Interview: Raphael Weinroth-Browne

Photo credit: Curtis Perry

October 2025

Ahead of the release of his new album Lifeblood (read my review here), Hotel Hobbies spent an extremely enjoyable hour chatting with cellist Raphael Weinroth-Browne. We discussed the new release, his influences and his approach to composition.

Hotel Hobbies: You are now approaching the release date of Lifeblood. How do you feel when you are about to release new material?

Raphael Weinroth-Browne: Well, I'm really looking forward to people's reactions to the full record because so far, they've heard the singles, which are indicative of a certain side of the record. As you know, I chose to front-end load the album with the Middle Eastern bangers and then to change the tone later on in the record. So, there's kind of three parts to it. It's like a triptych. There's the first three tracks - Lifeblood, Possession and Ophidian -  followed by Pyre, Labyrinthine, and Nethereal which are kind of like another chapter. Then the last section, Winterlight and The Glimmering are very ethereal, sort of transcendent pieces that feel maybe more like they're sort of up in the air rather than being earthbound in a way. So, there's these different elements and moods at play. I'm curious to hear people's reactions to the full journey and to know their favourite moments and to know how the record translates for them as a whole. Of course, I'm a bit nervous about it too, as anyone would be when you're not sure how it's going to go over.

I feel personally very confident in the music and what I've put into it this time. I felt like I really did my due diligence and I spent a lot of time in the studio trying to get the best takes possible, trying to make the production really serve the compositions. So I feel very confident in the quality of the work. I hope that it will be well received nonetheless, but you can't guarantee that. Also, because the record hasn't dropped yet, there's a number of things that I'm still trying to put in place and organise. It is a pretty stressful period and there's a lot that I have to manage and I'm doing it all on my own. So that part is challenging and I'm trying to kind of just keep my cool and do one thing at a time and get through it.

Hotel Hobbies: You have said that you feel this is the most personal album you have ever made. What makes you feel that is the case?

Raphael Weinroth-Browne: A number of things. I think that it's a record that speaks directly to my devotion to music. I feel that energetically the pieces embody this connection and this feeling of being all-in with something and devoting your life to it. I feel like music has given me everything and I feel that I owe the music everything, actually. I think that music has been there for me. It's given me everything. It's been there for me in moments where I didn't really love myself. It has brought me all sorts of opportunities and given me external validation in moments where I wasn't really able to provide that for myself. It has been a kind of a lifeline in a way. Lifeblood - the title track- in particular, really embodies that feeling of connection with the music and the moments of inspiration and moments of being on stage. However, it also embodies or depicts the struggle of creating something and trying to push through and make something in spite of all obstacles.

This record was very challenging to make. I really held myself to a very high standard when I was recording it. I travelled to another city and I had to do lots of long trips on the train. I spent a lot of money and I had to keep going back into the studio to refine things to carry it to the finish line. I was schlepping gear and doing these long days and being really tired and basically just sacrificing everything. In a way, this track, Lifeblood, is kind of mountain climb where you're taking an idea that seems like it's just a dream. You're trying to fully realise it and turn it into something tangible that people can perceive. There's the feeling of an epic struggle in the music that reflects actually the process of making the record itself. The album traverses a long period of my life. Some of it dates back as far as 2016. It’s a reflection on everything that I've done in the last ten years of my career, and in a way, like a summation of all of the different periods of that, in that time. I guess its difficult to describe how an instrumental album can be personal because there's no lyrics. But for me, there's an incredibly deep emotional world in these pieces. I really wanted to make that apparent through the performance and through the sound itself and through the imagery.

Hotel Hobbies: I know the imagery that accompanies the album is important to you.

Raphael Weinroth-Browne: Yes! The cover art embodies the duality, this dichotomy, between creating something beautiful that people can see, but also the roots underneath that are the dark side of being an artist. There's this hunger for more, to create something better than before and to surpass yourself, to also be able to attract the attention of others and to gain popularity. There is a kind of consuming intensity and ambition. Certainly, this record was an ambitious album, which was meant to be a bigger and better album than the previous one. It was meant to be a statement - a very bold statement, artistically - almost like a cello manifesto, so to speak. The snakes that form the roots of the tree on the cover represent that dark side but again, it's a question of integrating that dark side, not rejecting it. The shadow side is a part of oneself. You need to recognise that's part of what makes you who you are. The record is a depiction of the light and the dark and those two sides of me and my music.

Hotel Hobbies: You mentioned embracing different sides of yourself. You have a love of metal and you have mentioned in being a cellist, you have taken an unorthodox path. What lessons have you learned from taking those risks and not pursuing what might be expected of you in music?

