Soundtrax: Episode 2023-05
July/August, 2023
Feature Interviews:
Noted for a wide array of musical mediums, Bear McCreary is a graduate of the prestigious USC Thornton School of Music (in ‘Composition and Recording Arts’). McCreary was one of a small and select group of proteges of the late, much-honored film composer Elmer Bernstein. Although he is now firmly in the mainstream of film composition, many of McCreary’s earliest soundtrack-music compositions were for independent motion picture productions. Bear is best known for his work on the television series AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D., BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, OUTLANDER, THE WALKING DEAD, and FOUNDATION. His film scores include COLOSSAL, GODZILLA: KING OF MONSTERS, and CHILD’S PLAY, and he has provided the music for dozens of video games such as ASSASSIN’S CREED SYNDICATE, GOD OF WAR, and GOD OF WAR RAGNARÖK. In the following interview, we examine several of McCreary’s recent film scores.
FOUNDATION Season 1: FOUNDATION is set in the future, when the world is barely remembered, and humans have colonized the galaxy. The series introduces Hari Seldon, a brilliant visionary and psychohistorian whose job is to use mathematics and probability to predict the future.
FOUNDATION Season 2: More than a century after the Season One finale, tension mounts throughout the galaxy in FOUNDATION Season Two. As the Emperors Cleons unravel, a vengeful queen plots to destroy Empire from within.
Watch the trailer for FOUNDATION Season 2:
Q: Let’s start with FOUNDATION. You’ve described, back on Season 1, how your score was “a combination of live orchestra with an ‘algorithm orchestra’ playing fragmented phrases that would be virtually impossible for humans to perform.” Would you describe how you’ve utilized that and given permutations of it here with Season 2?
Bear McCreary: What’s interesting is that in Season 2, the show takes on even more epic science fiction tones. It takes on an even bigger emotional scale. I have found that the algorithm – the procedurally generated orchestral music – that is the signature of the main title is actually something that has very focused usages in Season 2 because so much of it needs to be emotional. We meet new characters that can be very swashbuckling and heroic and tragic and emotional, and our connections with Hari and Gaal, Salvor and the Emperors Cleon, are deeper after a season of storytelling – and I wanted to make sure that the score remained emotional and didn’t get too emotional for its own good. So while the algorithm is there, the mathematical music is there – especially when we’re inside the Prime Radiant , and we’re dealing with narrative arcs that pertain to the Prime Radiant – to me the most exciting part of the score in Season 2 is some of the new thematic material that is introduced over the course of the season.
Prime Radiant: A data storage device containing all of Hari Seldon’s psycho-historical calculations on the fall of the Galactic Empire
“One of the great things about the television format, and why I think there was never a good FOUNDATION movie made in all the decades that these books have existed – we really needed to wait for television to evolve to the point where it could tell the story!”
Q: How have you extended your thematic material from the first season into the storyline(s) of Season 2 – and what new themes have you needed to create for the new season?
Bear McCreary: There are several new themes this season. At least four new character themes are written for primary characters – these are not side characters. That is an expansion of the narrative to include new protagonists, and it’s one of the great things about the television format and why I think there was never a good FOUNDATION movie made in all the decades that these books have existed – we needed to wait for television to evolve to the point where it could tell the story! We’ve jumped ahead many generations, and should the show be fortunate enough to keep going, we’re going to continue jumping. The books span like a thousand years, so it’s inevitable that we have some connection with our original characters, but also, we need new ones – and they interface with new ones. I don’t even want to get into too much detail about what the new themes are because I don’t want to spoil the surprises for people, but we have at least two new worlds, two new races, two new factions, two new cultures, and one of the things I decided to do was make sure that each planet in FOUNDATION has a sound associated with it – has a musical language that tells us a little something about that culture and that tradition has been upheld here.
Q: Moving back a little bit to the first season – this is unlike any other science fiction I’ve ever seen, watched, read, etcetera because of its unique – the (things) that Asimov set into motion here, and here we’re putting it into film and music – what do you think as far as how this has changed perhaps watching or listening to sci-fi.
Bear McCreary: I grew up reading science fiction novels, watching science fiction shows and movies, and have been obsessed with the genre. And one of the things I love about it is its ability to transport you to another time. It blows my mind thinking about time on cosmic scales and what humanity might be like many, many thousands of years in the future in a post-lightspeed society. Asimov explored all these themes in his books, but the barrier to getting these on screen has always been shaping them around a narrative that could fit the form. And as I mentioned earlier, the feature film form is not conducive to this, while television always has been. However, the technology to show these stories convincingly on television has yet to exist. So, to me, it’s exciting to see something like this on our screens and finally get a version of FOUNDATION in a visual medium, and so for me to contribute to that on the musical side is a dream come true!
Q: What’s been most interesting for you about scoring FOUNDATION?
Bear McCreary: This season of FOUNDATION is a different credit than last season, and I do want to point out that, this season, I am sharing compositional credit with my studio, Sparks & Shadows. So, you will actually see, this year, that it says “Themes by Bear McCreary and Music by Sparks & Shadows.” I am very excited to roll out what I consider a more ethical way of crediting television work in our modern era, and I just wanted to let my support staff be recognized for the work they’re doing on a television show where they’re contributing the lion’s share of a lot of the music. So it is something that doesn’t change the way I approach the show, doesn’t change the way I work on the themes, the way I interact with my producers – but it is something that I think the fans are going to notice. I hope that they notice, because this is something that I am rolling out on a few other projects as well. FOUNDATION is the first of several projects where I’m redefining the way that I credit the massive amount of work that it takes to score a drama like FOUNDATION on a television time scale. So when I talk about the show in the second season, it is a group effort. Sparks & Shadows is my band, basically, and I’m excited for the future of the studio!
Q: That’s great, Bear – and hopefully what you’re doing in this regard may change the way film music crediting is being done, and those unsung heroes who work behind the scenes in realizing a film score will receive the credit they deserve for their parts in what we hear in completed television – and perhaps film – scores.
Bear McCreary: I feel very strongly that it is ethical, it is moral, and it is accurate. For some reason, the scoring world has not embraced what so many other aspects of filmmaking have embraced. Visual effects are by a company – it might be Stan Winston Studio, and you understand Stan Winston will win the Oscar if it gets to that point, but it’s a studio. It is his proteges, and it is his craftspeople that he’s trained – and music is the same. This is how television music is made in the modern era – and has been for a long time – so whether or not other people do this is not something I’m concerned about. Still, it is important that I do it, and it’s been something that I’ve spoken with many of my showrunners and producers and directors, and other creative partners. I’ve been very excited that these people are seeing it the way I see it, which is that it’s not taking anything away. It’s actually being inclusive and makes the job easier when everybody understands how it’s being made.
WE HAVE A GHOST (2023): Finding a ghost named Ernest haunting their new home turns Kevin’s family into overnight social media sensations. But when Kevin and Ernest investigate the mystery of Ernest’s past, they become a target of the CIA.
Q: Excellent! Thank you so much for doing that. Now, you recently rejoined director Christopher Landon, for whom you scored the HAPPY DEATH DAY and FREAKY movies. Tell me about scoring WE HAVE A GHOST and working with Landon again.
Bear McCreary: Christopher Landon is one of my favorite directors. He has a very unique vision for combining horror, comedy, and heartfelt emotion. As silly as it may sound, I do think Chris is a bit of an auteur. He has a vision that’s so clear I feel that my job is to keep up with him and help him find his vision. I have a tremendous amount of faith in him, and that’s based on having done four movies together, including WE HAVE A GHOST, which was our fourth collaboration. Each one’s different – each one is a unique challenge, but the thing that remains is just the joy of working for Chris and discovering the delightful storytelling that he is able to craft! It’s always original storytelling that feels timeless, and in a way, WE HAVE A GHOST is the most traditional score I’ve written for him. We talked about Amblin a lot; we talked about Alan Silvestri scores from the ‘80s, we talked about Danny Elfman and John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner… The movie wears its heart on its sleeve in a way that lends itself to beautiful, melodic writing, which of course, for me as a composer, is a joy – this is the kind of score that made me want to do what I do! So, I was thrilled to be able to collaborate with him.
Q: How have you balanced the dichotomy of humor and horror in Landon’s films, specifically WE HAVE A GHOST?
Bear McCreary: To me, the key to a Landon film is the emotion. The balance of comedy and horror is easier when we relate to the characters. If that works, the rest of it is much easier. So, I always start with an emotional theme. There was a story arc in the second HAPPY DEATH DAY film about the protagonist, a girl who was able to connect with her mother who has passed away, through a series of time travel shenanigans. Making that work was the key to the whole movie – from there, rippling outward, I could go to the slasher scenes, I could go to the adventure scenes, the straight-up comedy scenes and push that envelope as far as I could, knowing that the audience is there on the journey – the audience is going to follow you on a whiplash transition from laugh-out-loud comedy to intense scares if the emotional connection to the character is real. So that’s really where Chris’ superpower is. It’s funny because it is often talked about as a combiner of horror and comedy, but it is the emotional storytelling that makes that work. It’s pretty impressive what he does!
THE WITCHER – BLOOD ORIGIN (2023): More than a thousand years before the events of “THE WITCHER,” seven outcasts in an Elven world join forces in a quest against an all-powerful empire.
Q: THE WITCHER – BLOOD ORIGIN is a prequel to the first Netflix WITCHER series. What brought you into this project, and what were some of your early discussions with the showrunners and directors about the kind of music they were looking for?
Bear McCreary: I was thrilled to be a part of the WITCHER universe, especially because the score to the first season of the flagship show was so delightful, weird, and featured hurdy-gurdy, which I love! I just thought it was great. The composers did an excellent job. On the prequel, I was a little hesitant at first because I was already working on THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER, which was a prequel to a big fantasy show; however, the approaches couldn’t be more different, and ultimately I was thrilled to be a part of the WITCHER universe because the showrunner, Declan De Barra, and I were both excited about doing something that was the opposite of LORD OF THE RINGS. It was non-orchestral, it was non-traditional, it used folk instruments run through processing, it used weird vocals - I worked with one of my favorite collaborators, a singer named Morgan Thorne, and he created these otherworldly vocals. He’s all over the score. We had nyckelharpa and bagpipes... if anything, the score feels a bit like my score to BLACK SAILS – that kind of a sound, and I would say both scores have the same word cloud: jangly, rustic, gritty, distorted, folky, fun, dirty… these are all great words for music, for me! So, it was a blast. I really enjoyed my time working on that miniseries and getting to tell a small part of the WITCHER saga.
Q: How did you decide on the kind of thematic treatment necessitated between the characters?
Bear McCreary: For me, themes are everything. If someone wants an entirely ambient, non-thematic score, I could do that, but it’s not where my heart lies, and I recommend they find somebody else. So, despite all the fun word-association like gritty, raw, dirty, and bluesy, ultimately, it was a thematic score. Fantasy and science fiction significantly benefit from thematic storytelling because you need a shorthand to relate to your characters. Your characters have pointy elf ears or magical powers – they’re not like anybody you know in your life! So, part of the job that music has is making an instant connection, an instant understanding – is this a good person, is this a morally conflicted person, is this an evil person? Themes can tell you that, and so ultimately, that was my pitch on THE WITCHER: BLOOD ORIGIN – creating a score that felt very improvisatory and gritty, but that functionally was using leitmotifs just like all my favorite classic scores that I grew up with.
OUR TIME (2018): After failing to make it in New York and carrying a heavy secret, Stella Cooper returns to her distressed automotive hometown to work as a substitute teacher. She finds inspiration, hope, and ultimately salvation when she agrees to help three students pursuing their filmmaking dreams by putting on an impossibly ambitious shot-for-shot remake of one of the student’s favorite movies… The Goonies
Q: How recently completed scoring a film directed by Greg Mottola called OUR TIME, which is essentially a drama. What can you tell me about getting involved in that and your musical approach to it?
Bear McCreary: There’s not much I can tell you about OUR TIME. It’s a pilot that did not go into a series. It’s a spinoff – sort of? – of THE GOONIES. It was a brilliant script about kids recreating shot-for-shot the Amblin film THE GOONIES. So, it was a drama that had a lot of nostalgia for THE GOONIES but not in a way that the show is remaking it – it’s showing the generation of fans who didn’t grow up on it but discovered it. The show takes place now, and the characters are kids. So, the spirit of THE GOONIES is there, and the best of all is that I did have some opportunities to quote from and put my own spin on the iconic David Grusin score. So that was a blast. But it didn’t get picked up by the network that it was being made for, and I think it’s still in development, floating around, but that iteration of it joins the lengthy list of pilots that I’ve done that didn’t get picked up, as many composers do! It’s just part of the life cycle of working in television, working on something that will never be seen.
THE SERPENT QUEEN (2022): Eight-part series based on Leonie Frieda’s book “Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France.”
Q: I also wanted to ask you about an interesting historical project you did in 2022, THE SERPENT QUEEN…
Bear McCreary: THE SERPENT QUEEN is one of my favorite historical dramas that I’ve had the chance to work on; in fact, I’ve only really worked on two historical dramas that did not involve a certain degree of fantasy: this one and BLACK SAILS. What I love about SERPENT QUEEN is that it’s a gangster show. It’s essentially THE SOPRANOS with a female lead set in the Renaissance! Samantha Morton is flawed but badass. The show has this great sense of humor, as she breaks the fourth wall, looks right into the camera, and talks to you through the conceit, actually, that what we’re seeing is a flashback of Catherine de Medici telling a story to somebody else. So, theoretically, she’s not breaking the fourth wall; she’s just looking into the camera and saying what the character is speaking to another character in the framing device of the show. I thought it was very pretty clever. It was hilarious! It’s sadistic, funny, sexy, violent, and really satisfying.
Interestingly, it often gets lumped in with many other costume dramas that stars excel at, which are great, but it can appeal to a much broader audience. If you like costume dramas, you’ll love it, but if you like gangster movies, you might also love it. There are these well-told stories… The reason we love gangster drama is because you get to live vicariously and get your revenge fantasy, and that’s what happens. We watch people underestimate Catherine de Medici repeatedly and pay the price! And boy, is it fun.
THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER (forthcoming August 10th): Based on a single chapter, the Captain’s Log, from Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 novel Dracula, the story is set aboard the Russian schooner Demeter, which was chartered to carry private cargo – twenty-four unmarked wooden crates – from Carpathia to London. The film will detail the strange events that befell the doomed crew as they attempt to survive the ocean voyage, stalked each night by a terrifying presence on board the ship.
Q: Without spoilers, what would you be able to tell us about scoring THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER, which everyone who has read Dracula is probably looking forward to!
Bear McCreary: To me, there’s a rite of passage to write a theme for Dracula! In fact, I got to do that on DA VINCI’S DEMONS, speaking of fantasy. There was an episode where De Vinci encounters Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, so I got to write a Bernard Herrmann-style theme there. But the cinema Dracula – that is a whole other opportunity! So, I leaped at the chance to collaborate with a director I admire, André Øvredal, and a film studio I admire, and be a part of telling this fascinating chapter in Dracula’s story. The premise was super-exciting, and I was trying to find a balance between the traditional and a modern approach/I won’t say it was easy – the ship in the movie is itself a character, and there’s only so far into the modern era that you can take the score against that kind of classic imagery before you break the movie – you break the audience’s trust with it. So, I needed to have a foot in both worlds.
You’re going to hear hideously distorted orchestral instruments and solo instruments; you’re going to hear an ominous choir, tipping a hat to the Coppola Dracula score and Jerry Goldsmith’s Omen – that’s a very traditional color, and a lot of folk instruments from the period – there’s fiddle and nyckelharpa, and colors that belong on a sailing ship around the turn of the century. So hopefully, it all comes together into something that’s unique. I think the movie is imaginative and scary. It is doing such a focused thing; it is not part of a cinematic universe, it’s not setting up a billion sequels; it is wanting to take you on a ride and scare the hell out of you in this tight, claustrophobic location. For me, that was refreshing. There’s something awesome about being able to commit to that; it reminds me of ALIEN and THE THING. When I was talking with the filmmakers, and I said that you could tell they felt that way, too. Those are the kind of movies that inspired this. So, it’s exciting to see it come out. I’m so thrilled to be a part of it.
FORSPOKEN (2023, video game): A young woman named Frey Holland awakens in the land of Athia and must embark on an adventure and endure treacherous trials to uncover the mystery the land hides.
Q: Finally, I wanted to ask about something you did with Garry Schyman, the video game score for FORSPOKEN. What was that collaborative project all about?
Bear McCreary: Yes! I love Garry Shyman. He and I have been friends for years, having just met through video game circles. We also had the same composition teacher, a generation apart, at the University of Southern California. We both studied with James Hopkins. I also just immensely admire Garry’s music. Several years ago, we both got an inquiry from Square Enix about this upcoming fantasy game, FORSPOKEN. They wanted a classical fantasy color, they wanted a sense of contemporary pop and hip-hop, and they wanted some unusual instrumentation to take us into this fantasy world. And I always asked my rep, who else are they talking to? It just tells you what is in their minds, and when she said they were talking to Garry Shyman, I sidebar’d with him and said, “Why don’t we just do this together?” – because we’d always talked about collaborating and that was how it came about. And I think for the game studio, it was probably an unexpected surprise, they were hoping to get one of us, and then we both just hopped on board immediately. So that was great! I love collaborating with Garry. My contributions were limited compared to his, in terms of run time; I did some big theme suites and wrote some main themes, Garry wrote other themes and then did the lion’s share of the adaptive music and the cinematics and all that. I would say that, together, we crafted the sound of the game, which was fun. I did it as an excuse to hang out with Gerry and talk music and challenge ourselves and have fun, and we did all those things! It was a great experience.
Q: What was your orchestral palette for this project?
