Karl Sölve Steven isn’t merely a band frontman-turned-composer. He’s a musician who continually pushes his craft in new directions.
Best known for leading Supergroove, an iconic New Zealand funk-rock band in the ’90s, Steven is now one of the country’s most acclaimed film and television composers. Music fascinated him from a young age, but it was his time in Supergroove that gave him a template for independence and experimentation — an ethos he has carried into film.
“I think those early high-school experiments, which is what Supergroove was really, were an important early step on the road for me musically,” he tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ.
“Supergroove and its siblings were a way for my friends and I to get amongst music-making and hone our craft at arranging, performing, song-writing, producing, and recording without asking anyone’s permission or being told what we could and couldn’t do by experts who didn’t always share our taste or aspirations.
“We learnt a lot, we made a lot of mistakes, but this willingness to experiment and test artistic boundaries is something I’ve tried to retain as part of my practice ever since.”
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He recently stepped back into the public eye, reuniting with his Supergroove peers for a tour, playing shows across New Zealand and Australia’s East Coast, but these days, he spends most of his time dedicating himself to the craft of composition, fulfilling his lifelong curiosity of telling stories through sound.
Working from his home in Pārāwai Thames, a former gold rush town on New Zealand’s Coromandel Peninsula, Steven has composed award-winning film scores and immersive projects, earning seven APRA Screen Music Awards and a NZTV Award over the years.
But it is his latest that feels among the most special to him — creating the score for a film examining one of the worst mining disasters in New Zealand’s history, Pike River.
Three-time Emmy nominee Melanie Lynskey and acclaimed New Zealand actress Robyn Malcolm star in Pike River as Anna Osborne and Sonya Rockhouse, two ordinary women who together stand up and take on the government, justice system and a company that will stop at nothing to protect itself, after the 2010 Pike River Mine explosion takes the lives of 29 men underground.
The film explores the powerless versus the powerful — people against profit, right against wrong — through the lens of an extraordinary female friendship and the determination to never give up.
“It was an absolute privilege to be involved with telling a story of this importance and scope…this is something that really happened, and with repercussions that people are still very much living through, so contributing in any way to bringing this story into cultural focus feels very special indeed,” he says.
“I’m completely open to all sorts of stories, from documentaries to horror films, but I’m always very alert to the artistry involved in how they’re told. Cinematography is something I connect with especially strongly, so working with Gin Loane’s visual storytelling on both Pike River and Mārama recently has been a total delight.”
The film’s score had to travel with the characters, shifting tempo and texture to reflect grief, resilience, and the search for justice. That desire to move with the narrative has helped shape it beautifully. The score ranges from lush string ensembles to intimate, quiet moments, and even has injections of bagpipes when the moment calls for it.
As Steven puts it: “The priority was for the music to deliver the full arc of the journey emotionally; to move with them every step of the way without getting either too far ahead or feeling like the story has moved on while the music is still treading water.
“It was definitely a formidable challenge, but I’m enormously pleased with the results.”
Pike River is in New Zealand cinemas now.
