I was holed up in my Oakland apartment, dealing with a storm. The kind that makes you brew coffee just to stay grounded. The rain was extremely cathartic and meditative, giving me a sense of calm and ironically, silence. The silence is what I was focused on, almost exclusively.
My kettle hissed in the background as I waited for the video recording to finish processing. I had just finished chatting with Silvio Buchmeier, a multitalented instrumentalist and genuine nice-guy.
But it took me months to actually be able to write this profile. Life happens, things get in the way. Fortunately for me, Silvio is extremely understanding 🙂
Drinking my coffee and contemplating my most recent interview, I wasn’t thinking about silence anymore, I was thinking about how sometimes, the most interesting artists are the ones who never intended to become artists at all.
How It Started
For Silvio, music was never a conscious choice. His home in Switzerland pulsed with rhythms and melodies from the moment he could remember. His father, a professional upright bassist, kept a steady stream of jazz, classical, and West African music spinning through the house. The sound seeped into Silvio’s world by osmosis.
“This stuff found me more than I found it,” he says. And it shows. Even now, he speaks about music with the kind of comfort and fluency that only comes from growing up surrounded by it.
Guitar was his first instrument, but something about it didn’t click. He played it for a while, sure, but it felt like someone else’s language. There was no spark. It wasn’t until he reached high school and joined a big band program that things truly shifted. “It was another layer deeper than anything I’d experienced,” he says. Surrounded by committed players, exposed to intricate arrangements, he found himself drawn, almost magnetically, to the saxophone. Soon enough, he had one in hand and a clear sense of direction.
Two years of consistent practice followed. His tone matured. His ideas developed. Then came a special invitation: his father asked him to join a group of seasoned musicians headed to a jazz retreat in the Swiss Alps. The retreat, renowned for hosting some of the best players in the world, felt almost mythic. It was a chance to be in the room with musicians he had only heard on records.
“I wanted to have something to say when I was there.” he tells me. “Even if I still sucked.” He laughs, but the moment held weight.
That summer became a hinge point. A time when ambition, environment, and preparation all converged. It was the first time he saw music not just as something he loved, but as something he could build a life around. And from that experience grew a throughline, from performance to production, from big band to beatmaking, from jazz retreat to scoring films.
On Process and Palettes
Silvio’s approach to music is built on what he calls the “frame.” Whether writing for film, arranging for strings, or experimenting with AI, he needs structure before sound. That early training in jazz ensembles, the discipline of arrangements, the respect for space, the interplay of improvisation within set forms, still shapes his sensibilities today. His inspirations may range from trip hop to minimal piano works, but underneath it all is a foundation built on both intuition and planning.
“You build the frame before you put the canvas on it,” he says. “Without this support, your ideas just sit in a folder for eternity.” It’s a principle he applies to every project, from soundtracks to string quartets.
That doesn’t mean he avoids risk. Quite the opposite. Silvio gravitates toward ideas that resist easy categorization, uncomfortable, even dissonant sounds that challenge his habits. “Sometimes a small idea is just an exercise, not a piece of art… but it still moves you forward.” He often finds himself drawn to what initially sounds “wrong,” because that tension is where creative growth lives.
He’s currently working on a string quartet reinterpretation of a friend’s piano project, treating it like a companion album rather than a remix. It’s an approach that speaks to his instinct to deepen, not decorate. For Silvio, collaboration is less about showcasing and more about transformation. “It always starts with asking, what cool thing can I do with you?”
Process, for Silvio, isn’t linear, it’s iterative, layered, often circular. But the key, he insists, is intention. Set the frame, invite curiosity, and let the process take you somewhere unexpected.
Inspiration
Silvio’s musical world is a wide-ranging one. From his early days immersed in the eclectic record collection of his family, to playing in ska bands and studying classical traditions, his taste has always spanned genres and textures. But every now and then, an artist or album doesn’t just inspire, it rewires something deeper. That was the case with Massive Attack.
