Beirut, the folk pop project of Zach Condon, just released his latest record, A Study of Losses, via Pompeii Records. With 18 tracks — seven of which are just strings-based interludes that serve as bridges between songs — and nearly an hour of runtime, this is his longest musical project yet.

It's also the beginning of a new venture for the artist. His latest record found him collaborating with the Kompani Giraf, a circus based in Sweden, and composing a score based on Judith Schalansky's book An Inventory of Losses (Verzeichnis einiger Verluste in the original German). After seeing a live performance and meeting the circus's artistic director Viktoria Dalborg, Condon dove into the world of Renaissance music, medieval folk tradition, and the Scientific Revolution to build the sonic world of A Study of Losses. The one-act performance premiered on September 10, 2024, and now Condon is working on rearranging some pieces for a brief tour.

Like the book, Condon aimed to capture the episodic element of its chapters — which tackle different "losses" the world experienced by switching tone, style, voice, and subject matter — through music, changing tempo, instrumentation, and mood throughout. Yet, it's not a disjointed record; unified by the lunar "Mare" strings interludes, as well as the demands of live performance, A Study Of Losses attempts to sew these different mini-stories together, focusing on the grander themes of loss, uncertainty, and curiosity about the world around us.

Last week, I sat down with Condon to discuss the writing and production of his new record. We discussed A Study Of Losses, his collaboration with strings players and the Kompani Giraff, our shared enthusiasm for history, and the importance of accepting our impermanence.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Victoria @ TND: When A Study of Losses comes out, it’s going to start existing in three different formats. There's the original purpose of the circus performance, then there's the record, and then some of the songs will be adapted for the live show that you're going to be doing in a couple of months. How do you see A Study of Losses in these three different versions of it, considering the kind of experiences that different audiences will have while listening to it?

Zach Condon: I went into submarine mode when I made the record, if I'm being honest. I had seen the performance of the Kompani Giraf’s previous show, so I knew what it looked and felt like in a theater. I vaguely had that in mind. That changed some things, but I would actually say that, all in all, I did what I always do. When I start writing on a record, it's like the world disappears, everything disappears. It wasn't like this superconscious, ‘Okay, it's going to look like this; it's going to look like that. It's going to be this multimedia interdisciplinary art.’ I wasn't thinking so art student-y about it. I was very much a guy in a studio making this record.

However, knowing how it would be seen did change certain approaches, and if anything, I found it kind of liberating. For example, I've noticed a trend that all modern music, that has been for years — maybe decades — taking something beautiful and destroying it a little bit… or a lot. If something very pretty comes out, they squash it. I've even done it myself a few times before. For this record, I thought: why would you cut the wings off a beautiful melody, or a beautiful movement in music, instead of just letting it soar? Because if it's a theatre piece — the circus they do is, at least to me, almost more like a theatre thing — don't clip its wings. Let it be what it's going to be; bring it out, let it go, and just let it loose in that way. And if it feels sentimental or too much, just let it be.

So, there was a lot of that when I thought about it. As for the concerts, I never even really pictured it. I agreed to do them after I played three shows in Berlin last year, but I didn't even think like, ‘Oh, that's going to be when the album is coming out!’ It was very much just like, ‘Okay, this is all happening at once now.’

Do you think that the performance piece, the theatricality of the score itself, and necessity for movement to be performed in a theater informed the composition of the score in any way?

Not as much as you might think. In some ways, the influences were very subtle. For example, my last record [Hadsel] was very pounding modular drums, repetitious, very frenetic, and just like, a wall of sound. It was off, and then on, and then off. With this one, I had to lay back. It's not going to work with people moving if it's all just a fire hose of sound, drums, and energy. So, I really, really held back. I actually found certain songs to be very minimal: like, just a few instruments and my voice. And then I relied on these old tropes of mine — I mean, I call them tropes because I used to be almost pigeonholed and made fun of for them. Things like using a lot of waltz tempos and a lot of old-fashioned-sounding ballroom, this and that. Honestly, I think that in some ways, I got a little burnt out by people associating me with that stuff. But with A Study of Losses, I just went into it unashamed. I didn't hold back and just let it happen that way. I was picturing what the show would look like based on what I had seen before, but it wasn't like I had a notebook in front of me that made sure I was “following rules.” It was more abstract than that. 

With pieces like “Villa Sacchetti”, where it is just the strings and your voice with this Renaissance-era feeling underlying it, I wanted to know more about the historical musical influences for the music, especially when a lot of the subject matter that you drew the titles from have to do with that time period.

For the last two years, I've been on an incredible educational journey. I know I'm a high school dropout anyway, but the education we get in the States for classical literature, art, music, and stuff like that is pretty poor. Being in Europe, I often felt like people's standards of their reference points in life — the way they view philosophy and the world — was already a step ahead of where I come from as like, an uneducated American in that way. But [my recent education] is not because of that; I just found that interesting. It actually started when I was in Norway, and I was playing the church organ on the last record a lot. I'm here in this church playing this somewhat ancient instrument. I mean, that specific instrument is new, but church organs are very, very ancient. I wanted to know more about how they were used musically because modern examples are basically either whatever that overkill Phantom of the Opera-style is, or this kind of rock opera, wall of sound. It's just not very subtle or interesting. So, I was like, ‘How do people use [the organ]? Where does it come from? What were the styles played on it?’ In doing some research on that, I ended up going down this rabbit hole of medieval and baroque music because that was when that instrument…became kind of popular.

My interest then went from that into lute music, and then into general music from that era. I got caught by it. Like, it was almost exactly in the same way when I was a teenager, went out here for the first time, and started hearing some of the Balkan brass music. The floodgates just opened. You go into the world and learn as much as you can, and then it all gets filtered out through your own personal thing. I would never claim to be the real thing, so to speak, but the feeling is genuine, and it was so in my head that everything I did started coming out like that. But yeah, that was very much meant to be a nod to baroque music.

What's interesting about that historical period of music is that they were played in these intimate spaces as well. They were played [for select audiences] in the courts. Your record is minimal, and the subject matter about loss and impermanence has this vulnerable quality to it. So even though this is meant to be played on a big stage, how have you kept yourself to this intimate sound for the record?

Well, that's going to be the struggle. The truth is that I've only made certain preparations with arrangements for the live shows in my head. I've written notes out for the band, and I've showed people their parts and different instruments, but to be honest, I don't know for sure.

When I was growing up, I didn't go to concerts very often — very rarely, in fact. Usually in Santa Fe, there were only punk and rock shows, and I was never super interested in those. I was more there to see friends. So growing up, I thought of concerts as a lost art; I didn’t get it. Though I saw Modest Mouse when they came through town, because every once in a while, someone would come to Albuquerque, and I remembered thinking it wasn't bad. I enjoyed hearing the songs I liked so much. But, I also remember feeling like it sounded like the record being played loudly over the stereo, over those big speakers. When I started doing concerts myself, I started becoming an extreme stickler for acoustic instruments live. We will include a synthesizer because that's a whole other world of instruments that I love, but nonetheless, it's like I've always been like, upright bass if we can cut it. A real piano if we can cut it.

The only concerts I loved when I was a kid were either listening to the Mariachi bands play on stage with their big acoustic instruments, or classical music that we sometimes would go see, or a jazz concert. Those are the only ones that moved me, and I think it was because real instruments have so much tonal quality and attraction. I think everyone feels without knowing it in some ways that it's more attractive and interesting. Like, the human voice is so attractive because there's a complicated organic quality to it. That’s a lot of things to say that essentially, I'm trying to keep it extremely acoustic. When I was laying out the arrangements for some of this stuff, my band was asking, “Oh, can we sample that and play it? Or can we run a drum machine for that?” And I was just like, "No, no. We've never done that, and I'll never do that." I can't do it, I'm sorry! If I have to for some weird reason, maybe… but I can't imagine why.

I wanted to talk about the purely instrumental tracks — specifically, the “Mare” interludes, in which you have these beautiful strings arrangements — as well as your thought process of giving them their own narrative arc.

Originally, A Study of Losses was supposed to be just the chapters of the book. Although, you might notice that some of them are not the same as the book chapter titles, which is a longer story of its own, but essentially boils down to playing a game of telephone with Kompani Giraf. I was traveling while I was doing this; I was going back and forth between Norway and here. For some of the chapters, they were giving me these summaries, and I would read them and go, ‘Oh, okay, interesting!’ So, for example, I thought there was a title “Garbo's Face", but the Kompani was just mentioning that as one of the things that came to their mind when they thought of lost things on a certain subject.

A Study of Losses was going to be eleven songs; there were eleven chapters in the book. I had all these sketches that were not finished, but I felt great with the eleven songs. The director Viktoria Dalborg then asked me, “Could you rearrange some of the songs instrumentally so that it takes more time?” The eleven songs came out to about 45 minutes, but they wanted to do a performance for an hour and 15, maybe an hour and 20, and they needed more space in between them. And I said, ‘Well, instead of just rearranging things, why don't I just give you all this other instrumental material as these interludes between everything that ties the scenery together?’ She thought that was a great idea and was excited that I would be eager to do that.

I wrote a theme from a song based on a chapter in the book. (It's not called “The Moonwalker”, that was my own mistranslation of it. I forget what the original title is called.) It's about a guy who goes to the moon and archives everything that is lost on Earth. It’s a story that I quite related to because he eventually loses his life while he's up there, trying to archive everything. He realizes at some point it's all gone. For a guy like me, who's spent most of his life just being a complete night owl and often alone until four or five in the morning until I could sleep as a teenager writing music, staring at the moon all night, I could see why this is the realm of the poets. This interlude about journeying to the moon and back is exactly what should be the topic, and it should be interspersed between all the chapters. The guy in the story also travels across the lunar seas, so that’s where I got the titles. I found them in an old map where an Italian astronomer from the 1600s named them. And actually, it's really interesting because one side of the Moon he named after really rough things because sailors told him the worst weather occurred during the phase where that side of the moon is visible (“sea of storms,” “sea of rain,” “sea of clouds,” etc.). The other side brought better weather, at least according to the sailors, so the astronomer named those seas things like “sea of serenity,” “sea of tranquility,” and “sea of dreams.”

I really wanted Clarice Jensen to be part of this. I knew from the music I wrote for the rest of the record that it would already be a good fit, but when I started doing the instrumentals, I thought there was no better way to replace the voice than with strings. They can tell the story without words. Clarice, Yuki Numata Resnick, and Ben Russell had joined me before for No, No, No (2015). I had worked somewhat with strings before here and there, but in the studio listening to them play together as a trio, I realized why they're some of the most sought-after string players in the world. After that, I kept in contact with Clarice.

That fits in very well with the theme of this record and what A Study of Losses is about: human history, the quest for knowledge, and what stays and what eventually gets taken away either through force or through time.

What's the point of any of it if it all just turns to dust eventually, you know? I've spent my whole life kind of struggling with that thought.

Yeah, absolutely. The book itself is very disjointed in a way: there are the quirky topics like the still-existing Guericke’s Unicorn, but then there's also the Tuanaki Atoll, which disappeared tragically. How have these stories and your educational journey while making this record shifted your perspective on the quest for knowledge, for art and creativity, if it all, as you said, eventually turns to dust anyway?

As a kid, I had such an existential issue with that. Part of my insomnia was sitting around on my own and trying to figure that out as if there was an answer. I like that the book never tries to dig that deep in some ways; Judith Schalansky is brilliant with that. She digs so deeply on random thoughts, but then she'll avoid these land mine questions because she knows as well as anyone that it doesn’t seem like there's an answer. I became hungrier after all this. I have spent so much time since then nonstop just digging into all the architecture, art, and history that I've lost and/or never even knew about. What I've noticed is that the more I learned, the more I appreciate everything.

Like I said, I was up in Norway with this church organ. I'd come home from the church organ, looked up who built it, then ask where the first church organ was from. Little bit by little bit, it became this absolute flood, and now it's to this point where I feel like I'm turning into an archivist or something. But the truth is my appreciation for the world and the works of man and the societies that I'm a part of has just grown exponentially in the process. So even if things fall away and crumble, for whatever reason, I find myself immune to that despair that I used to have about everything disappearing.

I’m also not asking, 'Well, what does it mean?' so intensely. Because 100 years from now, my records will disappear — so why am I making them? Eventually, the Earth will be swallowed by the Sun, so why is anyone trying anything at all? Shouldn't we all just be… I don’t know… shooting heroin and having orgies or something like that? What's the point? I find that the more I research, the more I grow, and the more I appreciate, the less I ask these questions. 

I keep going back to “Guericke’s Unicorn” because it's both a standout on the record due to its use of modular synth, and it has more lighthearted lyrics just asking, “Why is it still here?” To me, those instances of the things that stay, especially when they’re evidence of embarrassing moments in our quest for knowledge, encourage us to learn more. Without that unicorn, people wouldn't have eventually discovered that A) unicorns aren't real and B) they definitely didn't look like that.

Right, they’re just the bones of animals that are just as weird, if not weirder, than a unicorn. Yeah, that is a funny one. I found it a good metaphor for the whole project of Beirut, which is digging up the bones of old folk music and such things that are forgotten, ignored, or maybe had bad reputations, and then asking what I could make out of it. It doesn't look anything like the original, and it wasn't even supposed to, at least in in my case, but it now has a presence of his own, I guess. I hope!

But that’s also how folk music lives on — how knowledge of history passes on. Even if it isn't in its original form, it's still preserved in some ways.

I think it was Picasso who said, “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” The more I look into stuff, the more I realize that even my heroes did it. I used to think that they must have pulled this magic out of thin air, and now I realize that they cobbled together influences just like I'm doing, just like everyone has done. And I appreciate that; I love that! So, yeah, you're right. It’s like DNA that exists way down the line. Like, people may not know it, but something in my musical DNA is doo-wop and Motown because that's what I grew up listening to. I hear it very loudly, even if others don't. So yeah, it’s like we musicians are all spreading the word.

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