and then anything is possible.

[Michael Künstle] With this project in particular, we showed each other the mock-ups or finished pieces and asked for notes. But I think this is one of the first projects where there was maybe one note total—like, maybe try to take the tempo a bit slower. Then you do that and think, yes, even better now.

That was interesting too—somehow we both could write something really personal, and when the other listens, it’s like, I have nothing to add. It’s all there.

“Freedom to Live” references a specific route from the Alps to the Mediterranean. How did that idea develop into music?

[Michael Künstle] Well, I think with most of the pieces, for me personally, it really drew from memories during the writing process. As mentioned before, the idea of freedom in writing was very important in this project. With series or movies, there’s always a clear set of what you can do. It’s interesting to try to push the boundaries there.

But this time, for the first time in a long while, we really had complete freedom to write. I tried to put a few stories or memories down—just as inspiration for where to go. But in the actual moment of writing, I also tried to forget about all of that and let the music speak for itself.

Once we had written and recorded the album, we took a step back and listened to the music. We let it rest for a while, to avoid being too close to it. Then we listened again and really pinned down: this music reflects this memory of mine, or this piece is still close to another idea I had while writing.

That was interesting, because how you perceive a piece of music can change over time. It was, for me, very interesting to take that step back and see what it evokes within me—what memories come back.

Were there any instruments in the orchestra that proved especially flexible or surprising when used in this way?

[Matteo Pagamici] We worked a lot with low woodwinds, which are not commonly used in music, like the bass saxophone. It was even hard to find players for it because it’s such a rare instrument. We had a lot of bass flutes too, because we really liked the textures. They added an unknown dimension—their sounds are unique but also have a strong presence in the orchestra. Especially the bass saxophone—you can hear it throughout the full ensemble.

Rather than specific instruments, I think it was really the way we used each one in a less traditional way. For example, a lot of air sounds from the woodwinds or multiphonics. For the strings, we used a lot of harmonics, aleatoric lines. Basically, we did everything we could to have each instrument do something it wouldn’t normally do.

I think it creates an effect where you hear the orchestra and think you know what it sounds like, but then something makes you wonder where the sound is coming from. Is it even part of the orchestra? Maybe you get the impression there’s a synth playing or something electronic—but it’s all purely acoustic.

[Michael Künstle] One of the edgiest instruments we used was the harp. We had two harps, but one of them was detuned by a quarter note. Same scale, but just a quarter note lower. The harpist hated us for it at first.

But during the session, it made sense. In a synth, you have different oscillators and you can tune them—so we thought, what happens if you do that with an instrument? With the harp, it was crazy. When we showed it to people before the release, there were moments where they’d ask, “What’s that instrument?” Some thought it was a steel drum. It was just a detuned harp—entirely in the quarter-tone realm—so you don’t recognize it as a harp at all.

That gave us a new possibility. Now we had our normal tuning and our quarter-tone tuning. For example, with the strings, we divided the violin one section into three: one subgroup played the note normally, another played it a quarter note lower with a different bowing technique—maybe sul ponticello for more brightness—and the third subgroup played it a quarter note higher, maybe sul tasto for a darker color.

That’s maybe the clearest explanation of how we treated the violin section in some ways like you’d program oscillators in a synthesizer. It was amazing—during the compositional process, you’d say, “That’s my setting.” You set your oscillators in the violin staves and then write melodies as you normally would.

The result was something where many people asked, “Is that a combination of electronic and acoustic music?” When we told them everything was acoustically recorded, they almost couldn’t believe it. These are techniques you know from electronic music—not from acoustic.

What are your plans after the release—will you continue working as a duo, or focus on separate projects?

[Michael Künstle] Definitely as a duo.

[Matteo Pagamici] Our film music work has always been as a duo for the past years, and it’s proven to be so efficient, creative, and just so much more fun than working alone. At the same time, we also have plans to write more music as a duo, just for ourselves, and create a second album with other techniques and ideas we’ve discovered in the meantime.

When will it be out?

[Matteo Pagamici] That’s all still…

[Michael Künstle] We still have Variety first, but hopefully soon.

Photo courtesy of Michael Künstle & Matteo Pagamici

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others