Bear McCreary: We recorded most of it in Vienna, but the orchestral component was straight down the middle traditional. Woodwinds in threes, big brass, big strings, choir… and I did this because I wanted a color that would feel familiar so that we could offset it with modern scattered, chopped-up electronics, vocal samples, colors that are drawing from Top-40 music now, EDM and pop, something that felt very contemporary, and then also some folk music soloists from around the world – which Garry and I both like to use all the time. The more adventurous you get with the colors, the more a familiar orchestral color forms a glue that can hold a score together. Because of the scope of FORSPOKEN, to contrast it with THE WITCHER: BLOOD ORIGIN, which did not have an orchestra, WITCHER BLOOD ORIGIN was very small and scrappy and weird, but ultimately that ended up being four hours – whereas a big open-world game you can play for 40 hours! So, you need to have a lot of colors at your disposal, and, look – if you’ve got Garry Schyman and me, you get some orchestra on that! That’s kind of our bread and butter to both of us!
Special thanks to Joe Augustine and Marisa Gunzenhauser of sparksandshadows.com for facilitating this interview, and especially, thanks to Bear McCreary for taking time out to discuss these scores with me!
Kudos to Bear McCreary’s Sparks&Shadows team for their efforts on FOUNDATION: writers Etienne Monsaingeon, Omer Ben-Zvi, and Kelsey Woods, S&S’s dedicated additional writers Michael Beach, Ramin Kousha, Trey Toy, and Jesse Hartov, engineers Ryan Sanchez and Ben Sedano, and music editor Michael Baber.
Related Addendum:
Sparks & Shadows has released the soundtrack album for FOUNDATION Season 2. The album features selections of the original music from the show’s second season composed by Bear McCreary and is now available to stream/download on Amazon and other major digital music services. Purchase/Stream: https://sparksandshadows.ffm.to/t60huwejmg Lakeshore Records previously released a soundtrack featuring McCreary’s score from Season 1 back in 2021.
- Regarding Bear McCreary’s massive, IFMCA-winning score to THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER, don’t miss his online blog which goes into massive detail about scoring this series, here.
- See the IFMCA interview with Bear about scoring THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER on the 20-minute video about his award presentation from IFMCA, here.
- Read my extended review about Bear’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER score in my November/December Soundtrax column http://www.buysoundtrax.com/larsons_soundtrax-12_03_2022.html
- Bonus: Listen to/watch Bear McCreary’s recording session for Netflix’s MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, 2021, via YouTube:
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Whether it’s a studio action film or an independent festival film, Award-winning composer Andrew Lockington’s music demonstrates his approach of scoring each project in a unique way, finding a musical language to communicate the relationships and elements of the story the visuals cannot. Lockington’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of film scoring has inspired him to record in such places as the highland jungles of Papua New Guinea, an ancient temple in Northern Japan, the tropics of Costa Rica and even a dormant volcano in Polynesia. His notable film and tv credits include Paramount+’s Mayor of Kingstown, starring Jeremy Renner;
Starz’s American Gods, starring Ricky Whittle and Emily Browning; Geoffrey Sax’s Golden Globes-nominated feature film Frankie & Alice, starring Halle Berry and Stellan Skarsgård; Netflix’s International Emmy Award-winning drama series Delhi Crime; Peter Chelsom’s The Space Between Us, starring Gary Oldman and Carla Gugino; Thor Freudenthal’s Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, starring Logan Lehman and Alexandra Daddario; Eric Brevig’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, starring Brendan Fraser; Gil Kenan’s City of Ember, produced by Tom Hanks and starring Saoirse Ronan and Bill Murray; Lone Scherfig’s Berlin Film Festival Opener The Kindness of Strangers, starring Zoe Kazan; and more.
In addition to writing scores, Lockington also composed the STX and Flynn Picture Co logo music and has written/performed multiple songs including “Stalking Stars,” featured in Ben Affleck’s Oscar-winning feature film Argo and “Move On,” featured in Chris Evans’ directorial debut Before We Go. Lockington currently divides his time between Los Angeles and his hometown of Toronto, Canada, where he resides with his wife and three children.
Special Ops: Lioness, inspired by an actual U.S. Military program, follows the life of Joe (Zoe Saldaña) while she attempts to balance her personal and professional life as the tip of the CIA’s spear in the war on terror. The Lioness Program, overseen by Kaitlyn Meade (Nicole Kidman) and Bryan Westfield (Michael Kelly), enlists an aggressive Marine Raider named Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira) to operate undercover alongside Joe among the power brokers of State terrorism in the CIA’s efforts to thwart the next 9/11.
With SPECIAL OPS: LIONESS features an original score by award-winning composer Andrew Lockington (SAN ANDREAS, DAYBREAK, RAMPAGE, FRONTIER, TIME FREAK, AFTERMATH, INCARNATE, PERCY JACKSON: SEA OF MONSTERS, CONTINUUM). Lockington creates an atmosphere of foreboding with Middle Eastern-inflected strings and percussion that augment the intensity of the series. From Academy Award® Nominee Taylor Sheridan, SPECIAL OPS: LIONESS airs exclusively on Paramount+.
“Taylor and I set out to use the music to reflect the emotional cacophony inside the characters, never the physical geography of the story. Playing the classical dilemma between the head and the heart, the music is sometimes sad, sometimes angry, often wounded, but still has moments of solace and glimpses of peace. The score gives some insight into our characters as they’re torn between their responsibilities to their loved ones and the oath they’ve sworn to protect their country. To achieve this, we assembled an eclectic ensemble of world hand-percussion, whining cello, analogue synth rhythms and the fragile strings of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Never comfortable, never committing, the music emanates from the cracks inside the psyche.”
– Andrew Lockington (PR notes)
Watch the trailer for SPECIAL OPS: LIONESS:
Q: I’d like to start out with your new project, the Paramount+ series SPECIAL OPS: LIONESS. What brought you into this project and what were your initial thoughts about the kind of music series creator/showrunner Taylor Sheridan was looking for in this spy-thriller?
Andrew Lockington: I got to know Taylor when he hired me to do THE MAYOR OF KINGSTOWN [2021]. He actually shot the film up in Canada, and I was lucky enough to be in Canada during COVID, where they were filming Season One. So, he and I got to spend some time on set, which is not normal for working with him, it’s not usual, it just happened to be that he was filming not too far from where I was staying with my family during COVID. So, we spent a lot of time talking about music. He is very knowledgeable and educated about music and has a clear sense of what he wants. The music has to be very precisely what he’s imagining. I think of him as an architect in the way he designs the blueprints for his stories, and every single element, every little bit of engineering has to be precise, so it’s a real pleasure to work for someone who has such a sharp vision of what they’re looking for. The best part is that he doesn’t tell you how to make it, he just tells you how he wants it to feel. So, there’s a lot of freedom in exploration, a lot of back-and-forth with him. After doing MAYOR OF KINGSTOWN, he came to me and asked if I’d be interested and willing to work on this and sent me the first few scripts and I was blown away. Once again, he’s such a master storyteller in how he builds a world and has you thinking it’s going to have one point of view but he’s really setting you up to pull the rug out from under you!
Q: Your score begins with foreboding textures, suggesting the sort of Middle East environment and the military situation, and a decision Joe needs to make in the heat of battle. What can you tell me about scoring these opening moments in this episode?
Andrew Lockington: It’s really a bit of a sampling for how we approached the entire series. Taylor and I talked about not wanting the music to delineate geography or cultural elements, but instead really look at Joe and as we get further on, Cruz – and imagine every place, every influence, every trauma, everything that’s contributed to their emotional psyche, put it in musical terms, put it in a blender, and create this vocabulary that we would use to score the entire show. So, we’re using a lot of elements that are skin-drums – some of them are Middle Eastern or Arabic drums, but a lot of them are also Japanese hand-drums. There’s this mélange of different instruments, which is really meant to create this unsettling, off-kilter representation of her emotional state and the cacophony going on inside of her head. One of the things Taylor said early on is, in the moments where she’s back in America, there’s a tendency in story-telling like this to musically delineate between Americana and the other world elements that might be involved in where they are – but when she’s back, she’s still bringing the reverberation and the echo of all of this discordance of sound and those influences in her mind. So, that begins for her at the beginning of the first episode, but that sound that’s there, which is a combination of strings, guitars, and an instrument called an Octoukelin that I built with a sound designer friend of mine, Michael White – it’s really a concoction and a recipe that scores the whole series even in the moments that aren’t out in the field.
Q: How did you create the main title theme for the series?
Andrew Lockington: One of the very first things I did on the score was do a lot of research into Arabic music and rhythm. I’d done a project years and years ago that had a lot of Moroccan influence, so I knew sort of the rough make-up of some of, for lack of a better word, their ragas, or other staple rhythms. But I quickly realized that I didn’t want to fall into that trap of trying to recreate a sound-alike or write in a culture I didn’t really understand and didn’t want to run the risk of misusing it. So, I put together a group of three percussionists and I just wrote out about twenty four or twenty five rhythms that were odd rhythms –really odd time signatures that I just made up, like a 22/8 or a 15/8, these different, strange time signatures and then find a combination or a pattern within it, whether it was 3+3+3+2 or any combination of different elements, even triplets. Then I went into a studio and did a bunch of sessions with these players, and one of my favorites was this 22/8 pattern. Shortly thereafter I was working with an orchestra and thought, “oh, I really want to try and have them play in this pattern.” Lo and behold, it was something Taylor really liked and was able to turn it into a main title piece. And, again, he wanted something that was sort of dirty and uncomfortable and dark; I can’t remember if he described it this way, but I think about it as: you take a window and you painted it black with black paint, and then you start scraping little moments of light away. The contrast of these little oasis moments musically are really only gong to work affectively if they are set on a black background, so the opening title is really trying to set the table for the complexity of this story, especially with the way Taylor writes characters, there are no pure good, no pure evil – there’s a complexity to a character that I thought the unique time signature really echoed in the opening title.
Listen to the main title music from SPECIAL OPS: LIONESS:
Q: You’ve described your score as having an “eclectic musical palette” – how did you arrive at this sonic texture, and would you discuss how it’s been developed throughout the series’ episodes?
Andrew Lockington: I wish I had a really good film school answer for that, but the reality is: I took a whole bunch of sounds I liked and threw they up against each other to see how they would work; and the only qualifications for whether it belonged in the score was whether Joe or Cruz would have at some point in their lives heard or been exposed to an instrument like that in some way. Or even further, did it sound like an emotion or describe or emulate an emotion that they might be feeling. It built over time. Taylor loves orchestra and, like me, I think he recognizes that it’s not an instrumental element in film or series media that has to be explained, because it’s so synonymous with story-telling and how we hear story-telling with emotion; but, that said, I wanted to be really careful that there was a coldness and any of the writing I did, orchestrally, was never pure, it always had something to it that felt reserved or stoic, or stiff-upper-lip is how I thought of that.
It’s interesting, because most of the score is associated through the minds of Cruz and Joe, and Joe, played by Zoe Saldaña, is quite hardened and you get the sense that she’s had many years of this emotional wall that’s been up protecting her. Then you have Cruz, who we see that happen to her – we see the trauma that closes her, in terms of getting beaten up in a domestic violence situation she’s in, and even in Episode 2, where she endures that systematic training torture as well. So musically, there’s a theme that plays on her in both of those moments that is kind of the last glimpse we get of her emotional context before the iron curtain goes up and she’s blocked it off and, on the road, to being like Joe, being emotionally removed and really guarded. The great thing about the series is we get a glimpse of it, and then the wall goes up; and, as the series goes on, events unfold where you start to see cracks and you get that light emanating through again. The story-telling aspect of seeing the origin story of how Cruz gets to that state of mind allowed me musically to introduce that theme and that thematic family, so that when we do hear it later, we’re already aware if it, and it’s being withheld strategically.
Listen to “The Other Half,” via YouTube:
Q: You’ve also got a poignant motif for Joe and her surgeon husband, first heard in episode 1 when Joe arrives home and has a chat with her husband by their pool. What were your thoughts in creating this music for and how it will run through the storyline?
Andrew Lockington: I never actually scored Neal (Dave Annable), the husband, but in Taylor’s writing, what was amazing about Neal – I think of it like an eclipse, in that you can’t look at the sun, but you can look at how the sun reflects off of something else. So, for me, Neal was a musical device that I could score what he sees in Joe, even though we don’t see that. So any time Joe is around Neal, it feels like the music can really score what his history with her, the person she obviously must be because he’s such an extraordinary human being and he’s chosen her and he sees the person he fell in love with and the person he married, even though, in the moment, that person may not be present and visible to the audience. So that ended up being a useful thing. Knowing Taylor, which was not by mistake; he’s very calculated and very strategic in how he figured these things out.
Taylor [was] saying: “Keep everyone a little bit off kilter. We don’t want anyone getting too comfortable, we don’t want it to feel like it’s a parade or a march; you want it to always feel a little bit off.”
Q: You touched on Zoe Saldaña’s character a bit – can you describe a bit more on her story arc in the series and how you treated her musically?
Andrew Lockington: The music, and certainly the writing in the script, sort of implies that Joe is quite hardened when we meet her, and music’s very careful with the exception of those Neal moments of not really playing her too emotional – the musical wants to be cognizant of that wall she’s put up but one of the great things that happens to her throughout the series, and I think it’s as a result of that very first incident when she’s forced to euthanize a member of her team who’s been captured and will get tortured. Joe had to make this call and while it’s quite horrific we all feel that, at the moment, it’s the most humane thing she can do. As the series goes on, that affects her and as much as she says in that opening episode that she’s going to be cold and not make friends with the next one, etc. It opens a fissure in that exterior wall and her humanity, her compassion starts to come out more in later episodes and we get to know her as a character. Musically, it allows me to expand upon what music needs to have for the exterior, and it evolves over the course of the series as the story evolved and you start to really understand her dilemma, sort of the battle between the head and the heart, choosing country over family, and the trauma that she has in dealing with both. For the music, Taylor and I talked early on about the impact on her – the domestic versus the field work, it’s one in the same – they’re both wounds, they’re both traumatizing for her, they’re both things she must work through even though they’re completely different worlds.
Listen to the track “300 Yards” via YouTube:
Q: Without any spoilers, are you able to describe briefly where the music may be going in the rest of the season?
Andrew Lockington: The dark, gritty side of the music – and, again, what I loved about the unique, unusual time signature is from Taylor saying “Keep everyone a little bit off kilter. We don’t want anyone getting too comfortable, we don’t want it to feel like it’s a parade or a march; you want it to always feel a little bit off.” So, what happens as the season goes on, as you have little moments where the team, which has jelled and they have the Quick Response Force, the QRF team, has this ritual and a very rehearsed approach to how they do things. But musically, that whole idea that being slightly off and using eighth notes and having these different time signatures echoes the fact that things aren’t going as smoothly as they’re supposed to go, and the training and the rituals and the repetition of these exercises gradually start to, not disintegrate, but show their wear and tear. Musically, we’re able to do that and go into that world more. Some people might see it as, oh, it’s going into these time signatures because it’s a cultural thing – but it isn’t. It’s, like I said, taking all these musical elements and unique time signatures and putting them all into a blender and smearing that onto the script, saying this is the language in which we’re scoring this world, whether it’s in America, whether it’s in Washington, whether it’s overseas, it’s all going to have this recipe in varying degrees and varying measurements of the ingredients.
Listen to the track “Q.R.F.”
POACHER (2023): A group of Indian Forest Service officers, NGO workers, police constables and Good Samaritans risk their lives trying to track down the biggest elephant ivory poachers in the history of India and bring them to justice.
Q: I also wanted to ask about a recent series you scored, POACHER, about a group of Indian Forest Service officers, who are trying to track down a group of elephant ivory poachers. You rejoined director Richie Mehta, who you worked with on DELHI CRIME [2019] and several other projects. What can you tell us about scoring this project?
Andrew Lockington: I’m still waiting to finish – I’m talking to them today, waiting to hear on the exact release plan. It’s an extraordinary true story about the investigation and the police work leading up to the largest arrest and the largest seizure of stolen ivory in Indian history – and it wasn’t very long ago – I think it was 2015 that it actually happened, which is so long after everybody thought that this whole practice and situation had long since been solved. It’s based on a true story. The writing is spectacular, and I love working with Richie – we’ve worked together probably for 15 or 16 years. I got to do some interesting things with the score. We’d originally talked about going and recording elephant sounds for it. I realized that if I went into the bush and was able to get some sounds recorded, that would be one thing – one version which is the very typical trumpeting that you hear of an elephant signaling for a human to leave. It’s their alarm call. But there’s this entire language of elephant sounds and elephant communications that I wouldn’t get. So I did a fair bit of research and we were lucky to get in touch with some of the forefront researchers of elephant language and get access to their recordings which they’d assembled over thirty or forty years by putting microphones into the jungle in India and they’d got some incredible sounds that I was then able to manipulate into musical elements – drones and rhythmic and things, that I don’t think you’ll listen to and say “That sounds like an elephant!” But it’s a unique and apropos way of scoring elephants for this score.
Q: I’m looking forward to watching this – I follow a lot of nature documentaries and something like this, catching perpetrators of horrible crimes like elephant tusk poaching, is really a touchstone for me.
Andrew Lockington: Exactly. I’m really excited about this project. If it’s something that you follow, you will find it fascinating. Richie is very highly regarded in India for his dramatic work and for taking on some difficult cultural storylines and exposing a lot of behind-the-scenes of things that are going on. It ‘s a tremendous piece of writing and it’s a tremendous story, but the fact that it’s such a true, real story is fantastic. I’ve always thought he should be commended for how true he stays to the truth, because he recognized that, for so many people, their only source of education on these things is the dramatic entertainment that they see. It’s important that it is an accurate as possible.
Q: Yes. I remember watching his first season of DELHI CRIME, it was just marvelous, along with your score, to make that as real as it is and going through the various investigations to crack down on a horrible gang rape situation.
Andrew Lockington: I learned so much working with him, because growing up when I did and part of the music scene at that time, you go: “Oh great, this is set in Java, let me look at Javanese gamelan. It’s a very literal paint-by-numbers: “here’s my set of tools to score this with,” and the projects I have done with Richie have not been that at all. We’ve said, “Hey let’s come up with this gritty sound that doesn’t have any cultural representation.” Even the elephant thing, we both said, “If anyone picks up on this being an elephant sound, we haven’t done our jobs properly!” It must be a piece of the DNA that’s subliminal but not conscious. So, it’s been a really great experience and I’ve learned a lot working with him.