“It felt like hearing your parents’ voice in another room, so familiar, but otherworldly,” he says, describing the first time he heard Angel. It was a spiritual jolt, the kind that makes you stop what you’re doing and reconsider everything. He dropped everything to learn how it was made. “I got the first plugins, started turning knobs… I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was hooked.”
That moment didn’t just change what he listened to, it changed how he approached making music. The techniques he discovered back then laid the groundwork for his comfort with tech tools today, especially as he works with plugin-based AI instruments like Morpho. The desire to break apart and understand sound, to reverse-engineer a mood or atmosphere, has never left him.
His influences continue to span a wide spectrum, from the syncopation of ska to the structured elegance of classical and the freedom of jazz improvisation. But what ties them all together is the impulse to blend, to discover the unexpected in the overlap: tradition and experimentation, acoustic and electronic, composition and chaos.
The Role of AI
It’s always tricky to talk about the role of AI in creative human endeavors. For every leap forward in capability, there’s an existential question trailing behind: what is the artist’s role when the machine can generate? For Silvio, the conversation again starts, and ends, with intent.
Silvio doesn’t buy into the idea of AI as a magic bullet. “Is it a finished record or is it an instrument?” he asks. For him, the excitement lies not in push-button music-making, but in expressive tools, AI as augmentation, not automation.
He’s especially interested in Morpho, our tool that lets him interact with sound data in real time. “Sampling is fine, but how can I be more intrinsically expressive with data? That’s the real frontier,” he says. He also calls for deeper literacy around AI: “It’s not a divine voice, it’s a super-powered word predictor. People should know what these things are doing and where the content is coming from.”
He draws an analogy to the early reception of the 808 drum machine: rejected at first for sounding “too mechanical,” only to later define entire genres. “Same with AI. It might take time for people to hear the humanity in it, but it’s there, if the intent is there.”
This is how we actually came to meet Silvio; he’s been a huge advocator of Neutone and Morpho in particular, showcasing his work and process with the plugin to audiences in panel discussions and demos and we’re extremely grateful!
Looking Ahead
2025 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for Silvio. After years of primarily scoring films, he’s carving out more time and space to focus on deeply personal projects. That includes finishing a string quartet album rooted in a friend’s minimal piano sketches, reimagining a nearly century-old Swiss opera with his Geneva-based publisher, and releasing his first body of work that isn’t attached to someone else’s visual narrative. “Just seeing these pieces get air and room to breathe, it feels overdue,” he says.
He’s also expanding his expeditions in the realms of AI. One recent experiment involved a Morpho model trained on a big-band piece he wrote five years ago, an experience he describes as surreal. “Hearing something I wrote come back to me, reshaped through another system, it’s like finding a time capsule version of yourself, and having a conversation with it.” He’s now working on the next phase, composing a dataset specifically for Morpho.
In all of this, Silvio remains remarkably grounded. He talks about creativity less as a personal statement and more as a kind of long-term relationship. “In art, the longer you stay on, the deeper your roots grow,” he says. “You might start out as a grain of sand, but if you keep showing up, keep collaborating, eventually you become part of the larger network.”
There’s something beautifully understated in the way he says it, like someone who knows the work is never really done, and that’s exactly why it’s worth doing.
Final Word
Silvio’s work is about discovery of limits, of language, of future forms. He doesn’t shy away from the unfamiliar; he leans into it. Whether it’s composing film scores, experimenting with AI, or reworking a forgotten opera, his instinct is to explore, not explain.
He reminds us that art isn’t just about making something beautiful, it’s about asking better questions. The tools may change, the collaborators may shift, but the desire to make something meaningful together never really goes away.
It just keeps evolving, like the artist himself, of limits, of language, of future forms. He reminds us that art isn’t just expression, it’s exploration. The tools may change, the collaborators may shift, but the question stays the same: what cool thing can we build together?
Silvio has lots of works in process and we are honored to be partnering with him as we build out ethically sourced and trained AI datasets here at Neutone. His latest single, ‘Apex’, is out everywhere! You can follow along with everything he has going on below: