False Awakening / Julian Iron Interview

First of all – what’s in a name? Why False Awakening?
Before I even started to think about making music, I was a lot into lucid dreaming and other kind of experiments about sleep and dreams. A false awakening is when you wake up within a dream, it’s very disturbing and it happened to me a lot when during that time, so it just came naturally as a name for this project.

More recently I noticed that you contributed a soundtrack to “Vagrant King” – a documentary on homelessness.

This shouldn’t be surprising given that you music is highly cinematic in style – do you have plans for more of soundtrack/movie work?
I don’t have any real plans, although I often found out that people used some of my tracks for their project, so it’s pretty cool. This specific song, “Dreams are Gone”,was also used for another project called “Yesterday’s Colors” by Jasmine H. Wilkes. Working on a whole movie soundtrack is definitely one of the thing I would love to do the most.

If you could play with any musician – alive or dead – who would it be and why?
Mmh… Mark Oliver Everett, Beck Hansen are the first name that comes to my mind.
Who would you consider your biggest musical influences?
I started playing guitar after I discovered Sigur Ros, EITS, Godspeed and alikes, and they’re still a great inspiration to me. Right now, This Will Destroy You, Caspian, Hammock, are the bands I listen to the most. Some other musicians/bands inspired me a lot for some pieces of my previous EPs : Message To Bears, Lights Out Asia for instance. The Internet is just full of marvellous musicians, I discover a new amazing band every day.
How about non-musical ones? Any movies or literature or works of art that made a particular impact on you and your music?
Into the Wild (movie and book) definitely blew my mind away a couple years ago, not to mention the OST by Eddie Vedder, and I have a huge admiration for Carl Sagan, I guess he also influences me somehow.
You contributed two pieces to “Gone In 60 Seconds” – one is called “Empty White Streets” and appears on “So Far, So Close” EP and the other one is “The Beast” (which doesn’t appear anywhere else).

What the story behind those two tracks? I’m particularly curious about “The Beast” – who was the narrator on this track?

I think I composed and recorded “Empty White Streets” in less than half an hour. I was in Montreal since only a couple of days at the time, and felt a little nostalgic, the notes just came by themselves.
“The Beast” came up very quickly too, the narrator is actually a free sample found on the Internet, I thought it was very Godspeed-like and would fit perfectly with this very short piece of music I recorded a couple of weeks before.