MAYOR OF KINGSTOWN: Kingstown, Michigan, is a fictional company town where the business is incarceration. The McLusky family have been keeping the peace in Kingstown for decades, acting as the moderators between the street gangs, prisoners, guards, and the cops. Tackling themes of systemic racism, corruption, and inequality, the series provides a stark look at their attempt to bring order and justice to a town that has neither.
Q: Then a couple of years ago you scored the drama-thriller series, MAYOR OF KINGSTOWN, which you’d briefly mentioned earlier, for Taylor Sheridan and Paramount+. What did the scoring this series entail?
Andrew Lockington: The fictional series follows Mike McLusky, who is played by Jeremy Renner – he’s a former convict in a high-security penitentiary. He’s now out and is an advocate deal maker for people in prison who are basically trying to keep the peace between the lawmakers and the gangs and various incarcerated groups. One really cool thing Taylor and I did was, we came up with the idea of going into the penitentiary where they were shooting, prior to shooting, and recording a number of medieval instruments in the actual penitentiary. One of the true things I learned about this penitentiary where they were shooting was that the largest riot in the history of the country (this was shot in Canada) took place at that penitentiary – it was all around the fact that they had a bell in the middle of the atrium that would ring to signify end of day, meal time, outside time, etc. But it was so loud and so obnoxious and offensive that there was a massive riot with the initial purpose of capture and destroying this bell. It had such a representation of torture for the inmates. So, I went on a tour of the penitentiary and its sound was really oppressive and offensive – it’s this big old 200-hundred-year-old stone penitentiary and the acoustics are such that any kind of sound that you play in it gets this standing wave which assumes the almost same frequency to it. The idea was, Mike McLusky has been imprisoned for a long time, so maybe in his head, that’s what he hears, even when he’s out driving the streets. Any time we score him, we’d give it that signature reverb sound. Like he’s forever branded, sonically, with this sound.
So, I brought a bunch of my favorite musicians and moved in. Halfway through the first session, the first morning we were there, I leaned over and I touched the mallet, because I was playing with the group, and I hit one of the gates of the cell and the entire cell wall resonated! We all had this Eureka moment where we thought, “wow – it would be way cooler if we brought the drums down and we just started playing in the prison!” So, we walked around with tele-bows and mallets and hammers, and we started playing those rhythmic patterns that I’d written, but we played them on the actual prison gates and walls and doors and things. It became the backbone of the whole score.
Listen to the track “History” from MAYOR OF KINGSTOWN, via YouTube:
ATLAS (forthcoming): A bleak-sounding future, where an AI soldier has determined that the only way to end war is to end humanity.
Q: What’s coming up next for you that you can talk about?
Andrew Lockington: I’m currently in the middle of writing a film called ATLAS, with Brad Peyton (SAN ANDREAS, DAYBREAK, RAMPAGE, FRONTIER). We met when I did the first JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (2008) film, and then in the sequel (JOURNEY 2: MYSTERIOUS ISLAND) he was hired as the new director to do it. So, we met on that film and now I think this marks our eighth project together. ATLAS is a sci-fi film starring Jennifer Lopez for Netflix, a fantastic film! She’s in a role we’ve never seen her in before and she knocks it out of the park! She’s very, very good in this movie. It’s one of those stories that works as an action movie, but it also works on all these other layers and levels, so as a composer it’s a real gift to get to score those kinds of films where you can hit at and help all these underlying layers of the onion.
Special thanks to Alix Becq-Weinstein and Jana Davidoff of Rhapsody PR for facilitating this interview. For more details about the composer, see his website http://www.andrewlockington.com/
SPECIAL OPTS: LIONESS is now playing on Paramount+
Purchase/Stream the soundtrack album for SPECIAL OPTS: LIONESS here
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Overviews: Soundtrack Reviews:
BLOODY FURY/Susan DiBona & Salvatore Sangiovanni/MovieScore Media – digital/Kronos Records - CD
BLOODY FURY is an Italian-styled short animated Western movie with an ecological message. Directed by Jordan Incostant, the titular character is one of the last red wolves remaining in the old West. He decides to avenge his family after they have been mercilessly wiped out by humans. But is revenge the best solution to find the way to redemption? Starring Bill Nighy and James Phelps in an interesting take on the Western genre that aims to raise awareness about the impact humans are having on animals and the environment. This score is the work of the dynamic duo of American-born composer Susan DiBona and her Italian composing partner Salvatore SanGiovanni have worked around the world on nearly 50 original film and television scores as well as music for commercials, opera, games, top 40 pop music, musical theater, and ballet since creating The Villa Studios Praia a Mare in southern Italy. “In this score, we do our best to pay homage to the greats like Aaron Copland, Elmer Bernstein, Carl Stalling and Ennio Morricone, and also express our own personal, modern composition and orchestration style. It’s all about timeless melodies and capturing that special Western energy!” write the composers. The score for BLOODY FURY resonates both the Italian/Euro western and the American westerns and includes many of the now established and readily associated musical sounds and instrumentation from both which were created by the likes of cinematic giants Ennio Morricone and Elmer Bernstein to mention just two. DiBona & Sangiovanni have crafted an orchestral score with a variety of Italian Western configurations, including references to Morricone, Elmer Bernstein, and Aaron Copland, not to mention playing the very same saloon piano that was used in DJANGO UNCHAINED. The score, like the film, is necessarily short (23 tracks of 29 minutes total length), but it’s a splendid mix of the Italian and Hollywood Western musical sensibilities, with a few touches of the comedic as serves the animated narrative, but it’s primary focus is on settling the musical Old West. The main theme opens the album, introduced briefly with a powerful guitars and brass and intoned Edda Del’Orso style by DiBona; it is reprised here and there through the album (wonderfully, and again in brief, in “His Name Is Bloody Fury”) and closing over the End Titles with a splendid rendition for trumpet and strings, with an interlude for soft piano interlude and Morricone-styled string section, concluding with brief rolling timpani and a sharp trumpet declaration. That trumpet element is reprised with piano and a strident string melody in the delightful “Little Wolf Dancing.” (Review continues below)
Listen to the opening main theme from BLOODY FURY, via YouTube:
There’s another short but very provocative element in “Siamo Anche Rimasti in Tre” (“We Were Also Three”) for acoustic guitar, castanets, ratchets and the like. “Shot on Sad Hill” (a clear reference to a certain cemetery in a certain notable Leone movie) offers some low, haunting phrases with wood block and various sonic elements; “Dark Memories” is a dissonantly snarling, howling mix of sound design, while the previous “Steampunk Taser” offers a somewhat lightly breed of eerie sound mixing; “Slow Motion Renegades” gives the electric guitars and bass a thorough workout; “The Moral Of The Story” is a delightfully jaunty take on the main title for low, growing brass, piano, bells, piping winds, bells and the like; and DiBona and Sangiovanni share choir voices in the growing title rendering, “Chop Chop.”What Spaghetti Western movie would work without a “Big Saloon Fight,” and this one will definitely energize your speakers with its roiling piano, dirty tremolo guitars, drumkit, fiddles, and smoking brass intonations. The score concludes with “The Wolf, The Legend (End Titles)” but there are 6 splendid tracks yet to listen to: there’s an excellent piano and strings lullaby in “Notturno Per Un Piccolo Lupetto “(Nocturnal For A Little Wolf”) sung by DiBona, and a lovely orchestral rendition of it that closes out the album. A thoroughly enjoyable and affecting cue, and a couple versions of a delightful ragtime piano piece with “Buffalo Rag,” (the first one segues into the dark, haunting twangs of the brooding “Nefarious”); the full version is provided later and an alternate, “Buffalo Shuffle,” is enjoyed on the second track to last track. A thoroughly enjoyable score which sounds much longer than its 29 minutes and will prompt repeated listening. MovieMusicInternational’s Jon Mansell writes notes for the CD edition. For more information and more sample tracks, see MovieScore Media for the digital release; see Kronos Records for the limited edition CD (strictly limited to 300 copies). Either release will leave you pleased and make a great addition to the collection of the lovers of the genre.
Listen to the track “Shot on Sad Hill:”
BUNKER/Andrew Morgan Smith/MovieScore Media – digital – CD on demand*
Released last February, this is the original score from the 2022 horror thriller feature film directed by Adrian Langley, starring Roger Clark, Luke Baines, and Kayla Radomski, produced by Buffalo FilmWorks and Crossroad Productions, and released by Blue Fox Entertainment (USA). The story follows a group of soldiers who become trapped in a bunker during World War I, and are faced with an ungodly presence that slowly turns them against each other. The music is composed by Andrew Morgan Smith (THE OLD WAY, GIRLFRIENDSHIP, PRESENCE, SINFIDELITY, JEEPERS CREEPERS 3), who commented: “BUNKER was a blast to work on. When the director, Adrian, first contacted me he specifically wanted to have a score in the neoclassical world. It needed to oscillate from pure horror to something far more classical in orientation. He challenged me by asking, ‘If a composer from the ‘40s wrote a horror score, what would it sound like?’ With that challenge I dove in and started creating. In addition to recording the score with the Budapest Symphony Orchestra, I incorporated an instrument I affectionately call, the Piano Guts which is the soundboard of an upright piano with its strings still on it. I plucked it, struck it, bowed it, and rubbed it to create some wild noises and textures. That made for a wild soundscape for this body horror extravaganza.” This orchestral palette gives the film an urgent panic borne of an ongoing ferocity that filters through the scenario. “Bunker Overture” begins with a musical lurch – a wild blast of orchestra which flows into very heavy percussive footsteps - by frightening string figures. It slows after half a minute into a roiling cadence of low brass beneath a higher presence of strings and various other instrumental structures which creates a very frightening growth until they finally dissolve into silence. This onrushing, encroaching musical treatment evokes a roiling fury that recurs in many of the tracks, maintaining a sense both of anticipation and a frightening jolt. (review continues below):
Listen to Andrew Morgan Smith’s “Bunker Overture:”
Smith builds on this throughout the score, both in hesitant trepidations and in roaring, horrific revelation, and he accomplishes this purely through orchestral means; aside from the Piano Guts instrument, this is primarily a live orchestra score. There are a few softer moments, such as the end of “Gas Canister!,” parts of “Driven Mad,” the opening of “Vomitous Mass” (but certainly not the middle, where it becomes a roiling mass of surging) pounding drums, ongoing shrieking violin strokes, the occasion light piano tinkles, finally calming to a drifting resonance of low, resonant strings. “Digging” offers a mix of hesitant strings and unsettling brasses and winds, all the more to maintain your suspense quotient. The 3:41 “Roots” mixes tinkling piano keys with eerie, malleable string figures, growing rapidly and then fading out, flowing into foraging strokes of strings that itself faded out before settling into collectively more violins rising upward to be joined by low brass intonations; a splendidly suspenseful and organized track, ending in what sound like eerie wailing voices. “The Radio Bleeds” continues the rising suspense with a driving pattern of the Dies Irae, that frequently utilized sequence for the Requiem Mass as well as dozens of horror film moments. “Swashbuckling” provides plenty of urgency in its scattering elements suggesting a very horrific kind of poorly heroic swaggering, culminating in a rising growth of string elements joined by more low brasses and tentative notes from the winds, all gathering into a intensifying cadence that drops suddenly off and is silent. “Escape” and “Outside the Bunker” offers a refreshing respite after the horrors encountered in the Bunker – but of course this is a horror film so nothing ends quite as comfortably, with “Outside the Bunker” culminating in an onrushing mix of agitating sound, with “The Griever” offering a dark sonic intrusion of howling menace and male choir propelled by heavy strings, brass, and pounding percussion emanating with a frightful sonic disturbance; with the sad melodic flavors of strings offering the true, dark ending of the story. This is a powerful and thrilling horror score which will keep you awake at night, which is just what the story needs.
*CD on demand here. For more details, see MovieScore Media.
Watch the Bunker BTS Scoring Session, via the composer and YouTube:
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INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS/Denny Zeitlin/Intrada – CD
DEADLY BLESSING/James Horner/Intrada – CD
Two unique horror films have finally received their world premiere soundtracks from Intrada recently. The label has, er, blessed us with the premiere release of James Horner’s 1981 score to the Universal Pictures film DEADLY BLESSING, a Wes Craven horror film starring Ernest Borgnine, Lois Nettleton, Maren Jensen, Susan Buckner (both women making their last feature film screen appearances), Sharon Stone in an early role. The film is about a strange figure committing murder in a contemporary community that is not far from another community that believes in ancient evil and curses. Occurring relatively early in his career, this is the first time Horner’s DEADLY BLESSING score has made it to a soundtrack CD. Horner composed a score featuring both orchestra and chorus, along with a large string section, augmented with solo woodwinds, piano, chimes, and percussion. The score is presented here from the only surviving complete set of ¼” stereo elements in largely good sound. While the music elements were originally dubbed at the slower tape speed of 7 1/2 i.p.s., but they were complete, including all takes and pickups as well as all choral overlays, allowing the label to preserve the music for a very satisfying listen for the first time on CD. Young Horner’s score is a splendid horror/suspense score, with just enough peaceful Goldsmith-esque music to set the scene before the deadly blessing of tension, and multiple configurations of psychological horror and unholy choral intonations once the movie really gets underway to keep the viewers shaking in their seats. “The ghost of Jerry Goldsmith’s THE OMEN hovers prominently over the DEADLY BLESSING soundtrack,” noted Tim Grieving in his liner notes… “but poking thorough the dark OMEN shadows are beams of the composer Horner would quickly become... The pastoral theme, [a] lyrical ballad, gliding over rolling arpeggios and shifting chords with just a perfume of magic, is the kind of heart-stirring them that Horner soon became famous for… [beyond the main theme’s pastoral refrains… the score skitters and bursts with spidery aleatoric effects, eerie ambiance, and sudden orchestral chaos.” A well-crafted horror score, available at Intrada here.
Joining DEADLY BLESSING is a world premiere expanded 2-CD release of groundbreaking score for Philip Kaufman’s terrifying 1978 remake of the 1956 sci-fi masterpiece, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS starring Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, and Brooke Adams while alien visitors exchange San Francisco humanity into an invasion of pod people. American jazz pianist and composer Denny Zeitlin was snatched to provide the film’s score, his only film composition, but the score is a very effective mix of jazz and symphonic orchestra, giving the film a valuable sense of shock and awe as the storyline plays out. United Artists released a 39-minute album of highlights in 1978, but the new Intrada 2-CD release proffers the full hour-long score plus a variety of “extra’s” The original 1978 album is also included for good measure. The composer’s harmonic vernacular produces an unusual but creepy haunting sound design while striking trumpet figures accompanied by orchestra create an equally distinctive sonic vibe, offering a very human sensibility for these characters as they investigate what’s happening to the people in their city. He adds a few touches of eerie electronica (“Panicked Man Is Killed,” “Symphony of Grotesque,” “Matt Finds The Real Liz”) as well as eerie intonations from symphonic instruments treated with unusual patterns that create an palpable and ongoing anxiety (“Bloody Stiff,” “Liz Won’t Be Coming Home,” “Bureaucratic Montage I and II”). The CD may not gather as many repeated listenings as, say, the Horner album, but it is an expressive work whose genuine emotional/suspenseful highlights for orchestra. It’s a very opportune release to enjoy (and be endangered by) the unusual sonic ambiance that the composer maintains for this very effective horror score. For more details, see Intrada.
Watch Intrada’s trailer for the INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS soundtrack:
MATCHMAKING/Frank Ilfman/Kronos Records – CD
2022’s MATCHMAKING is an entertaining and good-hearted romantic comedy that gives a light Orthodox twist to Romeo and Juliet (sans tragedy), in that Modi is smitten by Nechama, who is of Middle Eastern origin and thus Modi’s family refuses the engagement. The score is delicately and enthusiastically scored by Frank Ilfman (GUNPOWDER MILKSHAKE, BIG BAD WOLVES, THE ETRUSCAN SMILE, MANAYEK) using a variety of old and new sounds instrumental textures largely treated in a jaunty Balkan style for much of the film, while finding elements of comedy and melancholy as the film needs it. Ilfman recruits The Grozdan Band for most of his instrumental palette (featuring Ilfman on Farfisa, Roland CR78, Minimoog and Piano) providing both a setting for the storyline and its Jewish Orthodox society as well as painting the light-hearted romance with an emotive bearing as the romance plays out. The film was the biggest box office success of the year in Israel, fashioning softer, subtle interludes that effectively add depth to the emotional side of the narrative that affects the story’s sense of fragility and romance. The opening and concluding tracks are particularly effective, mixing boisterous, while the --- “Note For Love” captures the troubled mood of the would-be couple. The CD is a limited edition of 300 copies, features album notes by Jon Mansell, and offers quite an expressive listen. For details and more sample tracks, see Kronos.
Listen to the track “Note for Love” via YouTube:
EL PODEROSO VICTORIA/Fernando Velázquez/Quartet Records – CD
Quartet Records presents the new score by renowned composer Fernando Velázquez (THE IMPOSSIBLE, A MONSTER CALLS, CRIMSON PEAK, HERCULES) for a Mexican film written and directed by Raúl Ramón. In an unusual stylistic mash-up of westerns and Ealing comedies, EL PODEROSO VICTORIA tells the story of the town of La Esperanza in the year 1936. The town’s mining industry – its principal economic activity – must close down, and along with the closing of the mine comes news that the local railroad route will be canceled. The people of the town, finding themselves in need for a train, decide to build a steam train with their own hands to prevent the town from falling into disgrace and oblivion. This is a delightfully melodic orchestral score Velázquez provides an impressive, full-epic symphonic score. Opening with the melodic “Creditos,” Velázquez introduces the local townfolk with a splendidly wistful overture for winds over piano and strings, with a soft horn piping in after a while. The music suggests the homespun times of the townsfolk. “Estación Esperanza” follows with a jaunty, tune, as if giving the toiling townsfolk a sense of dedication and pride, while “No mires atrás” (“Do Not Look Back”) resonates with a discouraging air. As the situation intensified with the locals, the score mixes melodic elements with discouraging moods and concerned developments, delicate maneuvers interspersed with heroic temperaments; “Perdido en el desierto” (Lost in the Desert) mixed oboe with low flutes and dusty rattles, creating a dangerous aura, while “Una nueva esperanza” (A New Hope) provides a triumphant victory. “Lo imposible solo tarda un poco más” (Impossible takes just a little bit longer) soars with a happy recognition as the townspeople’s goal is in sight, with the jubilant “Nadie podrá llamarnos perdedores´” (No one can call us losers), followed by
“La odisea del Poderoso Victoria” (The Odyssey of Mighty Victory) as the townsfolk recognize a happy accomplishment with a joyful reprise of the main theme – breaking midway for some low oboe figures before repeating the victory tone again. Velázquez’s music is encouraging, drifting into uncertainty, but finally reveling in proud accomplishment. It’s essentially a Western-styled score constructed around a modern orchestra but treated with the confidence of a community dedicated to solving a difficult challenge. With 27 tracks and 72 ½ minutes of splendid, pure film music composed as in the good old days – romantic, tuneful, with a radiant love theme, EL PODEROSO VICTORIA is fun, emotional music, beautifully miked for a vivid, boisterous sound, meticulously performed by the Basque National Orchestra under the baton of the composer. The score is available in a limited edition of 500 units. See Quartet Records.
