Matthew Florianz

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Funicular Prism
by Matthew Florianz

Walking Along the Outlines
Matthew Florianz explores memory, sound design,
and the discovery of music through intuition

For more than a quarter century, Dutch ambient composer Matthew Florianz has quietly cultivated a body of work that explores the intersection of memory, imagination, sound design, and storytelling. From his earliest recordings under the Liquid Morphine moniker through a long series of releases under his own name, Florianz has approached ambient music not simply as a collection of songs, but as environments to inhabit and experiences to explore. His music often blurs the line between the physical and the imagined, inviting listeners to find their own narratives within carefully constructed sonic landscapes.

His latest album, Funicular Prism, may be one of his most personal works to date. What began as a response to a period of upheaval and change gradually evolved into something far more reflective—a meditation on perspective, transformation, and the way time reshapes our understanding of both memories and emotions. Throughout its development, Florianz repeatedly revisited, dismantled, and rebuilt the material until the album revealed its true identity, a process that mirrors many of the themes explored within the music itself.

In the following conversation, Matthew discusses the evolution of his creative process, the influence of game audio on his work, the role of randomness and intuition in composition, and his ongoing fascination with sound as a vehicle for imagination. Along the way, he offers thoughtful insights into ambient music, listening, storytelling, and the challenge of knowing when a piece of music is truly finished. The result is a fascinating look inside the mind of an artist who continues to discover new paths by, as he describes it, "walking along the outlines" of the unknown.

By the mid-nineties, computers and instruments allowed me to return to recoding. Inspiration was drawn from the Future Sound of London and Brian Eno, as they conjured up strong imagery in their own unique ways. Eno’s The Shutov Assembly creates a still, immersive space to explore, while FSOL’s Lifeforms uses dense sound design and musical transitions to tell a story. One is an abstract narrative, the other a concrete narrative and both became foundations of my early work. In your editorial on on this website you write that “At Ambient Visions, the focus has never shifted away from the music. If anything, it has become more intentional.” and I feel that applies directly to how my focus changed from listening to creating.

Initially, I recreated music I had heard elsewhere. Because it was reflective in nature, I felt it required a pseudonym, which is how Liquid Morphine originated. I spent six years experimenting, refining, and creating seven releases. The first CD run of GrijsGebied (2001) was released as Liquid Morphine, while the second appeared under my own name.

GrijsGebied brought years of learning and development together. It was no longer a recreation of the work that had inspired me, but my own response to it. That felt like the right moment to move from Liquid Morphine to my own name.

The DNA of that pseudonym is still present. I continue to explore how music and sound design can flow together into a dreamlike state, and that early realization that sound can support a visual experience—even an imaginary one—remains central to my soundscapes. If music can spark a listener's imagination, then I've accomplished what I set out to do.

AV:  In the late '90s and early 2000s, you were part of a vibrant Dutch electronic scene. How did that environment shape your sense of space and atmosphere in music?

I also still work with my friend and fellow musician Mindspawn, who contributes as either an engineer or a creative partner.

It all grew organically alongside our ability to harnessonline distribution and communication.

Being exposed to those interweaving styles and to live performance improved my skills and deepened my appreciation for intuitive, improvised storytelling. It literally took me out of the predictable home studio environment and MIDI grid and into a less predictable creative space.

My music production slowed down and became more introspective. GrijsGebied captures that period, bringing together various collaborations alongside a more diverse palette of sounds. I started viewing field recordings as an imaginary visual layer, adding narrative to the soundscapes.

AV:  You've described your albums as "environments" rather than songs. When you revisited Tauern in 2015 and removed rhythmic elements, what did that reveal to you about the role of rhythm in your work?

MF:  Tauern marks the period between releasing Maalbeek (2008) and Koude Handen (2010). To avoid creative inertia, injecting rhythm was a deliberate attempt to disconnect from Maalbeek, though to be honest, it felt a little forced.

While the rhythm gave Tauern an interesting sonic direction to explore, the underlying narrative wasn't evolving. I was layering field recordings and minimal tonal progressions with a steady beat on top, and it felt like adding salt to a basic meal. It wasn't pushing beyond what GrijsGebied, Three, Niemandsland, and Maalbeek had already achieved, so I moved on and created Koude Handen.