Raphael Weinroth-Browne: Good question! I would say that initially you're going to encounter more resistance and you're not going to be understood immediately. It's going to be harder to have immediate success or for doors to open for you right away. But I think that in time, in the long run, it actually is quite rewarding because you walk your own path and you find your own truth. People really resonate with this; not necessarily that they resonate with the exact path that you're walking or what you're creating specifically, but they resonate with your authenticity and with your sort of unadulterated truth. I think that not doing what society expected of me, what the music industry or my teachers around me expected of me but following an instinctive path made me feel more centred as an artist. It's led to opportunities that feel more artistically aligned for me: getting to play with groups, I admire and have the chance to do things that really matter. I think that the biggest takeaway for sure is that in the beginning, it's hard to do something different and to be unorthodox. It is hard to create a new style of music but if you stick with it and believe in it, you carry it through with consistency over a long period of time. Then, the results can be incredible and you can really realise some dreams.

Hotel Hobbies: You have already spoken about the title track and album opener. When I listened to the album, it feels like the track was destined to be an album opener. Was that always the case or did that come later?

Raphael Weinroth-Browne: Actually, that's funny that you mentioned that. It was written as an opener. Originally, it was for a show that I played three years ago and I wanted something that would be a compelling opener. I wanted something that would draw the audience in but that was also quite extroverted, dynamic and intense. There's the slow intro which gives you time to feel out your instrument, the stage and the sound that you're hearing, and you can sort of acclimatise to that. You can but you don't have to play super rhythmically yet. Then, after a couple of minutes, you lay down the initial looped layers that form the rhythmic backbone. From there is a series of solos that ramp up in terms of difficulty and intensity. The piece doesn't give away too much heaviness right away; it saves that for the end. So, I think it's a very effective show opener; also because audiences are not necessarily ready to hear your most intense material right away. They need some time just to get used to the space and to transition into watching and listening to a show. There was never really any question about it being anywhere else but the first track on the album.

Hotel Hobbies: On Possession, your Middle Eastern influences come more to the fore. Where did your love of those rhythms and sounds come from?

Raphael Weinroth-Browne: It came from my parents' record collection and the music that we listened to on the radio as well. Just music that I heard growing up. We had a lot of CDs from the Arab world, Iran and North Africa. I just had such an early exposure to that music and it always resonated with me and it always felt really enthralling and intriguing so it never, ever felt unnatural or alien. It always felt somehow like home in a way. When I was learning cello growing up, that way of improvising and those scales and that sort of affect or inflection just seemed natural and I tended to gravitate towards it a lot, even more so Western classical music. There's always some element of it in my playing. I played in metal bands as a teenager, and I wrote a lot of riffs that were also kind of Middle Eastern inspired before I had heard any bands doing that. Later on, I discovered that there were bands that were doing that. For me, it's all music but just different colours and shades with which you would paint. On this album, I wanted to double down on it.

Hotel Hobbies: Next on the album is Ophidian which keeps up the intensity but also the feeling of duality. Was that duality something you were trying to illustrate from your personal life or more musical exploration of two sides?

Raphael Weinroth-Browne: A bit of both, I would say. I think initially the track wasn't really about anything specifically. Ophidian was kind of my attempt at sort of referencing a lot of musical and cultural elements that were maybe more present in the early 2000s - for instance, in the nu metal genre. There's also this movie, Queen of the Damned, that I think a lot of millennials specifically remember from growing up. It's kind of this campy movie that has a really cool soundtrack and this sort of vampire lore. I noticed that a lot of people were comparing my music to the soundtrack from this movie and also the aesthetics of my videos to this movie. So I thought, why not just wrap all of that together into this pop culture sandwich. I wanted a piece that used the cello to embody all of that.

The idea was actually to combine Middle Eastern melodic ideas with vocal sounding melodies that reminded me of Korn. In that period, I remember listening to a lot of those bands and feeling they were quite a formative influence on my own compositional style growing up so I wanted to sort of somehow fold that into my own work. There's this whole middle section that feels like something out of a show and it feels very dramatic and theatrical. At the end, I wanted it to sound like it could be the soundtrack for the Dune movie and to have this feeling of the desert and a mirage with the heat affecting your senses. It's like an illusory landscape or imagery that is almost like a hallucination. The idea of duality is also representing the voices telling me to do something more traditional or conventional. I have always naturally pushed against that. In the music video, I wanted to expand on that concept and turn it into this duel. But it's just a duel between myself and myself. The idea was to show that sort of confrontation in a video and then to show that the chaos wins at the end. Its embracing your truth and not abdicating simply to align with what others expect of you.

Hotel Hobbies: You mentioned the cover art but I know you are also very proud of the videos that accompany some of the songs with Pyre being one example. I understand you were very moved by the initial ideas for that video.