Listen to the track “Un brindis por el Poderoso Victoria” (“A Toast to Mighty Victory”), via YouTube:
HANNIE CAULDER/Ken Thorne/Quartet Records – CD
In the Wild West, vicious but bumbling bandit brothers Emmett (Ernest Borgnine), Frank (Jack Elam) and Rufus Clemens (Strother Martin) botch a heist, and in anger they rape local woman Hannie Caulder (Raquel Welch), murder her spouse, and destroy her home. Set on retribution, Hannie seeks out bounty hunter Thomas Luther Price (Robert Culp), who helps her learn to shoot – a skill that she’ll need as she attempts to track down and take out the merciless Clemens brothers. I’ve always enjoyed this film since first seeing it in theaters in ‘71, although at that time I was unaware of how the rape-revenge aspect of the scenario affected a female audience, or how that was a bona-fide genre until I began to watch films like I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and many others in later years. But this is an excellent revenge Western and, despite the unfortunate choice of giving the bandit brothers a comedic presence rather than the despicable rapists/murderers they surely were. It’s both unique to see a female star in the lead role in a Western and a very good Western revenge tale in its own right. Robert Culp turns in what I believe is his best performance as the gunfighter who reluctantly teaches Hannie to shoot, and Welch turns in an excellent performance as well, showing that she’s more than a magnificent beauty but she fits into these character very well. Unique at the time was to see Christopher Lee, released from his Hammer horror films for essentially the first time since his leading Hammer roles, as the kindly gunsmith who makes a pistol especially for Hannie, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss it scene with Diana Dors as a barmaid in the final saloon sequence (her role was cut significantly). There’s also an uncredited Stephen Boyd as the mysterious Preacher who coaches Hannie from afar at the end of the film.
Ken Thorne (1924-2014, INSPECTOR CLOUSEAU, SUPERMAN II, SUPERMAN III, A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM) provides a fine Western-styled score which really brings to life the story with a mix of Americana-Italiana Western (favoring the former). Thorne complements the film’s wide variety of influences, from the rugged sounds of the Southern setting to evocative montages of Hannie’s development and fierce action cues for the various raids. With a handful of brutally dissonant passages as well as some necessary comedic cues thrown in, HANNIE CAULDER is colorful and Coplandesque, with a few Morriconesque touches included. An intended LP mock-up was previously released on an unauthorized promotional mono CD. Quartet’s new premiere CD includes the complete score (29 tracks, including several alternates versions) – almost entirely in expansive stereo – restored and mastered by Chris Malone from pristine master tapes vaulted at Paramount. The CD is rounded out by the theme song “Life Never Is Easy” performed by Bobby Hanna. The lavishly illustrated 12-page liner notes by the late Gergely Hubai discuss the film and the score with a cue-by-cue breakdown, explaining every step of the rebuilding process. The film itself was recently released with a special features-rich Blu-Ray by Olive Films. For details on the CD and several sample tracks, see Quartet Records.
Listen to the Main Theme from HANNIE CAULDER via a sample compilation on YouTube:
LONDON CLASS/Ashraf Elziftawi/Elziftawi – digital
This self-released soundtrack album from Egyptian composer Ashraf Elziftawi (SHADOW, ROOM 207, A HUSBAND’S DIARY, SECRET FILE, 11.11, SHAQAH 6) is a sublime orchestral dramatic score favoring strings, piano, and a bit of winds. The film is a drama telling the story of a group of Arab students who move to London to study during the 1980s, bringing with them their different ideas, traditions, and dreams, to begin stories of love, jealousy, and conspiracies. The 27-episode series premiered on March 23, 2023, and the 35-track soundtrack offers an hour and 15 minutes of persuasively evocative dramatic music as these students learn to filter in with London society and finding a place for their own traditions among class British classmates. (review continues below)
Listen to the track “Beginnings” from LONDON CLASS, via YouTube:
The music is largely quietly, albeit a soft, quiet beauty with occasional opportunities for drama, such as the repetitive low cello strains of “Danger Approaching,” basked by higher string lines and a growing drum pulse echoing the cello work as they grow in force. Low winds and oboe joined by a solo violin (over string choir) offers a distressful emotion in “Misery” until the addition of higher violins and a solo flautist created a rising pattern of happy accomplishment. In “Lies,” a rhythmic vibrato or tremolo of violins in disturbingly steady tempo is joined by a soft oboe with a percussive or electronic rustle at the midpoint suggests a deception revealed. “Lost Souls” presents the main theme, at first from wiry low strings, then with a rising rise sense of achievement, celebrated by a drum roll at its end. “Beautiful Memories” provides pizzicato strings underlying higher measures, before merging with the main theme from oboe and other winds, with high strings reprising the flute solo from before. “Hostage,” very near the end of the album, opens quietly with low, hushed strings dappled with furtive piano notes and low tempi – moving into the main violin theme a way in before opening into a strident march for heavy strings, tympani, wavering, forceful tempi, and rustling cymbal all in a determined force, as more wavering violin propels the sonic company forward. The score is overall quite attractive with its various flavors, efficient in its presentation of the story and sustaining in its musical appeal. The soundtrack is available digitally from Amazon, Apple Music, Spotify and other digital sources. Also worth checking out from Elziftawi on mp3 are these downloads from the usual streaming sources: ROOM 207 (2022 film: Upon starting his post as a hotel receptionist, Gamal hears the rumors about the mysterious Room 207 and finds himself obsessed with discovering the truth), 11.11 (2023 film: a drama thriller, a story of three people who are put on path with a stay bullet coming out of a troubled lawyer’s gun when he decides to commit suicide in his car) and A HUSBAND’S STORY aka Muzakirat Zoug (2023 TV series).
Listen to the track “Hostage” from LONDON CLASS via YouTube:
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE/Lorne Balfe/La-La Land Records – CD
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to hold onto your seats, as the release of the Digital, Vinyl, and CD Soundtrack of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE (MUSIC FROM THE MOTION PICTURE) is among us (DEAD RECKONING PART TWO is set to be released on June 28, 2024). Making his return to the franchise, GRAMMY®-winning composer Lorne Balfe has created a score that revels in the relentless action of the film bringing a bigger sound than ever before. The album is available on digital, vinyl and CD editions, and, in September, on a 2XLP vinyl album (see VINYL news below). releasing through MONDO Records. The 2-disc CD album released from La-La Land Records on July 25, 2023 - and then available at major retailers on August 22 – Includes a bonus track of the "Teaser Trailer" music that was released digitally by Paramount Music last summer. Of the score, Lorne Balfe comments: “It’s always exciting and thrilling to score a film which has such a legacy as MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE. I first began writing for this project over 3 years ago and the goal was to create an adrenaline fueled, emotional and exhilarating score to match the pulse pounding intensity of the film. For this score, we were able to record in cities which form the locations of the filming, bringing a different level of authenticity and emotional connection to the music. We recorded Choirs in Venice, The Swiss Drums Corps in Switzerland, Orchestra’s in Venice, Vienna, and London along with an epic bongo session made up of 35 players, it sounded incredible in the room and a nice ode to Fallout. This is by far my most expansive score to date with 555 musicians playing across 5 cities. It was an honor to work with such world-class talents and an excellent team that helped cultivate a finished score that is truly special.” (review continues below)
Listen to the Lorne Balfe’s track “I was Hoping It Would Be You” from MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING PART ONE, via YouTube:
In this M:I Iteration, Ethan Hunt and his IMF team must track down a dangerous weapon before it falls into the wrong hands. The DNA of Lalo Schifrin’s timeless M:I theme, of course, is front and center throughout the DEAD RECKONING score, in the opening titles, in Ethan’s theme, and during elements of the action, but there’s also plenty of new material that is bolstered throughout the film. Ethan’s theme, for example, finds elements of chord progressions and darker musical spaces, “There were certain things on bridges and certain relationships that come to an end,” Balfe told Variety earlier this month. “You see a totally different side to Ethan. You see someone who is protective and driven by different things, and that’s where that emotion came from… I went back and looked at Sergei Rachmaninoff and Igor Stravinsky and reinvented what was already there. It’s what the audience relates to and their connection with it, but it’s twisted differently … It was about taking that and delving into the emotional and tragic vocabulary.”
It took over 555 musicians with sessions around Europe – including Rome, Vienna, Venice, Switzerland, and London – to put together the score for MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE,” Lorne Balfe told Variety. The composer started writing the music almost three years ago, and “at last count, there was over 14 hours of music recorded,” Balfe said. However, only two-and-a-half hours or so made it into the final cut of the film. The score is highly percussive and driving, both within the use of Balfe’s own main theme and M:I theme of course, but there are moments of softer sinewy lines and wiry echoes (“A Ghost in the Machine”), eerie, tentative cadences rising near the end into an engaging coda (“The Sum of Our Choices”), melodic soft piano and string lines (“He Calls Himself Gabriel”), cautious strings roiling into progressive percussion effects and repeated statements from brass and rumbling effects moving into dark keyboard figures, bristly strains of strings, ending in a gathering of sharp strings and low brass swells (“You Are Dunn”), supple and introspective string patterns ending with low brass intonations (“Ponte Dei Conzafelzi” [a bridge in Venice]), similarly reprised with rapid percussion, string vibes, ending in a vociferous reprise of the main theme (“You Stop the Train”), and a mix of cautious string lines, adding low brass importing a repeating figure surging slightly into the M:I theme heard from brass or winds, but fairly restrained throughout (“This Was the Plan” – at 8:22, the score’s longest cue), and the like. These various elements offer the score’s more, not so much melodic but rhythm and modulation driven, serving as slightly escalating moments preparing for the more thunderous action moments that are distributed among the score elements. Then we have tracks like “I Was Hoping It Would Be You” and “I Missed the Train,” which are increasing in forward motion but not quite in the realm of active battle.
Listen to the track “Ponte Dei Conzafelzi,” via YouTube:
Those higher action moments create the increasingly propulsive action tracks driven from heavy drums and brass, full orchestra resonances, increasing full-on crescendos that really give the sonic action is full measure (“The Phantom,” “This Is Not A Dream,” “Get Out Now,” “Rush Hour in Rome,” “Hit it”, “A Most Probable Next,”
“Mask of Lies,” “Leap of Faith” and so on. Together these varieties of music give DEAD RECKONING its musical texture and drive while offering some diversity of musical extremes, giving the movie just what it needs – and providing an assortment of thoroughly enjoyable aural activity for the album listener on its own. It’s a very fine work on its own sonic measure, and quite possibly the best musical treatment in the M:I franchise yet. La-La Land’s CD edition, produced by Balfe and supervising music editor Cecile Tournesac, and mastered by Reuben Cohen, features art design by Dan Goldwasser and a 24-page CD booklet featuring a reversible front cover and a note from director Christopher McQuarrie.
Digital links to soundtrack: https://missionimpossible.lnk.to/deadreckoningAW
Link to CD soundtrack: https://lalalandrecords.com/mission-impossible-dead-reckoning-part-one-2-cd-set/
Listen to Lorne Balfe’s track “Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One,” via YouTube [it’s loud!]:
PATTIE ET LA COLÈRE DE POSÉIDON (EPIC TALES in US)/Olivier Cussac/MusicBox Records – CD
This animated feature film from France, directed by David Alaux, tells the story of a super smart and adventurous young mouse named Pattie and her feline companion, Sam. Life in Yolcos, a beautiful and prosperous port city in ancient Greece, is peaceful until the population is threatened by the wrath of Poseidon himself. A young, adventurous mouse, and the cat who adopted her, help the aged Jason and his Argonauts in their quest to save the city. After THE JUNGLE BUNCH, TERRA WILLY and PIL (all released by Music Box Records), Olivier Cussac provides a moving and classic fully orchestral adventure score, brimming with a wide array of musical styles and genres. The score is a mix of pure orchestral music and happy rock & roll with the latter infused by “Vers Trinactos,” a splendid electric guitar performance, “Regain” commands with both choir and electric guitars, “Rock On!” aligns with a straight on modern rock, and the synth-, guitar, and drum-machine propelled “Light Me Up!” concludes our rock idiom with a 70’s/80’s styled Euro-rock. It’s a thoroughly fun examination of Poseidon, Jason, the Argonauts, cyclops’s, the hydra, a kraken, and lots of Le péril in its musical delights as much as the film is with its animated presentation. The lively score is performed by the Orchestre National d’Île-de-France and conducted by Dirk Brossé. There’s also a cute vocal song, Un Espoir Pour Yolcos (A Hope For Yolcos), from cast members Emmanuel Curtil & Kaycie Chase, which is also offered as an instrumental. We end our enthused battle against Poseidon with the cute “Jason Et Ses Argonautes” for keyboard, whistler, and accordion riff. It’s all pure fun for the ear and, the film itself, a relaxing animated adventure for the senses! The album includes notes but only in French, and is available on CD from Music Box and also digitally from the usual sources. For more details, see Music Box Records.
SHOCK WAVES/Richard Einhorn/Howlin’ Wolf CD
In the 1976 zombie movie SHOCK WAVES, a group of vacationers on the tour ship of Captain Ben Morris (John Carradine) and his crew become stranded on a seemingly deserted island after their boat smashes into a huge ocean liner that appears mysteriously out of nowhere. The next morning, the ship is revealed to be the rotted-out hull of an old vessel. Exploring the island, the group find an old hotel; the remnants of a forgotten era and its sole occupant, a former Nazi SS Commander left there in involuntary exile during the closing days of WW2. The Commander (Peter Cushing) spins a terror tale to the unwitting visitors that the Nazis were working on a group of super soldiers amassed from serial murderers and homicidal maniacs. These killers could survive in any uninhabitable environment. The Commanders group was designed for the water and now that the island has fresh victims, the waterlogged Nazi undead have returned. SHOCK WAVES is a well done, low-budget independent film with very good production value in the water and on the land, boasting a fine cast with Carradine & Cushing, as well as Brooke Adams in her first role as the sole survivor of the zombie onslaught. Filmed in several locations in southern Florida, the film also benefits from an early all-electronic score from composer Richard Einhorn – his first film scoring assignment – which nicely fits the mood of the film. “SHOCK WAVES was… an unbelievably difficult process to put together, to work with the equipment back then,” Einhorn said in an interview for the 2014 Blue Underground Blu-Ray video. “I did most of the score with a four-track tape recorder that was in very bad condition, and with two synthesizers (Univox Mini-Korg and Maxi-Korg] and both of them were the first or second-generation synthesizers ever made by the company, which then went on to make some of the best synthesizers in the world. These particular ones were very sample; the Mini-Korg was a monophonic instrument – you could only play one note at a time. The Maxi-Korg had a whopping two-notes, but you could only play one note at a time… So, in order to get a chord, say, of ten notes, you had to overdub almost every single note individually in order to build up any sort of complicated texture.”
For what the composer had to work with in 1976, the SHOCK WAVE scores are both sublimely old-fashioned and terrifically effective for the style of the film itself. Opening with “The Deep End of Horror” (a deliciously Lovecraftian title), Einhorn presents a raucous range of frightening construction as low buzzing elements contrasting against shrill, abrasive whining and a recurring downward element of 4-note figures. An extremely effective preamble to where the music is going to be taking us, elevated by the Opening Titles and its wavering wails, sonic roars, and eerie, frightening sonorities. These are many more variants and sonic treatments, created necessarily through the confining, primitive days of what the earliest Korgs were able to eek out, and sustained by the efforts of Richard Einhorn whose efforts, now restored an integral presentation of a notable electronic horror score from the early days of the medium. Howlin’ Wolf Records originally released Einhorn’s SHOCK WAVES score in 2014 with a 29-track presentation of all that was available from that ancient, water-logged zombie score at that time, and made an album possible only because the composer discovered a lost tape that proved to contain those 29 tracks. Fortunately, further discoveries have allowed for an increase of five additional tracks, including a track inadvertently left off the 2014 album, a compelling 19½ minute “Film Music and Effects Suite,” two piano Demos, and a pair of radio spots, with all 25 tracks (61:22 min.) given some painstaking efforts in restoration to the best of currently modern ability and a worthwhile addition over the original release’s 31 minutes of music (largely accommodated by that sustaining and most welcome Music & Effects Suite). It’s deliciously miles away from modern electronic film music, and its uniquely primitive production offers is its most enjoyable attribute.
For more details, see Howlin’ Wolf Records.