When I later joined Bandcamp, I revisited my unreleased albums. This time I heard a completely different Tauern, especially in the arpeggiated and looped sequences. The repetitive patterns underneath the drum rhythms were beautiful and hypnotic. Removing the drums revealed an exploratory album hidden beneath the version I had originally grown bored with.

More broadly, it taught me that experimentation is best performed on oneself rather than on an audience. Had I released the original version, I'm not sure it would have outgrown the experiment. Time allowed me to hear it differently.

I've trusted that principle ever since: if in doubt, trust that a piece is not yet the best version it can be—or move on to something else.

MF:  Absolutely, and the reverse is also true.

Game audio is created in a very similar way to building a soundscape from layers. Where it diverges is in how those layers progress. A linear piece of music is bound by the passing of time and always unfolds in the same way. We can play with perception and emotion, but it always requires a listener's attention and imagination. When that attention wanes, the music continues regardless.

In games, direct player input is crucial. If the player doesn't interact, the game doesn't advance. Game audio must support that concept and, by extension, the player. Unlike a linear composition, the layers of game audio do not all move forward together. Instead, live game data modulates the relationships between them, and part of my role as an audio designer is finding the right data to shape the soundscape as a whole.

That unpredictability is a core tenet of game development. After all, chess pieces can't move themselves.

In that sense, there is a clear overlap between my ambient music and my daily work as a game sound designer. Both rely on creating a ruleset—intuitive in my own work, data-driven in game development—where elements wait for the right moment to shift.

I translate Eno’s famous idea, that ambient music should be able to resolve itself within a listening space, while revealing greater depth under closer inspection as allowing for listeners perspective. Is is also why I’m drawn to intuitive working and adopting processes that invite randomness. 

Since working in game audio, I have relied much more heavily on sound design, modulation, and post-processing. Those tools introduce unpredictability into both the creation and the flow of my music.

MF:  Literally, yes, I think so.

My music doesn't need to reach an audience or pay the bills, whereas commercial work ideally aligns with player expectations. In game development, it isn't effective to spend energy on parts of a game that players never interact with. Audio is more targeted and supports what the player needs to hear in order to move forward.

My own work doesn't need to support a game narrative because I can listen to a piece and allow it to change my mind about where it should go next. There is that intuition again.

In a figurative sense, if it were a fully conscious decision, it would be somewhat at odds with an intuitive workflow. What I enjoy most is the process of making music itself, and that process is certainly unhurried—much more so than on my earliest releases, when I felt pressure to work toward a finished album.

A breakdown, however, is a purely technical explanation. It can exist alongside a listener's interpretation because it doesn't attempt to add descriptive meaning to the music. On that particular track, without the processing, the sounds were thin and static. The modulation, effects, post-processing, and mixing are what gave the drones and raw noises their sense of depth and scale. I found that contrast so profound—that so much of the "world" exists in the mix itself—that I wanted to share how it was achieved.

I choose a breakdown because music is difficult to discuss; we lack precise words to describe sound. A technical explanation allows me to share my process without interfering with the listening experience. As long as the music has something to say beyond the technical presentation—and I hope it does—I don't think it shapes the listener's experience beyond encouraging deeper listening and personal interpretation.

There is also a broader reason. The barriers to creating and sharing music have never been lower. A breakdown demonstrates the thought and effort behind the work. It offers an alternative to the idea that ambient music happens accidentally, through presets, prompt engineering, or simply acquiring gear. The tools may be more accessible than ever, but creating meaningful music still requires intention and effort, and I think most listeners recognize that.

MF:  That is an interesting observation, and I like how you describe it as a physical history.

It implies friction—electrical impulses traveling through resistant wires, surrounded by electromagnetic disturbances that influence those signals in unpredictable ways. It suggests that things beyond my direct control are possible. Perhaps it is another example of inviting randomness into the process.

For the longest time, I have been the primary audience for my own work, and the possibility of stumbling into unexpected combinations has always excited me. It is also what drew me to live recording, because it always involves some element beyond your control.

On Molenstraat (2000), which I recorded with Erik t' Sas—someone who had a significant influence on my work—the balcony microphone picked up sounds from the city: a bicycle bell, a child, passing cars, all gradually fading into the distant hum of the night. These were sounds we could never have predicted, yet they reflected back on our playing. Even the way fatigue slowed our attention and movement affected the timing.

Playing live introduces randomness. Analogue gear feels beautifully imprecise, and radio signals exist entirely in the moment, much like the sounds captured by that balcony microphone. In the studio, I have developed processes that interact with hardware to recreate some of that unpredictability.

I associate digital tools with precision and repeatability. That isn't a criticism—it simply means I find them harder to have a conversation with creatively. Working digitally can feel like looking into a mirror, while working with analogue gear is more like trying to make out a reflection in a puddle of water. Some of that may be imagined, but I genuinely feel more capable of surprising myself when the sound itself contains an element of unpredictability. It works particularly well for exploratory and landscape-like music.

MF:  Besides synthesizer music, I listened extensively to film scores from the seventies and eighties, so the "Golden Age" is perhaps best understood as the music of my formative years.

Film music from that era is rich in orchestration, dramatic writing, leitmotifs, and sometimes even a degree of emotional manipulation. It wasn't only the synthesizer music that captivated me, but scores such as The Empire Strikes Back, Conan, Krull, The Abyss, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

By the 1990s, after hearing hundreds of soundtracks, I could never have hoped to follow the same orchestral path. However, access to synthesizers and effects allowed me to pursue a different form of visual storytelling.

Lifeforms by The Future Sound of London is part sound design and part musical narrative. It possesses a grainy, organic quality that allows the listener to explore a place that doesn't really exist. It feels expansive and cinematic, which is why it resonated so strongly with me.

It opened my eyes to the idea that I didn't need a symphony orchestra to create a deep sense of narrative.

It is also another example of how game audio and ambient music overlap in my work. Games are patched and updated in response to player behavior. Bandcamp similarly allows retrospective changes. Over time, the album can become something entirely different from what it was at the start.

AV:  Your earlier work often felt grounded in the physical world, while more recent releases lean toward the abstract or cosmic. Do you see that as a shift in direction, or just a different way of exploring the same ideas?

MF:  Yes, to such an extent that, at first, Funicular Prism actually broke the concept of listening for me.

I pushed too far into sound design and became overly focused on presenting sound rather than inviting exploration. As I've mentioned before, I think this kind of music works in two ways: it either creates a space for listeners to wander through, or it guides them on a journey. By concentrating too heavily on technical processes and noise, I felt I had lost both the sense of space and the sense of progression.

My earlier work was also more grounded in the physical world because I had limited equipment and relied heavily on field recordings, something I have done less frequently in recent years.

So yes, it is a shift, but not an intentional move in a different creative direction. I am quite comfortable where I am creatively.

AV:  The title Funicular Prism suggests both motion and refraction. How do those ideas translate into the structure and movement of the album?

MF:  That's right. A funicular describes vertical movement, while a prism refracts light into its component parts.

I spent a long time trying to get these recordings to work. The earlier versions lacked the layering that rewards deep listening. The textures were there, and I liked how they washed over me, but they kept eluding a narrative. I was getting lost in the sound design. The listening experience wasn't taking me on enough of a journey; it was simply passing by. The music sounded raw and somewhat abrasive.

To infuse movement and create a narrative, something more was required. I added a tonal layer that rises from beneath the existing textures, and bring a sense of calm and warmth. It creates narrative that shifts away from the gritty sound-design into a new environmental state.

During a later listening session, when the album was finally beginning to come together, I thought of the funicular in Budapest. As I get closer to finishing an album, titles tend to reveal themselves. They don't always make immediate logical sense, but this one fit the idea of musical elements being transported above the more chaotic textures.

Whether that connection was entirely random or purely associative hardly matters. Embracing it immediately sparked ideas for the cover art and the imagery of holding light in my hands. Right after that listening session, I went into the kitchen and started photographing the cover.

If the original recordings reflected the period in which they were created, then the finished album reflects upon that period and ultimately tells a more interesting story.

MF:  In a cinema, all the senses are engaged, and sound in particular transforms the space. A surround mix fills the room and allows you to drift into the imagery between the screen and your seat.

The problem is that surround sound has never been fully standardized for music. Bandcamp only accepts stereo recordings, and sharing surround files remains complicated. Spatial audio formats such as Atmos attempt to solve that problem, but because I've always listened through a true physical surround setup, virtual spatial systems don't really work for my ears. I've heard soundbars that can project sound convincingly into a room, but spatial audio on headphones simply doesn't translate well for me.

I once mixed A River Buried in Sand in quadrophonic and was very happy with the result. When I rendered it to an atmos mix, however, it no longer worked for me. I kept hearing the processing itself rather than the positioning. I couldn't reliably tell whether the mix was good or not.

What it ultimately comes down to is that stereo remains the most accessible format. Within a standard stereo recording, you can still create an enormous sense of space, and that generally translates well to both speakers and headphones without requiring specialized equipment.

When it works, the sound seems to move beyond the speakers and fold around the listener. I find that beautiful because it is such a pure illusion. On this album, I focused heavily on wrapping the layers of textural music around the warmer tonal passages and allowing them to pass through one another.

I am also aware that dedicated speaker listening is becoming less common, while headphones are increasingly becoming the primary way people experience music. There is still more for me to explore there.

MF:  It was the addition of a tonal layer that allowed the recordings to elevate themselves, so in a sense, the analogy of breaking the tracks and adding component colours, fits the process that was applied. the track Searchlight in particular carries a sense of urgency and restlessness, while moments of warmth emerge in between. The tension briefly escapes, almost like a sudden daydream. That calm sounds like mountains to me, perhaps because of associations with my carefree childhood in Austria.

At one point I wondered whether the track was my own attempt at time travel—shedding the layers and protective masks accumulated through adulthood. Even the shape of the music feels like mountain peaks to me. Of course, that is a personal association and not necessarily something anyone else will hear.

Because the recordings originated during an uncertain period, the music reflects that era through abstraction. Letting time pass and allowing imagination to move beyond it became a recurring thread throughout the album. By the end, the music enters a more purely fictional space. Reality, captured in the earlier sound design and textures, gradually gives way to fantasy.

That progression is reflected in the titles as well. Dead Tree at the Starlight Interpass feels much more fictional than many of the titles that precede it.

I didn't fully recognize those connections while making the album. They became apparent only afterward, once everything had come together. It isn't intended as an album about chaos, nor is it meant as a direct reflection of current events. Rather, it represents my observations of a particular period in life. The creative process became a notebook for those observations.

MF:  I still remember the moment precisely. I was standing in front of the refrigerator trying to find something to eat. A completely ordinary moment.

The banality of it made me realize that I had moved beyond a difficult period in my life. I wasn't thinking about it anymore. I wasn't thinking with it anymore. The realization felt like the inverse of a smell that suddenly takes you back to the past. Instead, it brought me forward.

I remembered how liberating it felt not to worry all the time.

That realization connected with something the Dutch artist Tearsong once wrote about my music: sometimes you only recognize a new layer after the old one has completely disappeared. The musical identity I was searching for had been missing because there was nothing grounding the sound design. The new layer emerged in a way that highlighted not only itself, but also the absence of what had come before.

You can gradually become accustomed to a situation, and only when you stop thinking about it do you realize how long it has been affecting you.

That insight allowed me to step away from the sound design and reconnect with the music itself. Within a few days, I had the first transition in place, and the abrasive textures began dissolving into a warmer tonal progression.

It's not necessarily better, but it offers a fresh perspective.

I once read that film editors working with physical film would occasionally view scenes in reverse to disconnect the images from the timeline. The goal was similar: to see familiar material in an unfamiliar way.

We inevitably become accustomed to our own work, and that often pushes us toward subtlety. The danger is that what feels obvious to the creator may no longer be obvious to a first-time listener.

That is partly why every album develops its own listening ritual. During Mist Schimmen, I often listened while running outdoors wearing oversized Beyerdynamic DT 770 headphones. During Los (2011), I took the album on cycling trips from The Hague to Hoek van Holland. Self (2003) was listened to almost exclusively in the middle of the night when everything was silent.

Each album develops through a different listening environment. For Funicular Prism, one of those reference points became listening through speakers with an unconventional tweeter placement. It may not be as dramatic as a bicycle ride across the Dutch countryside, but it served the same purpose: hearing the music from a new perspective.

MF:  Oh, absolutely. It's the reason the title hints at both movement (Funicular) and the separation of layers (Prism).

I struggled with this album for quite some time. What I initially wanted to convey was a reaction to turbulent circumstances. There were changes at work, we had moved to a small village, and my son was growing up so quickly that every six months seemed to bring a completely new phase. The music began as a response to change, and perhaps as a way of processing a personal crisis.

Sometimes that kind of direct reaction can lead to powerful creative statements. In this case, however, I felt something was missing. Because those emotions were still raw, the music resonated strongly with my own state of mind. But when sharing instrumental music with others—especially music without lyrics to provide context—I feel there must be more than a reflection. A reflection is different for everyone. The story risks being lost if it relies entirely on being understood rather than being told.

As time passed, I became less burdened by those earlier events, and the disconnect became obvious. In a sense, the album had trapped me inside a moment that no longer fully existed. It had become a memory, and memories have a way of coloring everything around them.

Once I recognized that, I could listen with fresh ears.

I began cutting into the middle of each track and creating spaces that needed to be filled. It was surprisingly liberating. It quite literally cut me loose from those memories and allowed me to place something new between them. The result became a reflection upon a reflection—an echo in time.

I even returned to the earliest versions of the recordings and undid work that had clearly taken them in the wrong direction. The new material created a tension between the older and newer layers. More importantly, it created relief from the tension of the more chaotic passages. That contrast finally began to tell a story.

MF:  Originally, there was a sense of restlessness in the album. At times it is deliberately difficult to listen to, something you have to work your way through. Then the middle sections arrive, pointing toward a lighter place with more color and less turbulence.

For me, it expresses the moment when you realize that who you were and who you are today, while sharing the same origin, may no longer embrace one another quite so closely. I find that contrast to be an incredibly fertile place for ideas and, by extension, for listening.

My working titles are often much closer to the feelings I associate with a piece. The title track, Funicular Prism, was originally called "Later That Same Evening." It has a subtle science-fiction quality to it and reminded me slightly of Michael Stearns' Encounters. Later that evening, something strange happened—something along those lines.

Blistering Dusk was originally called Onder een Groene Bank ("Under a Green Sofa"), a direct reference to my grandmother's green velour sofa that sat beneath a large wind-up clock. As a child, I would often fall asleep there and wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of that clock. There is a ticking sound in the track that captures something of that transition between dreaming and waking.

For me, that piece is tied to a very specific place and memory. For the listener, who has never slept on that sofa (I suspect) , that association holds no meaning.

Out of all my releases, this album probably describes an imaginary space the least. It is much more about a feeling: the realization that emotions can completely consume you, and that sometimes only time allows you to see beyond them. Once that happens, and you finally let go, there can be a sense of peace and freedom. That is ultimately the optimistic message I hear in the final third of the album.

MF:  The honest answer is: not very much.

For someone from a direct culture like the Dutch, that may sound a little abrupt, but it's true.

I haven't performed live in quite some time. I simply no longer have the mindset for it, and because of that I'm no longer part of the circles and environments where those opportunities arise. Playing live was always a valuable way to refine material. Through repetition, I became familiar with a piece, experimented with timing and phrasing, and learned how audiences responded.

In a live setting, you pay attention to concentration levels. You can feel when a section drags or when something needs greater emphasis.

Sharing the creative process through projects like Untenable Prognostications or the early versions of Blistering Dusk is not as immediate, but it still invites participation. It allows listeners to react to something tangible. Most people find it easier to respond to a tangible difference than to an abstract work presented as a finished whole.

MF:  That has to be the synthesizer that appears on virtually all of my albums: the Korg 05R/W, which I bought in 1995 from Maarten van Welzen while living in Sittard.

When I realized that Funicular Prism wasn't working because it lacked movement, and I decided to introduce those warmer tonal layers, I immediately reached for sounds I had been using for decades. The idea of blending sound design with tonal progression isn't new, it’s as old as ambient music itself, and because I know that Korg module so intimately, it felt like the naturalplace to begin.

Of course, there is a degree of self-fulfilling prophecy in returning to familiar tools, but in this case it worked.

The album also features the analogue Korg Prologue alongside a digital ASM Hydrasynth equipped with polyphonic aftertouch. That keyboard can sense the pressure of individual fingers and use that information to modulate specific notes or parameters. The resulting instability appeals greatly to me, which probably won't surprise readers by now.

Dead Tree at the Starlight Interpass is primarily Hydrasynth, while Searchlight relies heavily on the Korg Prologue and an RD-909.

Among my collection of instruments, the analogue synthesizers tend to sound grainier and more textured, which made them particularly suitable for the album's warmer passages.

MF:  In other words, are we looking backward or forward?

Finishing an album feels double, as we say in Dutch. I am truly finished with Funicular Prism. I listened to it one final time before pressing release on Bandcamp, and that will probably be the last time I hear it for quite a while.

There is nothing more I can do to improve it. At this point, changes would simply make it different rather than better.

Every track has gone through countless iterations. Often I took a few steps backward because I had polished away the very rough edges that made a piece interesting in the first place. Finding an album's resting position involves sequencing, track lengths, titles, visuals, mastering, and the final mix. Everything remains in motion until it is finally anchored in place.

Yet arriving at that point also highlights one of the curses of modern digital workflows: every previous version remains available.

Up until Maalbeek, my albums were assembled through destructive editing. Changes were committed permanently. Once a file was saved, there was no easy way back. The work accumulated like watercolor absorbed into paper rather than layers stacked on top of one another.

Working without predefined goals and strictly wanting to discover an album on intuition alone often creates situations where I’d want to go back, thinking the earlier version was better. The curse is that modern workflows allow this easily, and because I lack a clear understanding of what 'finished' means, an earlier version can be just as as provocative as the current one. Flipping back and forth and redefining different paths leads to a process that could go in circles and the journey becoming more important than ever arriving. Walk till you’re there… but where is there?  Eventually, I did figure it out for this release, but on those older albums the workflow was more strictly bound to the moment. Not being able to go back to earlier revisions was liberating, and perhaps that’s a style of working I should re-embrace one day. So it might not matter and I will likely always work in an explorative way, mapping out the undiscovered album by walking along its outlines.

Like any emotionally intense period, the experience never completely disappears. The waves simply become gentler over time until one day you realize they are no longer washing over you. The memory remains, but it becomes something welcome rather than overwhelming.

Looking ahead, Funicular Prism took so long to complete that several other projects emerged while I was searching for its resolution.

One is currently called Cities in a Field Recording—a title that is probably too blunt a pun even for my tastes. It combines field recordings gathered during trips to Berlin, Budapest, and other cities with looping, processing, and additional musical layers. Berlin will likely be the first installment.

Another project, currently titled Zonderlicht, follows the darker path that Funicular Prism originally occupied. The music itself is finished, but it still needs work before it truly flows as a complete album.

Finally, there is a minimal ambient science-fiction project built around 909 drums that sits well outside my comfort zone. Every attempt to expand it seems to lose the simple charm that made the original pieces work in the first place.

So everything is a little scattered at the moment, though there is always the possibility that these projects will follow the same winding path as Tauern and Funicular Prism.

To answer your question differently: I don't know whether my creativity is rooted in resolution or evolution. I suspect it depends on where I am in life at a given moment.

What I do know is that it probably won't be a revolution. I'm not the sort of artist who reinvents himself completely. I still feel the urge to pay homage to The Future Sound of London, who remain one of my greatest inspirations.

AV:  Matthew, I'd like to thank you for your willingness to not only answer these questions, but to answer them with such depth and thoughtfulness. Throughout this conversation you've shared insights into your creative process, your relationship with sound, and the experiences that have shaped your music over the years. It's been a pleasure exploring those ideas with you. We wish you continued success with Funicular Prism and the projects waiting in the wings, and we look forward to following wherever the next chapter of your musical journey may lead.