Raphael Weinroth-Browne: The video was created by Jess Cope from Owl House Studios. I didn't actually give her specifics for the narrative. I gave her a general prompt, which was basically there's a piece about reaching catharsis through sacrifice. I also mentioned it was about a memory of a half-forgotten romance and the idea of leaving one's past behind to move forward into the next chapter in life. She came up with this great storyline and just ran with it. It really fit with what I was trying to convey very powerfully. When I received the storyboard that she sent me, I just burst into tears. It was so touching and was so perfect. It also had a Nordic element to it which I think aligns perfectly with the tone of the music.

Hotel Hobbies: Following Pyre, which is a short track, there are two longer tracks – Labyrinthine and Nethereal - that have many different elements. In my review of the album, I wrote it feels like the varying pieces that make up a symphony. Do you sometimes think about your pacing of pieces, and the overall album, in that way?

Raphael Weinroth-Browne: Yes, I do but I don’t always connect it to classical music. I think about it very instinctively. I think about my piece being multi-movement works. Within a single track, there might be multiple sub-pieces. I agree Labyrinthine and Nethereal are good examples. Labyrinthine has many sections and Nethereal really has three kind of big parts to it. I'm always considering the ebb and flow of the music and the dynamics to create an experience for the listener where they're not bombarded by the same thing too much. I want them flowing from one musical landscape to the next but with enough continuity that it feels like a narrative they can comprehend. I don't want it to feel like there's a lot of ideas in these long pieces just for their own sake. It's just that they evolve that way. I did take the time to pair certain things down so that they wouldn't get too long or convoluted but balancing that with them unfolding naturally.

Hotel Hobbies: With instrumental music, it leaves much to the listener’s imagination. How do you feel when people tell you what images your music has conjured in their mind or what your music means to them?

Raphael Weinroth-Browne: I love that! I love it when people interpret something in my music that I didn't think of or that it evokes certain imagery that's maybe very personal for them. Especially if it's not something that I would have thought of. That's the beauty of instrumental music. It can conjure all kinds of narratives and images. It is like light flowing through a prism. The light refracts at different angles and turns into different colours. I like to create music but it is also sometimes important to explain certain things to give people a starting point.

Hotel Hobbies: In addition to your Middle Eastern and metallic influences there are also some electronic elements such as on The Glimmering. How you go about trying to meld them so they are manageable to you as a composer but also interesting to a listener?

Raphael Weinroth-Browne: I would say, and I hope this answers your question, that when I'm composing a piece of music, I don't think about the cello as just being a cello. I think about an ensemble and all the musical elements and different types of textures, sounds and timbres that could make up a piece. Then, I create them on the cello. Some electronic sounds are just cello being run through a pedal and then being layered. I really like making the cello sound like a synth and I do it in different ways. I like the idea of it sounding kind of hyper modern like it's not coming from an acoustic instrument.

Nowadays I see a lot of people performing with just laptops and I don't find that watching a performer on a laptop is very engaging as a spectator and their music might be interesting, but I do want to see how the sound is being made. So that's important to me. I really like the idea of using an acoustic instrument and pedals and doing that. It feels more analogue to me because you're not trying to perfectly emulate something else but you're also not trying to make that thing obsolete. You're just using the cello as a lens for how a listener might perceive that instrument or that type of sound which gives a greater sense of unique subjective perspective. I just hear the composition as a whole, and then I ask myself, well, what sonic treatment does this need? Sometimes it becomes evidently clear in the writing stage but sometimes I have to get to the recording before I really know how I want it to sound. Then, I go back to the live performance and I try to emulate that. In the studio, you have to make more definitive decisions. Do I want this thing to sound this way forever? It's tricky because you have an intention of how you want a piece to come across. However, you can't control the way a listener perceives that, or whether they think an element in the music was too exaggerated or too subtle. I try to be very firm and resolute in my decisions and to stand by my argument. Hopefully, people like it and hopefully they get it. But there's no guarantees. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

Photo credit: Curtis Perry

Hotel Hobbies: What challenges does a wide sonic tapestry present to you when playing live?

Raphael Weinroth-Browne: Well, it's a good question. When I'm performing live, I don't have the same possibility to shape all of the sounds in the same way that I would in the studio. In the studio, every element has a very specific treatment and can be massaged into the mix in a certain way. I see live performance as a bit more of a compromise on that level. Ideally, I can have as close a mix to the recorded track as possible. What's more important about the live performance is the energy and the feeling that the performance of that piece transmits. Live, you are managing the ebb and flow and controlling the energy in the room. You are doing that in real time. Over time, I would like to make my live shows more polished in terms of sound and in terms of the mix. When it comes to the arrangements themselves, I play these pieces quite similarly to the recordings, but there are moments I might not have as many elements in the mix or might take more time to build something up. Lifeblood was largely performed live before being recorded.