STEELTOWN MURDERS/Sarah Warne/Silva Screen - digital
Silva Screen Records has digitally released Sarah Warne's plaintive soundtrack to BBC One’s true crime drama, STEELTOWN MURDERS. Based on real life events, the BBC Wales’ commissioned four-part series depicts the hunt for “The Saturday Night Strangler” who terrorized Port Talbot in the 1970s. The series is set in 1973 and then in 2000, when DNA breakthroughs helped finally catch the killer. Described by MSN as “a more thoughtful class of true crime drama” and by The Arts Desk as “a respectful, even affectionate piece of work”, the focus of the series is on mapping the toll of an unsolved murder on the people left behind in pain. Composer Sarah Warne exquisitely captures the series zeitgeist with her fragile orchestral score. Industrial percussion, haunting vocals and intense orchestral colors are fused together in the dark and poignant landscape of Steeltown Murders, performed by BBC National Orchestra of Wales. At its heart, the score evolves and transforms the traditional Welsh hymn tune ‘llef’, in the drawing together of a broken and harrowed South Wales community. A sense of resilience and ultimate catharsis are pursued in the music, beautifully performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, together with various additional soloists including voices, halldorophone, and guitars. The score is a persuasive array of these various sonic colorations, maintaining an aura of brooding danger, engaging mixtures of metallic over hushed choir voicings, echoing percussion timbres, and an effective assemblage of the fusion of integrated textures given both melodic and discordant treatments. It’s a fine score in all respects. To order, see Silva UK or SilvaUSA.
Listen to the STEELTOWN MURDERS Main Tites, via YouTube:
THE VICTORY OF JOAN OF ARC/Jared DePasquale/Audio Drama Score – digital soundtrack
Jared DePasquale’s latest audio drama score is one of the composer’s most fragrant, potent, and personal scores to date, and that’s saying a lot. The score honors the sad story of Joan of Arc and intensifies the audio narrative with music of great passion. The soundtrack music offers the fullest measure of DePasquale’s score as the drama plays out, while impassioned measures of strings and solo voice emphasize the drama partaking in the story. Solo elements of flute, oboe, English horn, and clarinet amplify powerful percussive-driven cadences of full orchestra and choir. The score offers a fervent listening experience on its own while providing a wide-ranging dramatic score to intensify the audiobook experience. The Victory of Joan of Arc is an award-winning Augustine Institute Radio Theatre Original Audio presentation, the remarkable true story of the 15th-century French peasant girl who claimed God had sent her to drive the English invaders out of France and place the true king on the throne. Featuring over 50 actors, cinematic sound, and original score, listeners will fully experience Joan’s relentless bravery and determination against all obstacles to change the course of history. DePasquale, who specializes in dramatic audio theatre scores, showcases a flutist named Kim Fleuchaus in the Joan of Arc score. “While Kim can play the notes on the page with such beauty and expression,” the composer said, “it’s her ability to improvise over scenes that makes her a true artist. I’ll give her basic direction in terms of range, rhythm, and basic pitch ideas, and she creates mood and textures that are ethereal and almost other-worldly.” The score also features vocals by DePasquale’s long-time collaborator, Sarah Van Der Ploeg. The digital soundtrack is available from Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and AppleMusic. For more information on the composer, see his website here. For details on The Victory Of Joan Of Arc audiobook, see Audible.com.
Listen to the track “The Sword of St. Catherine,” via YouTube:
Y TODOS ARDERÁN/Joan Vilà/MovieScore Media – digital & CD on demand*
In a small village in Leon, Spain, María José (Macarena Gomez) prepares to end her life after failing to get over the suicide of her bullied son years before. Everything changes when she receives a visit from Lucía, a strange little girl who could be connected to a local legend about stopping an impending apocalypse. With the enigmatic girl by her side, María José faces the corrupt community, triggering strange events and a series of horrific deaths among the local population. Y TODOS ARDERÁN (Everyone Will Burn) is a very compelling film whose music borders between the intimately beautiful (as evoked by the striking Main Theme) and the encroaching darkness of “The Creature” and the like. Describes the composer: “I started composing the music for the film months before shooting began. I love to work on different ideas by simply talking to the director or reading the script. From the beginning we wanted a very narrative soundtrack both melodically and instrumentally. Associating different melodies and instruments for different characters or situations, and depending on how the character lived the situation, the music varied. So, there’s a story arc from the beginning of the movie to the end. My intention was to write a very emotional soundtrack, so that the viewer could deeply connect with the characters, and in this way, the music would help the viewer experience the film at its maximum emotional expression.” The outstanding music, performed by the Budapest Symphony Orchestra and choir featuring piano, synths, and percussions, as well as violin solos by Maria Perera and cello solos by Eduard Raventós, proffers an excellent listening experience and a darkly brooding sense of trepidation as the music’s impulses push the story into the dangerous regions. Intricate violin bowing over shuddery string lines further suggest the dichotomy of beauty and horror that manifests itself in the film’s music as “The Legend” and “Town Boys” further creates a palpable sensation of growing fright with growing auras of suspense tracking against soft pianos and sinister violin figures. “The Funeral” provides a serene “Moonlight Sonata” for solo piano, while the following track, “The Mayor,” affords a powerful mix of tremolo strings infused by heavy timpano strikes, while rapid piano runs start “The Duel” off before strings, percussion, drums, accents of violins and soprano voice take the lead. Another popular piece, “Lucia’s Dance (Carmen)” resonates briefly with quiet disturbiana despite its inherent beauty, while a dark infusion of low bass open “Everyone Will Burn” before moving into a mix of sonic patterns, tones, quick violin tremolos, hand drum, and other semblances drifting around eerie whining and more, where a growing burning sound suggests a conflagration looming. “Lights Out” is another aggressive pattern for bowed and mercado strings, more of the whining tonalities and soft percussion beneath. “Blood Moon,” despite it’s title, is an exquisite mélange of strings; while “The Prophets” feature solo and massed violins consorting with a heavenly choir, ending in a striking solo piano variant of the main theme. The film concludes with “Finale (The Doors of Hell),” resonating with a repeated harpsichord pattern beneath menacing escalations of choir and growing, high sinewy patterns, concluding with the choir and solo violin fading into the darkness; while the soundtrack culminates in the “Waltz in C minor (End Credits)” for strings and rising choir, followed by a reprise of the Main Theme. Y TODOS ARDERÁN is a fascinating film with an equally captivating score; its mix of beauty and darkness makes for a highly appealing listen.
*CD on demand: https://wall.cdclick-europe.com/projects/y-todos-arderan-original-motion-picture-soundtrack
Watch a video on making the soundtrack:
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Film & TV Music News
Film music journalist Gergely Hubai has died on July 21st at the age of 38, as reported his family and other friends. This has been very sad news to the film music community. Gergely’s work in film music journalism has been very active and acclaimed; a knowledgeable friend to many on Facebook and elsewhere, he was the author of liner notes for many soundtrack labels over the years; his book Torn Music – Rejected Film Scores was a unique and essential guide and a frequently perused reference tool. Lost far too early, may his memory always remain among us, and we share our sincerest condolences to his family and friends. RIP, Sir.
The award ceremony for the 20th edition of SoundTrack-Cologne took place Friday, June 23, at the Comedia Theater in Cologne. The WDR Funkhausorchestra played pieces during the event by renowned film composers such as Rachel Portman, Natalie Holt, Carlos Rafael Rivera, and Mychael Danna; Danna received the Lifetime Achievement Award of STC 20. “Mychael Danna came to film music when that changed decisively,” said journalist Daniel Kothenschulte upon presenting the award to Danna. “We can also say that he has made a decisive contribution to the expansion of the sound language of cinema since the mid-1980s.”
With the latest Disney For Scores podcast, host Jon Burlingame sits down with Thomas Newman, the iconic composer whose latest work can be heard in Pixar’s new film Elemental. They talk about how Newman went about creating music and introducing vocal elements for the imaginary world of the film, as well as revealing the helpful advice Thomas’ cousin, the legendary Randy Newman, once gave him. Listen to the podcast on Spotify.
Volker Bertelmann will be honored for his life’s work at the 19th Zurich Film Festival with the Career Achievement Award. Under the alias Hauschka, Volker Bertelmann released several albums for piano and commissioned to compose music for television early in his career. Later he composed the scores for numerous outstanding films, which both celebrated their European premieres at past editions of the Zurich Film Festival. At this year’s Zurich Film Festival, Volker Bertelmann also presides over the jury for the International Film Music Competition. During the glamorous Cinema in Concert gala Saturday, September 30, 2023, the compositions of the three finalists will be live-premiered by the Tonhalle Zurich Orchestra. Later that evening, Volker will announce the winning composition and present the 10’000 Swiss franc-endowed Golden Eye for Best International Film Music 2023.
Nainita Desai has provided music for the relaunched Nautilus attraction that opened in Disneyland Paris this July. “With a new theme and score…,” she said in a Facebook post, “But this is just the beginning!” Check out the news from Disneyland Paris, here. She has also scored the British series, THE TOWER Season 2, an ITV, which premiered last May. Based on Kate London's Metropolitan trilogy book series. Set in London, it stars Gemma Whelan as police officer Sarah Collins, initially from the fictional DSI department. The first series follows the aftermath of the deaths of a veteran Metropolitan Police officer and a young Libyan girl who fell together from the roof of a London tower block. When Constable Lizzie Adama – one of the only witnesses – disappears soon after, Collins' investigation becomes two-pronged: what happened on the roof, and finding Adama.
GOOD OMENS is a British fantasy comedy series created and written by Neil Gaiman based on his and Terry Pratchett’s 1990 novel of the same name. A six-episode coproduction between Amazon Studios and BBC Studios, Douglas Mackinnon directed the series, with Gaiman also serving as showrunner. Michael Sheen (angel Aziraphale) and David Tennant (demon Crowley) lead a large ensemble cast of expert thespians. In the first season, they are longtime acquaintances who have grown accustomed to each other’s company, and to a pleasant life on Earth as representatives of Heaven and Hell, while agreeing not to let the conflict between their sides prevent their friendship. When told that Armageddon is about to happen – the final battle between heaven and hell – they team up to prevent the coming of the Antichrist and the end of the pleasant existence they enjoy on Earth. The new second season, written by Neil Gaiman and John Finnemore (after previous co-writer Terry Pratchet’s death in 2015), is just as wonderful and frivolous as the first season, though perhaps a bit darker in some of its textures. We confront a naked archangel who turns up at the door to renegade angel Aziraphale’s Soho bookshop, with no memory of who he is or how he got there, making Aziraphale and retired demon Crowley’s lives become extremely complicated. Heaven and Hell are both desperate to find the runaway. As Crowley and Aziraphale attempt to fix a human romance, things become increasingly unsafe for them, in the past and in the present. David Arnold provides the music for the series, which also includes a number few Queen songs throughout the series. His opening theme for the series is “a kind of wicked, slightly, devilish, Mephistophelean waltz – it has a feeling of twirling, out-of-control-ness” Arnold told Jon Burlingame in a 2019 interview for Variety June 9, 2019.
Definitely watch the trailer for GOOD OMENS Season 2, below:
Composer Olivier Arson composed the original music for THE MALA FAMILIA, the first feature film by directors Nacho A. Villar and Luis Rojo (BRBR collective). A group of friends, who have not been able to see each other for some time, take advantage of Andresito’s permission to meet and enjoy a hot summer day in the suburbs of Madrid. When the sun goes down, they’ll have to deal with a problem from the past that threatens to put them all in jail. Composer Olivier Arson provides an intimate visual fresco, a quasi-documentary supported which modestly touches on history and recalls by hovering the tension of the situation: the perspective of prison. Check out the soundtrack released May 26, 2023, on Spotify and other sources. The film is available on Netflix. Composer Arson also confirms his collaboration with Pedro Martin-Calero on the horror film EL LLANTO from Caballo Films: Something is haunting Andrea (Ester Exposito), but no one, not even her, can see it with the naked eye. Twenty years ago, ten thousand kilometers away, the same presence terrorized Marie. Camila was the only one who could understand what was happening to her, but no one believed them. Faced with this oppressive threat, all three hear the same crushing sound… a shout. EL LLANTO is slated for Amazon Prime Video in the US, but doesn’t yet have a release date.
Composer Pierre Földes directs and scores the animated feature BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN
Based on short stories by acclaimed author Haruki Murakami, the movie is now available to own on DVD and to buy and rent digitally on Kino Now and cam be watched on Amazon Prime, iTunes, Vudu, and Google Play. Summary: A giant talking frog and an elusive cat help a listless bank employee, his traumatized wife, and a lonely accountant seek meaning in their lives and save Tokyo from catastrophe. Based on stories by acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami, this feature debut by composer Pierre Földes won the Jury Special Mention award at the renowned Annecy Animation Film Festival and the Grand Prize at the Anima Festival in Brussels.
COBWEB is an upcoming American horror thriller film directed by Samuel Bodin in his directorial debut. Horror strikes when an eight-year-old boy named Peter tries to investigate the mysterious knocking noises that are coming from inside the walls of his house. As Peter’s fear intensifies, he believes that his parents (Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr) could be hiding a terrible, dangerous secret and questions their trust. And for a child, what could be more frightening than that? The music is by composer Drum & Lace, aka Sofia degli Alessandri-Hultquist (RADICAL LANDSCAPES, ROSALINE, DICKINSON, NIGHT TEETH, DEADLY ILLISIONS), an Italian composer, sound artist, and performer that writes and creates music for film and media. Melding together sampled field recordings, chamber instruments and lush layers of synths, she creates densely textural and beat-heavy music, drawing from film music, music concrete and modern electronica. Her ambient and chamber work also gathers great inspiration from nature and natural sound, as well as the juxtaposition of unlikely sounds with one another. Having a toddler at home, Sofia had all this “weird kid” percussion around, much of which she sampled and used to create instruments for the horror fairytale-like quality of some cues. The instrumentation is very heavy on string ensemble and string effects, as well as synths. The strings were recorded in Macedonia with FAMES- 40 string ensemble. Synths were used throughout as percussive elements and drones. One synth, a low wavering subby analog bass, is featured prominently throughout the score in very specific scenes and was meant to be a hypnotic and terrifying element to the score. An original soundtrack release will be forthcoming from If This Then Records.
COBWEB is scheduled to be released in limited theaters by Lionsgate in the United States on July 21, 2023.
Read my recent interview with Drum & Lace on scoring COBWEB at MusiqueFantastique.
Directed by Australian twins/YouTube sensations Danny and Michael Philippou, TALK TO ME is the “best horror surprise of 2023,” writes Laura Bradley in The Daily Beast. “The film feels like a culmination of years of practice with laughs and scares – a carefully calibrated journey that soothes its viewers with humor just in time to snap them back into hell with a single horrific blow.” The film: When a group of friends discover how to conjure spirits using an embalmed hand, they become hooked on the new thrill, until one of them goes too far – spending more than 90 seconds playing host, the legend goes, and the ghostly guest becomes permanent, unleashing terrifying supernatural forces on them all. The film score is by Cornel Wilczek, an award-winning Australian screen composer and music producer. He is driven by experimentation and the desire to find something new in music. Working with color and contrast, he combines lush, acoustic sources with home-made electronics to take listeners to new places and help create unique worlds for his projects. Cornel runs and owns Electric Dreams Studio in Melbourne, Australia. TALK TO ME had its preview screening at the 2022 Adelaide Film Festival, followed by its world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival on January 22, 2023. It was theatrically released in Australia on July 27, 2023, and has opened now in theaters everywhere on July 28. Watch the TALK TO ME trailer:
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New Soundtrack News
Marvel Music & Hollywood Records released the first soundtrack album for Marvel’s SECRET INVASION series.
The album features selections of the original music from the first three episodes of the show composed by Emmy Award nominee Kris Bowers (BRIDGERTON, HAUNTED MANSION, SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY, CHEVALIER, and DEAR WHITE PEOPLE.) The soundtrack is available digitally on several platforms including Amazon and Spotify. A second album featuring the composer’s score from the final three episodes is expected to come out in the coming weeks. -via Filmmusicreporter.
Walt Disney Records released June 28th the INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY original motion picture soundtrack with score composed by John Williams. The digital soundtrack is available now at Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, and Amazon Music. A limited-edition CD was released on June 30 but it went sold out almost immediately, apparently with no plans for repressing. Thanks Disney. A 2-LP 180g black vinyl set is reportedly available now for pre-order. “John Williams brings the special sauce to the movie—the music,” says producer Frank Marshall. “The themes that he writes for these movies are so recognizable and so identifiable with the movie, it’s just an amazing thing.” Adds director James Mangold, “John Williams is a legend. He’s one of my artistic heroes in filmmaking, and he’s had such a profound and inspiring effect on so many careers and films.”
The five-time Academy Award® winner and 53-time nominee composer was excited to write music that would not only amplify the excitement of Indy’s last adventure, but would also underscore its most moving, deeply resonant emotional moments, including those at the very end of the film. “What I tried to do is bring an aspect of nostalgia into this piece,” Williams says. “Indiana Jones is wonderful because Harrison Ford has this ability to do the most dramatic scenes with a slight tongue in his cheek or a twinkle in his eye. He does action-comedy dialogue as well as anybody ever could.” Of all the new material he composed, Williams’ theme for Helena is a stand-out, featuring the outstanding contributions of violin soloist Anne-Sophie Mutter. “Jim Mangold said to me, write a theme for Helena like those composed for the great Hollywood leading ladies from the ‘40s or the ‘30s,” Williams says. “She’s adventurous with lovers here and there—all the while doing all these things looking ravishingly beautiful.”
Quartet Records announces a quartet of new soundtracks, starting with a completely revised and remastered edition of Ennio Morricone’s classic score for the 1974 French political thriller, Robert Enrico’s IL SEGRETO (aka LE SECRET). Ennio Morricone composed a fascinating score for LE SECRET, and one of its most beautiful and heartbreaking themes (“Dal Mare”) features the wonderful voice of Edda Dell’Orso. The main theme, a melancholic melody suspended over the overlay of the sound of a drop of water and a harp chord, was an innovative idea and a trademark of Morricone in his prolific run of ‘70s political thrillers. LE SECRET was originally released on a French 45RPM featuring only two cuts from the score. In 1995, Point Records added five tracks to the soundtrack of LE FOTO PROIBITE DI UNA SIGNORA PER BENE. The complete score was released in 2000 by Screen Trax and that version is long out of print. But while Quartet’s new album is longer than 50 minutes, LE SECRET has only fifteen minutes of music, so we have chosen to offer first the score originally conceived – and partially unused – by Morricone for the film, in proper order (with the license to offer the extended version of “Dal Mare” at the beginning of the album, as an overture), and the alternate versions as bonus material. Having access to the original master tapes, the sound has been completely restored, including a new mix for the main title overdub. Also released is a remastered and expanded reissue of the 1979 sci-fi-horror classic score by Franco Micalizzi for STRIDULUM (aka THE VISITOR). The film is a genre-bending Italian cult film that mixes a wide range of influences from ROSEMARY’S BABY to THE OMEN, from THE FURY to CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. Micalizzi’s masterful score is as colorful as the many jazz and funky source materials the film builds upon. The soundtrack album released by RCA in 1979 was a big success and was reissued on CD by Digitmovies in 2011 with a good amount of previously unreleased tracks. For Quartet’s newly remastered edition we located the original master tapes that contain not only more material and unreleased film versions but also a great discovery, says the label. Next is a CD edition of one of the titles most requested by maestro Riz Ortolani’s fans: the bizarre 1978 mondo movie BRUTES AND SAVAGES (aka SAVANA SELVAGGIA). The film belongs to the select group of mondos that became notorious not for their shocking content, but for their lack of understanding of the genre. Surviving in two different cuts (92 mins vs. 107 mins), BRUTES AND SAVAGES focuses on mostly Latin American customs from local natives who do unspeakable things to animals. Ortolani, the de facto mondo master who was the key musical figure of the genre since its conception in MONDO CANE, always found a way to create cool tunes that managed to tie together the insanely wide-ranging episodes that featured inconsistent quality and tone—and when all else failed, he created singular, individually successful cues for self-contained segments that saved as much of the film as possible. The music of BRUTES AND SAVAGES has previously been released only on LP and is quite hard to come by. Finally, in collaboration with MovieScore Media, Quartet presents a mammoth 3-CD special edition featuring Panu Aaltio’s acclaimed, award-winning music for the Tale trilogy. This trio of Finnish nature documentaries chronicles the wildlife of the North in three episodes: TALE OF A FOREST (2012). TALE OF A LAKE (2016) and TALE OF THE SLEEPING GIANTS (2021). The first two scores were released on CD by MovieScore Media, but both have been out of print for years and are now very hard to find. So, for this new edition Quartet presents them remastered and expanded with some bonus tracks. SLEEPING GIANTS was previously released only in digital format; so, this premiere CD edition features the same content.
See https://quartetrecords.com/
Silva Screen Records also presents several new soundtracks this July and August. Two new albums from Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope catalogue, the first two having been THE GODFATHER SUITE and THE CONVERSATION. Now we have John Barry’s score to Wim Wenders’ HAMMETT (1982), the fictional account of real-life mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, and his involvement in the investigation of a beautiful Chinese cabaret actress’ mysterious disappearance in San Francisco. In HAMMETT, Barry created a sparse and concise period score, capturing the mood of 1920s and mixing enjoyable jazz and suspense cues. Here, his usual large string section was reduced to just twenty-two players and supported by the two principal soloists, Ronny Lang on clarinet/alto sax and Mike Lang on piano. The brass section was cut down to just three – a French horn, trumpet, and trombone. Silva Screen has retrieved the original studio session tapes and reconstructed the score as written, with some additional cues and alternate versions. Barry has reflected on his work on the score: “I loved doing Hammett. That was a terrific movie. If the director’s got it correctly onto the screen and that intimacy is present, it’s just great to be able to write that simply and orchestrate that sparsely.” Secondly comes Georges Delerue’s THE ESCAPE ARTIST (1982), releasing it as a reissue of a 2005 limited-edition CD. This new edition features new artwork, based on the original US poster, extensive notes by Michael Beek and a new interview with director Caleb Deschanel.
Next from Silva Screen comes James Bernard’s seminal score to Hammer Horror classic, THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, to be released digitally on August 11th. Released in 1968, the film was James Bernard’s most mature score in his Hammer Horror opus, following THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN in 1957 and DRACULA in 1958. Bernard had an instinctive understanding of Hammer’s Gothic fantasies and for years there has been a consensus that his formidable score, brimming with creepy chords, tribal drums, and string stabs, is one of the film’s most accomplished elements.
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Varèse Sarabande has released their latest CD Club titles: two deluxe edition expansions from two legendary composers: CITY HALL by Jerry Goldsmith, and MOUSE HUNT by Alan Silvestri. CITY HALL was a well-regarded 1996 suspense drama exploring crime and corruption in New York City. The label’s long-awaited Deluxe Edition debuts a 16-track, 34-minute program of Goldsmith’s score as heard in the film; a 6-track, 10-minute selection of previously unreleased alternates; and the 12-track, 30-minute sequence of the original 1996 CD. Silvestri’s MOUSE HUNT was a slapstick black comedy about two hapless brothers who inherit a mansion – but cannot exterminate the wily mouse who lives there. The label released Silvestri’s MOUSE HUNT soundtrack at the time of the film in a 30-minute program; this long-awaited Deluxe Edition premieres an expanded program of 44 tracks totaling 66 minutes. Both albums are available to order now at www.vareseSarabande.com
La-La Land Records and CBS Studios present STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL SERIES – THE 1701 COLLECTION VOL. 1, the first in a series of limited-edition CD releases that showcase original scores from the landmark sci-fi television series. Containing music originally from the label’s long out-of-print 2012 Original Series Box Set, these volumes utilize the same restored master as that acclaimed release, but feature new packaging by Dan Goldwasser, and brand new, exclusive liner notes by film music writer and Trek historian, Jeff Bond. Vol 1 of the 1701 Collection focuses on the Trek TOS music of renowned composers Alexander Courage and Fred Steiner, containing original music from the classic episodes THE MAN TRAP, THE NAKED TIME, CHARLIE X, MUDD’S WOMEN, THE CORBOMITE MANEUVER, BALANCE OF TERROR, WHAT ARE LITTLE GIRLS MADE OF? and THE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER, along with MAIN and END TITLES. Available now from LaLaLand Records
Kronos Records presents the soundtrack of GLI ITALIANI E L INDUSTRIA, a feature documentary with music composed by composed by the legendary Piero Umilani. Umiliani wrote a very modern and contemporary soundtrack with a serious dose of experimenting, especially on the latter part of the disc. Whereas the first half is more melodic and upbeat, the music varies from easy jazz to free jazz, from pop-beat to avantgarde. Eclectic is the name of the game and at the end of the day the genius of Umiliani shines through. A vinyl album was released back in 1967 by Omicron, which version is pretty impossible to find and has been a collector’s item for decades. This is the first time ever that GLI ITALIANI E L INDUSTRIA is released on CD format, and it is limited to 300 copies. https://kronosrecords.com/KG48.html
Lakeshore Records has released HAWAII FIVE-0 – Original Series Soundtrack digitally on July 7, with music by Brian Tyler and Keith Power. The album is a long-awaited compilation of the best original music from the 2010-2020 CBS series. Notes Tyler: “Hawaii Five-0 was part of my life for many years, and it was always an honor and a pleasure working with everyone on the team… It was an absolute pleasure and honor working with Keith Power for all those years on this show. His incredible mind and musical skill were an integral part of the sonic landscape for the duration of the show. I am so grateful to everyone on the show including the producers. showrunners, editors, cast, screenwriters, sound department, directors, and all the musicians who made FIVE-0 legendary.” Order here: https://lnk.to/HawaiiFive-0
Horror specialist Klaatu Records announces the premiere release of the score for THERE’S NOTHING OUT THERE, the directorial debut from writer/director Rolfe Kanefsky (THE HAZING, NIGHTMARE MAN). The 1991 independent production, written by Kanefsky when he was a high school senior, revolves around Mike (Craig Peck), a genuine horror film buff who has studied every film of the genre on home video and has a developed a sense of impending danger or doom because of it. When a group of teens show up at the nearby cabin in the woods for spring break, Mike tries to warn them about someone or something stalking them. They immediately dismiss him as watching too many movies until a murderous mutated frog starts to kill them off one by one, the horror genre’s cliches start to become frighteningly real. The film score is by Christopher Thomas, who ramps up the scares and terror of the genre despite the films’ limited budget with much success. See KlaatuRecords for more info.
Joseph Shirley (THE BOOK OF BOBA FEET, CREED III, THE MANDALORIAN, THE MYSTERIOUS BENEDICT SOCIETY) has scored Disney Branded Television’s new original movie THE SLUMBER PARTY. The coming-of-age comedy is based on the YA novel The Sleepover by Jen Malone and depicts the aftermath of a sleepover birthday party hypnotism gone wrong as two best friends, along with their soon-to-be stepsister, wake up with absolutely no memory of the night before. Prateek Rajagopal provides additional music The Slumber Party is now showing on Disney+. – via filmusicreporter and other sources.
Back Lot Music announces the release of DreamWorks Animation’s RUBY GILLMAN, TEENAGE KRAKEN Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, with music by Grammy® Award winning composer Stephanie Economou and original songs by Mimi Webb and Freya Ridings. With RUBY GILLMAN, TEENAGE KRAKEN, DreamWorks Animation dives into the turbulent waters of high school with a hilarious, heartfelt action comedy about a shy teenager who discovers that she’s part of a legendary royal lineage of mythical sea krakens. Aiming to craft a unique sonic palette for the film’s score, composer Economou (JUPITER’S LEGACY, ASSASSIN’S CREED VALHALLA: DAWN OF RAGNAROK) found her chief musical inspiration for this film in the rich underwater world: “The idea of dream pop/shoegaze came into my head while I was reading the script,” Economou says. “There’s something about the washy and bubbly textures, guitars through modulation effects pedals, reverb-y vocals, and vintage synths that really capture the essence of water to me. My goal was to make the music as immersive and arresting as the visuals.” That kernel of an idea ultimately became the catalyst for Economou discovering the sound of the score, which incorporates elements of cinematic synth, setting the tone for life on land and at sea. Economou composed roughly 70 minutes of music for the film, employing a wide range of featured instruments to make the score feel as singular and unique as Ruby Gillman herself. In addition to electric and acoustic guitars by performer Jon Monroe, Economou utilized electroacoustic harp, conchs, didgeridoo, omnichord and accordion. She also designed a specific motif for the moments when Ruby’s bioluminescent tentacles light up: a harp gesture that is run through echo pedals and a granular looper, performed and curated by the brilliant Emily Hopkins. “The immersive nature of the environments and lighting details really inspired me to harness some less traditional sonic tools and collaborate with unique specialist performers,” Economou says. For the live choir, Economou enlisted the score’s vocal soloist, Ari Mason, to create an original kraken language for the film.
The soundtrack is available at these links.
Lakeshore Records recently released GREASE: RISE OF THE PINK LADIES – a Paramount+ Original Series score featuring a modern take on the nostalgic sound of the original musical composed by Nick Sena (BIG TIME ADOLESCENCE), and producer/composer Zachary Dawes (Lana Del Rey, THE BIG DOOR PRIZE). The musical series takes place four years before the original GREASE. In 1954, before rock ‘n’ roll ruled, before the T-Birds were the coolest in the school, four fed-up outcasts dare to have fun on their own terms, sparking a moral panic that will change Rydell High forever. Notes Sena: “For the most part we tread pretty lightly with the score - hinting at understated lusts, desires, and dreams so when the songs came along, they could really knock you over the head with the feeling. I think we did a really good job of seamlessly carrying the viewer in and out of the different songs in each episode while also creating a score that has its own character.”
Purchase/Stream the Album here.
Composer Lorne Balfe continues the magical, mystical journey of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES with his new album BOOK OF THE BARD. From lively and jovial melodies that evoke images of raucous celebrations and spirited conversations, to haunting and melancholic compositions that echo the tales of weary adventurers seeking solace, each track captures the spirit and soul of the tavern tales of the DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS blockbuster that Balfe recently scored. This has been a collaborative album with the lyrics written by the film’s directors, John Daley & Jonathan Goldstein, and vocals by Lorraine O’Reilly. Speaking about the inspiration behind the album, Balfe shared, “DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS has always been a cherished world of imagination for myself and countless fans. The taverns within this universe hold a unique charm, acting as gateways to adventure, camaraderie, and discovery. It was a lot of fun working with John and Jonathan on this album, and we envisioned players of the game having this album play in the background of their quests. We aimed to honor the essence of these captivating spaces by crafting melodies that resonate with fans and take them on a musical odyssey through the world of DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS.” The BOOK OF THE BARD album is now available to stream on all digital platforms. Also, the vinyl edition of the full motion picture soundtrack for DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES is also out now at Decca Records.
Netflix Music has released a soundtrack album for the fifth episode of Season 6 of BLACK MIRROR, titled Demon 79. The digital soundtrack album features the original music from composed by Christopher Willis (THE DEATH OF STALIN, THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD, CAT BURGLAR, SCHMIGADOON!). The episode is written by Charlie Brooker & Bisha K Ali, directed by Toby Haynes and stars Anjana Vasan and Paapa Essiedu. The episode is set in Northern England in the late 1970s and revolves around a meek sales assistant who is told she must commit terrible acts to prevent disaster. The full sixth season of the anthology series is now available to stream on Netflix. The digital soundtrack is available via Amazon and other major digital music services. – via filmmusic reporter.
Director Hiroshi Nagahama’s striking new film UZUMAKI, based on supernatural horror manga by legendary author Junji Ito, was announced way back in 2019, and, as of a year ago, delayed with no ETA. A brand-new trailer unveiled July 23rd at the San Diego Comic-Con indicates that the upcoming series may be more than worth the wait, wrote Meagan Navarro for the Bloody Disgusting website. The four-episode series has been scored by Canadian American composer Colin Stetson, known for his scores to genre projects like THE MENU (2022), TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2022), COLOR OUT OF SPACE (2019), HEREDITARY (2018) and OUTLAWS & ANGELS (2016). The animated film is scheduled for US distribution by Adult Swim, although a release date has not yet been. But with the unveiling of the new trailer suggests that a streaming debut of the animated series is on the horizon. Watch the film’s striking trailer:
WaterTower Music has released a soundtrack album for this Summer’s shark action sequel, MEG 2: THE TRENCH on July 28. The album features the film’s original music composed by Harry Gregson-Williams (SHREK, THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, THE MARTIAN, CHICKEN RUN, THE LAST DUEL, MULAN) who previously scored 2018’s original THE MEG movie. The soundtrack is now available to stream/download on Amazon and any other major digital music services. The sequel movie follows a research team on an exploratory dive whose voyage spirals into chaos when a malevolent mining operation threatens their mission and forces them into a high-stakes battle for survival. The film will be released in theaters nationwide next Friday, August 4 by Warner Bros. Pictures.
- Via filmmusic reporter and other sources.
Associated: See my interview with Harry Gregson-Williams on scoring the original THE MEG movies, at MusicFantastique in June 2019.
Watch the trailer for MEG 2:
Christophe Beck has scored the delightfully funny and moving Netflix animated film NIMONA. Based on a science fantasy graphic novel by American cartoonist ND Stevenson. Set in a medieval world, the story follows the title character, a shapeshifter who joins the disgraced knight Ballister Blackheart in his plans to destroy the over-controlling Institute. When Blackheart is framed for a crime he didn’t commit, the only one who can help him prove his innocence is Nimona – a mischievous teen who happens to be a shapeshifting creature he’s sworn to destroy. The film features the voices of Chloë Grace Moretz as Nimona and Riz Ahmed as Ballister Blackheart, with Eugene Lee Yang and Frances Conroy voicing supporting roles; the film received highly positive reviews from critics for its animation, themes, humor, characters, musical score, tone, and vocal performances (particularly that of Moretz and Ahmed). A digital soundtrack album has been issued by Amazon Music, which is available here.
Watch NIMONA’s trailer:
Milan Records has released THE WITCHER: Season 3 Soundtrack, by composer Joseph Trapanese. Available everywhere now, the full collection of music from Season 3 of Netflix’s epic fantasy series includes both the previously released Season 3 Vol. 1 album as well as the new Season 3 Volume 2 album with 25 new tracks. Trapanese returns to the series after scoring the show’s second season, this time enlisting the help of Polish folk metal band PERCIVAL SCHUTTENBACH, who contribute their expertise in historical Slavic music to deliver an authentic soundscape for the world of The Witcher. About THE WITCHER Season 3: As monarchs, mages, and beasts of the Continent compete to capture her, Geralt takes Ciri of Cintra into hiding, determined to protect his newly reunited family against those who threaten to destroy it. Entrusted with Ciri’s magical training, Yennefer leads them to the protected fortress of Aretuza, where she hopes to discover more about the girl’s untapped powers; instead, they discover they’ve landed in a battlefield of political corruption, dark magic, and treachery. They must fight back, put everything on the line – or risk losing each other forever.
Order Season 3, Vol. 2 soundtrack https://witcher3.lnk.to/vol2
Order Season 3 Vol. 1 soundtrack https://witcher3.lnk.to/vol1
Listen to the track “Stay Together” by Joseph Trapanese from THE WITCHER Season 3:
Making its premiere at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is the upcoming Taika Waititi-helmed film, NEXT GOAL WINS! Based on the 2014 documentary by the same name about Dutch-born American coach Thomas Rongen’s efforts to lead the American Samoa National football team (known to be among the weakest in the league) to qualify for the 2014 FIFA cup. The film features a score by Academy Award-winning composer Michael Giacchino. Searchlight Pictures presents NEXT GOAL WINS, coming to US theaters November 17, 2023; soundtrack details to follow.
Paramount Music has released Cliff Eidelman’s score to LEAP OF FAITH on all digital platforms for streaming and downloads. “I composed this score in 1992 with a huge orchestra and choir (members of the LA Master Chorale). Remastered for this release, I am very thrilled with the sound quality,” said Eidelman in a Facebook post. The film stars Steve Martin and Debra Winger and is about a fake faith healer who is stranded in a small town where he finds he can’t fool all the people all of the time. Listen to the score on Spotify or Apple Music.
The scores for INSIDIOUS THE LAST KEY (2018) and INSIDIOUS THE RED DOOR (2023), the INSIDIOUS franchise’s fourth and fifth installments, have been released digitally on numerous streaming services. Joseph Bishara has composed the scores for all five INSIDIOUS films, a swell as numerous other horror films and franchises including THE CONJURING films, the first and third ANNABELLE films, THE CURSE OF LA LLORONA, THE UNHOLY, MALIGNANT, and much more (as well as performing the monsters for some of them). INSIDIOUS: THE LAST KEY follows parapsychologist Elise Rainier as she investigates a haunting in her childhood home. INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR was directed by Patrick Wilson (in his directorial debut) from a screenplay by Scott Teems based on a story by Leigh Whannell and Teems. It is a direct sequel to INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 2 (2013) and is the fifth installment in the INSIDIOUS franchise. Original INSIDIOUS director James Wan serves as a producer, as does Jason Blum through his Blumhouse Productions banner. INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR was just released in to theaters the United States by Sony Pictures Releasing on July 7, 2023. - via filmmusicreporter, Wikipedia, and other sources. The soundtracks are now available on these links:
INSIDIOUS THE LAST KEY, INSIDIOUS THE RED DOOR.
Watch the scary trailer for INSIDIOUS THE RED DOOR:
Lakeshore Records has released GLAMOROUS – Soundtrack from the Netflix Series digitally with music by Joy Ngiaw (BLUSH). The series stars Miss Benny (she/her) playing a character named Marco Mejia, a young gender nonconforming queer man whose life is stuck in place. Well, that is until he meets esteemed beauty mogul – and one of his biggest idols – Madolyn Addison (played by legendary actor Kim Cattrall, she/her) while working his day job behind the makeup counter. Looking to shake up her prestigious business, Madolyn hires Marco and gives him a seat at the table. This new job is his first chance to figure out what he wants out of life, who he actually is and what it really means for him to be queer. Notes composer Ngiaw: “The sound of this score represents a departure from my usual orchestral work, embracing a more contemporary and pop-inspired style. It exudes a light-hearted and fun tone throughout, while also incorporating heartfelt and tender moments that add depth to the music. The guiding keywords for this score from the filmmakers are ‘sexy,’ ‘trendy,’ and ‘intriguing,’ with the emotional moments being subtly integrated to ground the overall composition. Something I experimented with in this series is using plug-ins to manipulate traditional orchestral instruments such as the harp, piano, vibes, and even my voice. This aim was to infuse the score with a touch of ‘dreamy-ness’ and modern flair.” Available at these links.
Lakeshore Records released BASED ON A TRUE STORY Original Series Soundtrack on July 14, with music composed by Sherri Chung (RIVERDALE, GREMLINS: SECRETS OF THE MOGWAI, KUNG FU, BATWOMAN). A dark comedic thriller, the film is about a realtor, a plumber, and a former tennis star whose lives collide in an unexpected way, exposing America’s obsession with true crime, murder, and the slow-close toilet seat. Chung masterfully weaves a vivid backdrop with strings and percussion to the dark comedy that accents the comedy and horror. Says Chung: “Writing the score for BASED ON A TRUE STORY was as thrilling a ride as the show itself. The score, like the story, is a cross between hilarious and horrifying–striking that tonal balance musically was an awesome challenge.” A prolific composer, Chung made history in 2022 when she was elected as the first female governor of the Television Academy’s music branch. The Peacock original series stars Kaley Cuoco and Chris Messina and is streaming now. Soundtrack available here.
Listen to “The Credits” by Sherri Chung:
Lakeshore Records has released WARRIOR: SEASON 3, the original series soundtrack featuring music by Reza Safinia and H. Scott Salinas. The duo has created a thrillingly orchestrated score rooted in string arrangements with rock guitars reminiscent Sergio Leone’s classics, with added propulsion of hip hop beats, tribal percussion, synths, and a variety of wind instruments. WARRIOR, based on the writings of Bruce Lee, is a martial arts drama set in the brothels, bars, and alleyways of Chinatown, San Francisco, in the 1870s. Season three debuted Thursday, June 29 on Max for the first time after originally airing on Cinemax – see the trailer here. Note Safinia and Salinas: “Scoring this season was the most fun because we did it like a band. Most of the cues have us playing instruments at the same time, and even when we were composing the orchestral sections, we’d work on different sections in the same room and compare notes as we moved forward, so the entire score felt like a concept album by a band. We had established the soundscapes of the 90s hip hop and the Indie Rock guitars fused with Sergio Leone cinematic strings in the previous two seasons, this season, we kind of let go of thinking about that deliberately, it’s still there in the DNA of what we do for the show, but we were more influenced by a particular Pink Floyd album "Obscured by Clouds.”
Purchase/Stream here.
Republic Records Kids & Family will release the first-ever soundtrack album for the Nickelodeon animated series AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER. The album features the updated and re-recorded score from the first season of the show (Book 1: Water) composed by Jeremy Zuckerman (THE LEGEND OF KORRA, SCREAM: THE TV SERIES, LUCKY, HORSE GIRL) who has expanded his original compositions and employed a full orchestra for the release. The soundtrack will be released digitally and on vinyl on November 17, 2023; a first track (“Aang Becomes Ocean”) is already available to stream/download now, see Amazon. – via filmmusicreporter.
Robert Ouyang Rusli has created an eclectic score to match the strange, fairytale-like world of Julio Torres’ PROBLEMISTA. Moving between bubbling, whimsical melodies to propulsive classical minimalism, the score features orchestral arrangements that combine synthesizers with a live choir. Sounds from the surreal world of the film bleed into the music: ominous clocks ticking, 56k dial-up modems shrieking, filing cabinets, and keyboards creating rhythmic backdrops for the bureaucratic nightmares of the American immigration system. Everything in PROBLEMISTA’s surreal world can be personified, and the score is no different. It’s a colorful living creature in the film. Acting like a Greek chorus that urges on the film’s characters, the score’s choir sings and chants in an invented language formed from deconstructed words that describe their deepest desires and fears. The film features contributions from many heavyweight artists in New York’s experimental music scene, and the entire music team, from the musicians to the mixers, is based in New York – the city that provides the chaotic, pulsing backdrop to the film. In addition to scoring the upcoming film PROBLEMISTA, Rusli (they) also scored the newly released Hulu film BRUISER, and the Gotham Award and Independent Spirit nominated film TEST PATTERN, several episodes of Hulu’s YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE, as well as the Sundance Film Festival award-winning short films BAMBIRAK and REST STOP. PROBLEMISTA opens August 4 via A24 Music (-via Terrorbird Media).
CINNAMON Original Motion Picture Soundtrack has been released by Lakeshore Records, featuring music by composer Daniel Ciurlizza, whose electronic and orchestral score is atmospheric with vocal, jazz, funk, and rock flourishes that manage to capture both the hopes of the lead character as well as the sinister tension of the noir thriller. In addition, a two-song EP of the soundtrack’s signature songs featuring star Hailey Kilgore and esteemed multi-instrumentalist Adrian Younge who is known for his soulful repertoire and love for analog recording was released on June 23. This The noir thriller follows a struggling small-town gas station attendant and aspiring singer, named Jodi Jackson (Kilgore), whose life is sent into a tailspin after a fatal crime. Says Ciurlizza: “My goal with Cinnamon’s score and soundtrack was to give our audience something unexpected but easy to love. My philosophy as a film composer is to write scores as if they were pop songs to be played on the radio. I want people to have fun and be whistling these tunes by the time they’re done watching our film or listening to our soundtrack.”
Purchase/Stream the album here.
Mondo Music, in partnership with Universal Pictures, present Ludwig Göransson’s score to OPPENHEIMER, Christopher Nolan’s sweeping, epic thriller that delves deep into the psyche of a singular American mind: J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. Collaborating with esteemed musicians from the Hollywood Studio Orchestra, Göransson began shaping OPPENHEIMER’s musical world with an intimate solo violin performance, capturing the essence of the character. As the story evolved, the ensemble gradually expanded to include a quartet, octet and a large ensemble of strings and brass. This progressive orchestration reflected the deepening complexity of OPPENHEIMER’s journey, enriching the musical tapestry with each new addition.
Available now for preorder on both 2XCD (expected to ship in September) and 3XLP Vinyl (expected to ship in August).
RESIDENT EVIL: DEATH ISLAND is a 2023 Japanese adult computer-animated action horror film set in the same universe as the RESIDENT EVIL video games. It is the fifth installment and fourth film in the animated RESIDENT EVIL series, following the 2017 film RESIDENT EVIL: VENDETTA and the 2021 miniseries RESIDENT EVIL: INFINITE DARKNESS. According to Capcom, the film will take place in the year 2015.; this places the film after the events of RESIDENT EVIL 6 (set in 2013) and RESIDENT EVIL: VENDETTA (set in 2014), but before RESIDENT EVIL 7: BIOHAZARD (set in 2017). Rei Kondoh (RESIDENT EVIL: DAMNATION, THE WONDERFUL 101, REDEMPTION REAPERS, BAYONETTA 3, TEKKEN: BLOODLINE TV series) has released a soundtrack album for the animated sci-fi horror movie RESIDENT EVIL: DEATH ISLAND. Kondoh has worked on more than twenty video games throughout his career, including various games on the BAYONETTA, FIRE EMBLEM, and MARIO PARTY franchises. The new soundtrack album features the composer’s original score from the fifth installment in the animated RESIDENT EVIL series and is now available to stream/download on Amazon and most other major digital music services. - Via filmmusicreporter (which see for film’s trailer), and other sources. Listen to a track from the score, via YouTube:
French composer Cyrille Aufort signs his second collaboration with Eléonore Faucher for the series ET LA MONTAGNE FLEURIRA. “For this new drama series based on a historical context, I began composing very early in the process, even before the shooting commenced. I sent Eleonore Faucher, the director, several musical proposals for the main title and character themes. She emphasized the need for a romantic, lyrical, and classical touch regarding the main title. It should incorporate a dramatic theme that drives the story. In the score, I employed numerous leitmotifs to reflect the dramatic evolution of the various characters, transitioning from romantic cues to intense, emotional moments.” The soundtrack is available digitally and CD on demand from MovieScore Media.and from these digital/streaming sources. For more information about the composer, see his unofficial website here.
Lakeshore Records has released I’M A VIRGO – Prime Video Original Series Soundtrack with an original score by Tune-Yards (aka Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner). The indie duo expands beyond their already hyper creative talents with a weirdly wonderful collection of soundscapes that complements the offbeat vision of series creator Boots Riley. I’M A VIRGO is a darkly comedic fantastical coming-of-age joyride about Cootie (Jharrel Jerome), a 13-foot-tall young Black man in Oakland, California. Having grown up hidden away, passing time on a diet of comic books and TV shows, he escapes to experience the beauty and contradictions of the real world. He forms friendships, finds love, navigates awkward situations, and encounters his idol, a real-life superhero named The Hero, played by Walton Goggins (THE HATEFUL EIGHT, THE RIGHTEOUS GEMSTONES).The film is a clever mythical odyssey that questions the purpose of the mythical odyssey. The original series is now streaming on Prime Video. The soundtrack is available for purchase/stream here.
Composer H. Scott Salinas (THE BANKER, A PRIVATE WAR, CARTEL LAND, FULL SWING, BIRTH OF THE DRAGON) is reteaming with director Jared Moshé on the upcoming sci-fi thriller APORIA. The film is written directed by Moshé and stars Judy Greer, Edi Gathegi, Payman Maadi, and Faithe Herman. The movie revolves around a woman who is virtually drowning in grief after losing her husband in an accident and is faced with an impossible choice when she learns of a top-secret time-bending machine. Salinas has previously scored Moshé’s first two features, THE BALLAD OF LEFTY BROWN and DEAD MAN’S BURDEN. APORIA will be released in select theaters on August 11, 2023, by Well Go USA Entertainment. – via filmmusicreporter
Disney’s WORLD’S BEST Original Soundtrack featuring original songs written by lead actor and co-writer Utkarsh Ambudkar and Charlie Wilder with the score composed by Raashi Kulkarni, a composer and pianist based in Los Angeles; she has established a distinct compositional voice that can be heard across a variety of genres (WEDDING SEASON, Ifine: BEAUTY, BAREFOOT EMPRESS) and Jongnic Bontemps (TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS, (JAGGED MIND, THE SPACE RACE, REDFALL video game, WEDDING SEASON. VOODOO MACBETH). Summary: In the midst of navigating the tumultuous hardships of adolescence, 12-year-old mathematics genius Prem Patel discovers his recently deceased father was a famous rapper and immediately sets out to pursue a career for himself as a rap superstar. While his recent actions may appear reckless and the quickest way for him to lose everything, Prem, empowered by imaginative hip- hop music-fueled fantasies where he performs with his father, is determined to find out if hip-hop truly is in his DNA. As his father always used to say, “the world’s best never rest.” WORLD’S BEST is now streaming on Disney+. The soundtrack is available on
Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon.
Lakeshore Records has released THE HORROR OF DOLORES ROACH – Prime Video Original Series Soundtrack digitally, with music by Siddhartha Khosla (RABBIT HOLE, ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING, RUNAWAYS, THIS IS US) ), and Garrett Gonzalez (RULES OF THE TRADE, co-composer THE MYSTERIOUS BENEDICT SOCIETY, A DREAM OF SPLENDOR). The film, based on the hit Spotify podcast series of the same name, is a contemporary Sweeney Todd-inspired urban legend of love, betrayal, weed, cannibalism, and survival of the fittest. The score conveys both innocence and dread utilizing piano, strings, and synth to create a deliciously deceptive backdrop to the macabre dark comedy. Notes Khosla: “Dolores represents the kind of authentic and diverse stories that we are proud to help in telling; our orchestra was key in helping us create a tense, quirky, and emotional thriller score that we’re especially proud of.” Purchase/Stream the soundtrack here.
Watch the series’ trailer:
Milan Records releases THE WALKING DEAD: DEAD CITY (Original Television Series Soundtrack) with music by Ian Hultquist. The series is available now on AMC and AMC+. Similar to the original WALKING DEAD series, we follow Maggie and Negan travel into a post-apocalyptic Manhattan long ago cut off from the mainland. The city is filled with the dead and denizens who have made New York City their own world. The music is dark and industrial, using sampled organic and environmental sounds, sampled in abandoned warehouses and various other deteriorated areas, these sounds include banging on pipes, vibrating grain silos, playing instruments such as brass and guitar sounds and repitching, looping, and reverberating them in the studio. “[I had] a few friends design samples & sounds specifically for the show,” said composer Hultquist. “They helped create a lot of the booms & percussion, and the drones in [episode 5]. My assistant Ben Van is an avid field recordist and spent his holiday break in Maine recording sounds in abandoned warehouses. They literally look like Dead City sets.” The underscore supported vulnerable moments in the show, using strings, drums, synths, Therevox, distorted Baritone guitar, and Guitarviol. The 20-track album is available on digital platforms here.
WaterTower Music has released a digital version of the expanded edition soundtrack album for the 1984 sci-fi classic THE LAST STARFIGHTER directed by Nick Castle and starring Lance Guest, Dan O’Herlihy, Robert Preston and Catherine Mary Stewart. The album features the film’s complete original score composed and conducted by Craig Safan. Visit Amazon or any other major digital music services to stream/download the soundtrack. Intrada Records had previously released a (now out-of-print) CD version of the expanded edition back in 2015. - via filmmusic reporter
MURDER CITY – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack has been released digitally from Lakeshore Records, featuring the music by award-winning composer Kurt Farquhar (THE NEIGHBORHOOD, BLACK LIGHTNING, FIRST KILL). The film follows a disgraced former cop who finds himself working for a ruthless female kingpin to pay off his estranged father’s debt and protect his family. Farquhar utilizes electronics to stunningly dark effect creating an atmosphere of dread and danger. Says the composer: “It was exciting to journey into the dark and heartbreaking world of “Murder City.” It was important for me to musically show both sides of our main character Neil’s very broken and troubled character. (Performed brilliantly by Mike Colter) There’s a lot of grit, excitement, and danger in this score, but a good deal of heart and pathos too!”
Purchase/Stream the album here.
Horror score specialists Howlin’ Wolf Records have released a CD soundtrack of Rocky Gray’s thrashing music for the popular video game KILLING FLOOR 2. “I have remixed and at times replayed and added parts to all of the tracks that appear on MUSIC FROM KILLING FLOOR 2,” said the composer. “Beautifully remastered by Troy Glessner, I believe this is the best these songs have ever sounded. Rocky Gray is an award-winning composer of over 30 features, shorts, and video games. An accomplished musician, he was the original drummer for the multi-platinum goth rock band Evanescence, and later drummer and lead guitarist for We Are The Fallen and Living Sacrifice. He most recently earned raved reviews and the “Best Score” prize for THE BARN II at the 2022 GenreBlast Film Festival. Rocky’s score for 10/31 PART III is also available on the Howlin’ Wolf Records website. KILLING FLOOR 2 is packaged in a jewel case with stunning imagery featuring original cover artwork by Zachary Jackson Brown, original tray card artwork by Seth Metoyer, and packaging designs by Howlin’ Wolf Records’ Art Director, Luis Miguel Rojas. See: Howlin Wolf Records.
Lakeshore Records has presented the digitally soundtrack to THE DRAGON PRINCE: MYSTERY OF AARAVOS, Seasons 4 & 5 - A Netflix Series Soundtrack on July 28. With original music by Emmy® Award-winning composer Frederik Wiedmann (STAR TREK: PICARD 3, BIG NATE, OCCUPATION: RAINFALL, THE DRAGON PRINCE series). This vividly orchestrated score features both familiar harmonies as well as a variety of new themes for the show’s newly introduced characters. Notes Wiedmann: “I am absolutely thrilled to be able to continue this saga from my work on Seasons 1-3 of THE DRAGON PRINCE. The creators of this show at Wonderstorm have managed to expand on the first three seasons with Season 4 and the upcoming Season 5, creating a wonderful canvas for me to expand the music equally. New characters were introduced requiring a whole set of new themes, as well as the new and unique ‘Main Title’ theme song. We continue to use our vast pallet of exotic instruments that have become such a big part of the sound of Xadia – such as the cello, fiddle, duduk, and ethnic flutes – while also incorporating new sounds from a fantastic female vocalist, as well as a ‘quad-flute;’ a flute that plays four notes simultaneously. We also once again utilized a wonderful 40-piece string section to complete some of the more pivotal cues in these two new seasons.”
Purchase/Stream the album here.