Hotel Hobbies: Other than your Middle Eastern influences, what other genres, bands or composers led you to where you are now?

Raphael Weinroth-Browne: Oh, good question! It was a combination of metal and the Middle Eastern music. On the metal side, I listened to a lot of Tool and Metallica and then later, Opeth and Meshuggah – bands like that. In terms of more Middle Eastern music, there's Dhafer Youssef, the oud player from Tunisia, and Le Trio Jounran, who are a Palestinian oud trio. There are also some Persian groups like Dastan Ensemble and Kayhan Kalhor, who plays the kamancheh. There are also some Canadian artists such as The Tea Party and Loreena McKennitt. I would also add Efrén López who is Spanish and extremely well versed. He's kind of like an expert in all kinds of music from different parts of the world and plays many instruments. He is very well specialised in Turkish, Greek and Afghan music. I really admire his work a lot and it has definitely had an impact on what I do.

Hotel Hobbies: Your work has led you to collaborate with a lot of different bands and artists. Do you have any particular favourites?

Raphael Weinroth-Browne: There’s so many (laughing)! I've played in a number of groups over the years that were groups that I formed with other people. On that topic, I have a group called Kamancello which is cello and kamanche – a spike fiddle from Iran. We started in 2014 and have made three records. There is also a group called Musk Ox which is a chamber folk trio comprised of cello, violin and classical guitar. Then there is my old group The Visit – a cello and voice duo.

Through this, I ended up supporting Leprous as a solo artist. Then they asked me if I wanted to play on their next album which was Malina. I spent seven years basically touring and recording with Leprous. That really changed my life and my career in so many different ways, both musically and professionally, and maybe personally too. It opened so many doors; inspired me in terms of what I do now.

One of the more recent chapters in my career has been working with contemporary dance, and I've been doing that for the last three years both here in Ottawa, where I live, with Ottawa Dance Directive, and I also play in a group here in town, which features West African Kora – a 21 string African harp. That's been really cool for me because I have been a fan of the instrument since I was a kid. To have the opportunity to play in a group with someone who is really a virtuoso on that instrument is super special. We're going to be releasing some music next year.

I've also had the chance to play on some really interesting films and TV shows. I've worked with a lot of great film composers. Some recent ones include the shows Landman, Special Ops: Lioness and Mayor of Kingstown which are all fairly visible shows with some well-known actors. That’s a kind of trippy thing that I never thought I would do.

Hotel Hobbies: Through those collaborations and due to your own work you have played some very interesting venues including the Royal Albert Hall in London and Hellfest. Which venues or concerts stick in your mind as being special?

Raphael Weinroth-Browne: Cello Biennale Amsterdam for sure is a highlight. It's the world's biggest cello festival and they bring in all the most incredible artists. Just even being invited to perform in that festival is a huge honour for me. I have been lucky enough to perform at it twice. That is something of which I am proud. Also touring with Apocalyptica, which happened through Leprous because we were a direct support band for them on one of their US tours. It was like an amazing moment for me to be able to meet those guys and to also play with them on stage. It was a real full circle experience because they were such a big influence on me growing up. I think they're really the reason why I'm doing what I do now. I also had a great experience a couple of weeks ago performing with the Danish band Vola. I was opening for them here in Canada, but they also asked me to join them on stage. I'm a big fan of their music so that was really special.

Hotel Hobbies: What are your plans for playing live to support Lifeblood?

Raphael Weinroth-Browne: I have a number of shows booked. Right now, I'm focusing on my  hometown show here in Ottawa, Canada. That will be the first show in support of the record. I have a big venue booked and I'm going to play the whole album. Immediately after that, I'm going to go to Winnipeg, Manitoba. I'm going to be playing at the International Cello Festival of Canada and I'm going to be playing music from the album. Then, I have a few dates in the UK in November, mainly in the southwest, in Cornwall and North Devon. So I'll have a few solo dates in some villages and some small towns. There's also some performances of the dance piece in Plymouth. Next year, I have released shows for Lifeblood in Toronto, Ontario; Montreal, Quebec and Kingston, Ontario. There will be another tour of James Wilton Dance in the UK. That time, there will be a smattering of dates in the north and the south where I'll also play Lifeblood because I'll have some solo shows interspersed with the dance shows.

Hotel Hobbies: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. I wish you luck with the album and I am sure it will be well received.

Raphael Weinroth-Browne: Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time as well and your great questions. It's been really lovely chatting with you.

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