Max Richter (THE LEFTOVERS, AD ASTRA, MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS, HOSTILES, WALTZ WITH BASHIR, TABOO, MISS SLOANE) has composed the original music for the upcoming Netflix original film SPACEMAN. The sci-fi drama is directed by Johan Renck (CHERNOBYL, THE LAST PANTHERS) and stars Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan, Paul Dano and Kunal Nayyar. The movie, based on the novel Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar, tells the story of an astronaut who is sent to the edge of the galaxy to collect mysterious ancient dust and finds his earthly life falling to pieces, when he turns to a creature from the beginning of time who can help him try to put it back together. The film is set to premiere this fall on Netflix. Richter is also expected to return as the composer of the second season of Apple TV+’s INVASION, which will debut on August 23, 2023.
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via filmmusicreporter
World renowned contemporary cellist Nick Squires teams up with London Music Works. On August 25th, Silva Screen Records will digitally release Imitation Games. The single from the album, “To Build A Home,” will be available to stream on Spotify from August 11th. Known for the ‘Bach in the Rain’ viral video that reached more than 50 million viewers, and for his contemporary cello arrangements, Nick Squires, together with London Music Works, creates a complex, multilayered sonic world. With this album, Nick brings a fresh perspective to some of the most moving and powerful soundtracks and concert hall music. Featuring music from The Cinematic Orchestra, Gustavo Santaolalla, Max Richter, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Bear McCreary, Imitation Games is bound to find its place on many major DSP playlists. Release date from Silva Screen: August 25, 2023. Digital album: Silva UK, Silva USA
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Film Music Books
Elmer Bernstein, Film Composer: An Authorized Biography Hardcover
Peter M. Bernstein (Author)
Kindle $32.00
Hardcover $34.00
A behind-the-scenes look at the life and music of legendary Hollywood composer Elmer Bernstein, the only person to be nominated for an Academy Award in every decade from the 1950s to the 2000s. Over a career spanning 54 years, he composed landmark scores in every available genre—epics, jazz, westerns, dramas, and comedies—and his credits read like list of the greatest films of his time: THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, THE GREAT ESCAPE, GHOSTBUSTERS, to name just a few. This biography, written by Elmer’s son Peter, interweaves exclusive interviews, oral histories not otherwise available, estate archival materials, and personal experiences. Elmer Bernstein lived a colorful life: he was a first generation American; he was blacklisted; and he was a fearless advocate for film music not afraid to take on anyone in pages of trade papers. The book looks at many of his landmark scores in depth, collaborations with various producers and directors, and his success in navigating the rough and tumble of Hollywood. There is much to his story: a cycle of struggle, success, frustration, failure, and reinvention repeated many times over his career which connected the Old Hollywood with the modern era.
Available November 15, 2023 – pre-orders available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and most other major booksellers
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Documentary Soundtrack News
Movie Score Media releases GREEN SPACE DARK SKIES Original score from the 2022 short documentary film directed by Mark Murphy, with music by Nainita Desai. The Green Space Dark Skies Finale project is a spectacular human art installation that took place around the four highest mountains in the UK: Scafell Pike in England, Ben Nevis in Scotland, Snowdon in Wales, and Slieve Donard in Northern Ireland. Thousands of people became Lumenators, and at each mountain, equipped with special high tech low impact geolights, they journeyed into the landscapes at dusk to create extraordinary outdoor artworks with their lights. “Each mountain had its own theme and the music had to be composed before the performance took place, in order to allow the director to choreograph, structure and edit the whole performance around the music,” said Nainita. “Inspiration came from the land, and the volcanic origins of the mountains, so the score had to take you on a dramatic and emotional journey throughout time illustrating the epic landscape. It portrays human endeavor, it’s about the heartlands and the joy of nature and sharing the experience of connecting with the land. Matt Kelly performed the strings with a neo-folk approach which resonated with the earthiness of humans and land coming together. Imagine thousands of lights making patterns on mountains, lakes, and moorland across the UK! It was a very uplifting and emotional experience.”
The music takes you on a journey from the origins of the formation of the mountains and the land itself thousands of years ago with the aim of bringing people together in a community spirit. The soundtrack is available at these links.
Watch the Green Space Dark Skies | Four Peaks Finale, on YouTube.
Silva Screen Records has released Jasha Klebe’s score to ITV’s 6-part nature series, A YEAR ON PLANET EARTH, presented by Stephen Fry. The awe-inspiring and ambitious series brings an innovative, interlinked story to reveal the incredible ways in which all life is impacted by the changing seasons. The first episode will be broadcast on Sunday 9th July on ITV1, with the box set available to stream on ITVx. Klebe comments: “On approaching the music for the ITV series, I wanted to create a score that was lyrical, vibrant, and a joyous celebration of the natural world. Using a kaleidoscope of instruments and textures, I crafted soundscapes to be as rich and colorful as the animals and environments they portrayed. Starting with ambient vocal calls, cascading strings, and a jubilant percussive motif – the heartbeat of the series – in the opening suite; to stacked ambient layers of my vocals in Bush Fire; delicate piano and wistful solo cello in Ice Bears; to the sweeping melodic song of Monarch Butterfly; I set out to evoke a wondrous, emotional journey, as we transitioned from each new season over a year on planet earth.”
The 34-track album is available today, July 14, on digital platforms here.
Node Records has released a soundtrack album for the documentary THE YOUTUBE EFFECT, featuring the film’s music by Paul Haslinger. In this eye-opening documentary, director Alex Winter presents a thoughtful, troubling look at YouTube, a site with humble origins that has gone on to change how we experience the world – while exploring the unforeseen privacy and ethical problems that it created. - via filmmusicreporter <and see for tracklist and film’s trailer.>
Dara Taylor (THE TENDER BAR, BARB AND STAR GO TO VISTA DEL MAR) has scored the upcoming NSFW pet comedy STRAYS starring Will Ferrell, Jamie Foxx, Sofía Vergara, Will Forte and Isla Fisher. Dara utilizes sweeping orchestral scores when leaning into the emotional scenes of a dog realizing when he’s been wronged and hip-hop inspired tracks when Reggie meets Bug and the gang, and they get into street dog antics. Dara scored music that would match each dog and their unique personalities. As a comedy she had to create a score that matches the ridiculousness of talking dogs who curse and get themselves into situations that would never normally happen with fast music for certain ‘action set pieces.’ Dara also had the added task of making music that matched each dogs’ character traits.
Justin Melland has scored the Netflix documentary series, UNKNOWN: KILLER ROBOTS, a groundbreaking documentary exploring the rise of AI-powered robots on the battlefield. Brace yourself for an eye-opening journey into the future of warfare where machines make their own decisions. The doc is now showing on Netflix.
- Via DOCUMENTARY SCORING NEWS on Facebook.
Milan Records has released a soundtrack album for the giant screen documentary BLUE WHALES – RETURN OF THE GIANTS. The album features the film’s original music composed by Academy Award winner Steven Price (GRAVITY, LAST NIGHT IN SOHO, OUR PLANET, THE AERONAUTS). From its almost incomprehensible size to its spectacular feeding habits, from the surprising role it plays in the health of our oceans to its awesome long-distance communications, the film provides an unforgettable window into the lives these massive animals live – and the extremes scientists must endure to study them. Joined by a cast of supporting characters – from dolphins and sperm whales to sea lions and orcas—the blue whale finally gets its star turn… in life size, and immersive 3D on the giant screen! The soundtrack is now available to stream/download on Amazon and any other digital music services. “This movie is incredibly uplifting and powerful,” says narrator Andy Serkis. “Everyone assumes that because blue whales are the largest mammals on the planet, we should know a lot about them, but in fact that’s not the case. Learning what scientists are trying to do, to understand their behaviors, has been a real education for me. We need to find out more about creatures like these, because they inspire us to have hope. The film is a wonderful marriage of storytelling, fact-giving, and entertainment.” The movie opened in Giant Screen theaters and museums on May 25, 2023. Via filmmusic reporter and other sources.
On August 22nd, Silva Screen Records will digitally release EARTH, Paul Saunderson’s expansive and complex score for BBC Studio’s landmark TV series, presented by Chris Packham. Using the latest science and technology, the 5-part series tells the astonishing 4.5-billion-year story of our Earth. The series takes us back in time to reveal the Earth’s most significant events and draws parallels with climate change today. Composer Paul Saunderson perfectly captures the spirit of the Epic TV series by introducing gravitas and drama to underpin the struggles and successes of our planet’s history. Saunderson explains “I wanted the music to constantly give this sense of awe and wonder, combining very modal classical harmonies and progressions using a large live orchestra accompanied with a combination of modern synths, vocals, guitars, a range of instrumental soloists and percussion bedded with a plethora of uniquely manipulated found sounds and instruments, bespoke sound beds and other worldly textures to help further transport the viewer back in time to these alien like, unrecognizable images of our planet. Each episode looks at a different time period of our Earth, Inferno, Snowball, Green, Atmosphere and finally Human. Sonically each episode has its own pallet and instrumentation, with recurring thematic melodies and harmonies that give cohesion to the score."
Andrew Hollander (WAITRESS, GRAY MATTERS, WORDS ON BATHROOM WALLS, SERIOUS MOONLIGHT, SLEEPWALK WITH ME) has released a soundtrack album for the documentary ONCE UPON A TIME IN UGANDA. The album features the composer’s original score from the film and is now available to stream/download on Amazon and any other major digital music services. Once Upon a Time in Uganda is directed by Cathryne Czubek, co-directed by Hugo Perez, and tells the story of how Ugandan brickmaker Isaac Nabwana decided to make action films, drawing the attention of New York film programmer Alan Hofmanis. – via filmmusicreporter
Listen to the opening titles track below:
Cyrille Aufort is reuniting with Academy Award winning director Luc Jacquet (MARCH OF THE PENGUINS) to score his upcoming documentary CONTINENT MAGNÉTIQUE. The few thousand kilometers that separate Patagonia to the South Pole is a fascinating and hypnotic journey for explorers. Some even speak of an addiction “the Antarctic bite.” The movie marks the fourth collaboration between the composer and director following LE GLACE ET LE CIEL, Emmy, and Hollywood Music in Media Award-winning score for L’EMPEREUR and 2019 short documentary CASHMERE (which can be watched on Youtube). Co-produced by Aster, Paprika Films, Arte France Cinema and Memento Production, CONTINENT MAGNÉTIQUE will be released in theaters on December 20th.
In the new Netflix documentary, UNKNOWN: THE LOST PYRAMID, Egyptian archeologists dig into history, discovering tombs and artifacts over 4,000 years old as they search for a buried pyramid. Directed by Max Salomon, the docu is scored by Robert Neufeld (FACING GRIZZLIES, UNTAMED AMERICAS, GORONGOSA: PARADISE REBORN, BBC’S SUPERNATURAL SCIENCE).
Editions Verde announces the release of 20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Jordan Dykstra. Dykstra’s score reflects the haunting reality of life during war in Ukraine. Using digital and analog synthesizers, percussion, strings, detuned piano, and filtered noise elements, this aided in the film’s perpetual anxiety and feeling of dread. While a classical string section brings emotion to painful scenes of loss, a low-pitched and rhythmically unstable rolling bass tone appears throughout the film, mimicking the sound of a Russian tank creeping closer and closer. With images of blown out buildings, crumbling universities, and shelled hospitals, Dykstra uses harsh noise music that is distorted, wavering and windy, adding to the stressful and terrifying truth of war. Winner of the Sundance Audience Choice Award for World Cinema Documentary, the makers of 20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL follow an AP team of Ukrainian journalists trapped in the besieged city, struggling to continue their work documenting atrocities of the Russian invasion. The soundtrack is available on all digital platforms.
Camilo Forero and Laurentia Editha with others at Bleeding Fingers Music have scored the new documentary series, ISLANDS. This six-part documentary premiered on Sky Nature Sunday, July 23rd. “Some of the best music I’ve ever written is in this show,” said Forero in a Facebook post. Thanks to music editor Harsha Thangirala, additional Composer Joseph S. Djafar, technical score assistants Ruth Felicia Christina and Antonio Ibrahine, score supervisor Greg Rappaport and score producer Russell Emanuel, all of whom helped get the project to the finish line, said Forero – via DocumentingTheScore group page at Facebook.
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Vinyl Soundtrack News
Mondo Music, in partnership with Universal Pictures present Ludwig Göransson’s score to OPPENHEIMER, Christopher Nolan’s sweeping, epic thriller that delves deep into the psyche of a singular American mind: J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. Available now for preorder on both 3XLP Vinyl (expected to ship in August), or 2XCD (expected to ship in September).
Four Flies Records has released two 7” double-sider singles with Piero Umiliani’s themes from two to IL CORPO (THE BODY), Luigi Scattini’s 1974 erotic film about a beautiful mulatto princess who raises violent passions in two men. Umiliani’s score explores exotic jazz-funk rhythms – listen here. Another collaboration by Umiliani with director Luigi Scattini is 1969’s ANGELI BIANCHI, ANGELI NERI (WITCHCRAFT ‘70); Umiliani’s soundtrack is a unique blend of groove and magic – listen here. Have a listen or order from FourFlies.
Klattu Records has partnered with Scare Flair Records to finally release Glenn Paxton’s score for DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW on vinyl, having previously released the soundtrack on CD. DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW is a 1981 horror film directed by Frank De Felitta. The film was originally meant to be an independent feature but was purchased by CBS – turning it into a made for television film that was very well received by critics and audiences. DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW is credited to have started the horror subgenre of the killer scarecrow. Despite being a made for television film, it got a VHS release through Key Video in the mid 80’s, as well as a DVD and Blu-Ray in 2011. See Klaatu Records for details.
La-La Land has released the digital and 2CD soundtracks of Lorne Balfe’s spectacular score for MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE in a 2XLP vinyl album, the seventh chapter in actor/producer Tom Cruise’s beloved spy series, soon to be released through MONDO Records. Pressed on 2x 180-gram Mondo Exclusive color vinyl and features artwork by Mo Shafeek and liner notes by the film’s director, writer, and producer Christopher McQuarrie. Estimated shipping in September 2023, it is available to pre-order at MONDO here.
Rob Zombie and Waxwork Records have announced “Rob Zombie Presents CARNIVAL OF SOULS Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Gene Moore.” Starring Candace Hilligoss, CARNIVAL OF SOULS is a 1962 American psychological horror film directed by Herk Harvey. The plot follows a young woman whose life is disturbed after becoming the sole survivor of a car accident. Trying to put the incident behind her, she moves to Utah to accept a job as a church organist. Unable to assimilate with the locals, her life is soon interrupted by visions of a ghoulish stranger. As her visions become more frequent, she finds herself strangely drawn to an abandoned carnival on the outskirts of town. The alluring, deserted carnival may hold the secret to her tragic past. Waxwork worked closely with the owners of the original CARNIVAL OF SOULS film elements which have been restored by and archived in the vaults of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. AMPAS restored the soundtrack from the film’s original soundtrack negative, allowing the holders of this historical film to provide Waxwork with the best possible source material. This special release marks the first, official CARNIVAL OF SOULS soundtrack album. In addition to the original soundtrack, this release features segments of dialogue and sound effects eloquently and tastefully included, all sourced from the restored original soundtrack negative.
https://waxworkrecords.com/products/rob-zombie-presents-carnival-of-souls
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Video Game Music News
Doyle Donehoo (Warhammer series, Space Hulk: Deathwing, Sniper: Ghost Warrior, Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2, Hammer and Bolter miniseries) has scored the recently released video game Aliens: Dark Descent. This real-time strategy video game was developed by Tindalos Interactive in collaboration with Disney’s 20th Century Games and published by Focus Entertainment. Set 20 years after the events of ALIEN 3, a team of colonial marines must stop a Xenomorph outbreak while gathering resources to repair their Otago spacecraft on the moon base of Lethe. The game was released for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on June 20, 2023. “One of our goals was to stay as true as possible to the musical vocabulary set down in the Alien movies by Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner and Elliot Goldenthall,” said Donehoo. “These movies, and their scores which I listened to so many times, meant so much to me as a budding composer, who saw (and was freaked out by) the Alien movies in the dome theaters of San Jose. We wanted to capture as much of that unique dread Alien atmosphere as we could. Naturally, we added a more modern approach as well as featuring instruments not available to the above Alien(s) composers. When gamers play this game, we want the listeners to be sonically plunged again into the bowls of the Nostromo or the shattered hallways of Colony LV-426. However in this game, we have some new locations with a similar feel to what we saw in the Alien(s) movies. I think the true hardcore fans of the Aliens franchise will be pleased with what we have composed.” Watch for my interview on scoring this game with Donehoo coming up in MusiqueFantastique.
Lakeshore Records is releasing THE SIMS 4: TAKE THE REINS SOUNDS OF THE SEASON original soundtrack with music by BAFTA-nominated and DICE Award winning game composer Ilan Eshkeri (GHOST OF TSUSHIMA) who has been the composer for THE SIMS since 2014. Inspired by the locale of the new season, the soundtrack will bring Simmers from all over the world will enjoy the toe tapping sounds from The Sims 4 base game and packs including Eco Lifestyle, Cats & Dogs and Seasons. THE SIMS 4: TAKE THE REINS in-game soundtrack is perfect for each and every rancher. Inspired by the rustic locale of the new season and it’s rootin’ tootin’ sounds, Simmers from all around the world are invited to gallop on up and experience the world of The Sims! Fans of the franchise will also enjoy other toe tapping sounds from The Sims 4 base game and packs, including Eco Lifestyle, Cats & Dogs and Seasons.
Purchase/Stream here.
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Randall D. Larson was for many years publisher of CinemaScore: The Film Music Journal, senior editor for Soundtrack Magazine, and a film music columnist for Cinefantastique magazine. A specialist on horror film music, he is the author of Musique Fantastique: 100+ Years of Fantasy, Science Fiction & Horror Film Music and Music from the House of Hammer. He currently writes essays on film music and sf/horror cinema, and has written liner notes more than 300 soundtrack CD or digital releases. He can be contacted via https://musiquefantastique.com/ or follow Musique Fantastique on Facebook. Follow Randall on Twitter at https://twitter.com/randalldlarson and https://twitter.com/MusiqueFantast1
