british_bpm

Thanks dfenton for this very flattering review. I'm sorry not to have responded to your mail, I usually do. You're spot on when you describe it. On reading the script the director asked me how I imagined the score would sound and I said "like every good movie score I heard when I was growing up". We did some tests to see if this score could be done for the very tight budget and were pleased that it was going to be possible. Originally we had no score for musicians, but as the process expanded we decided to squeeze every penny of budget into a band of 60 players which we recorded in a single day at Air - Studios, London. The original idea of an electronic realisation can be heard though on the odd exception to where the brilliant UK musicians just didn't have the time to "nail it". The entire cue on the first repeat of "Lisa's" theme; a cue which I call "Beach Of Death" switches half way through to 100% electronic. This happens as the music shifts from major to minor as the beach of death is revealed returning to the live orchestra as we bleed into the next scene. Also the very final cue, when this turns to minor and goes into the end roller for that minute or so of orchestral gymnastics, that is also entirely electronic. I'm with you on the melodic aspects of a lot of modern scores. A lot of which I've written! Composers are asked to be seen and not heard (or rather heard but not noticed) these days, so instead of forming a choral narrative with the listener to provide context, consequence, motivation and risk in addition to the action and dialogue on-screen, we are instead asked to provide "atmosphere" and "mis en scene" where we're either a backdrop or a hyperreal extension of the images and sound FX track. Jon the director took the bold step of wanting to immerse the viewer into his world, once you're in for the ride, you can take a viewer anywhere. I recently watched an episode of University Challenge where they played a clip from a soundtrack and asked "Which famous John Williams score is this piece of music from". The answers ranged from "ET" to "Raiders..." via "The Goonies", the cue was actually from Jaws, and was one of the shark chase cues. They were all very surprised, and had forgot that in those good ol' days when the sun shone, it really shone but when the clouds formed, they were of a darker azure than you get these days, and this in part was achieved by contrast, for without light no shadows form surely? It was great to work on something where the director and I shared the same ambition. More importantly he understood how best it would be achieved from a process point of view. One key idea was not allowing temp to penetrate the process, if anything was ever edited to temp I never heard it. Jon felt that there is no way for a composer to be truly original, whether compositionally or simply from concept and approach if guided by temp. The other key to the process was .... time. I had the best part of 6 months to work on it. This didn't mean I was on the show for that entire period. But Jon allowed me to address the score in bursts of activity. In fact at one point Jon said "I need you not to work on this for a couple of weeks now as I need your true objectivity and you can only do that if you move away from it for a bit". So it was a gloriously luxurious process of coming up with the themes, temping the odd loosely cut sequence, to scoring the whole picture to soft lock. Taking a "vacation" of several weeks during a CGI hiatus (lots of FX shots in this show) only to fine polish and adjust to the final, slightly tweaked lock before the process of orchestration, production and mixing occurred. I'm hoping an iTunes release of the score will coincide with the release, it has been promised. But these can seem frustratingly difficult to coordinate if experience is anything to go by. If however you have a Blu-Ray player the Jon has kindly organised it so the whole score can be listened to in isolation in full 5.1. Good news, Jon has a really exciting project in the pipeline which will feature another collaboration with myself. When I asked him how he envisaged the score he said "start where we left off on Grabbers...." In the meantime I hope some of you brits get along to a screening of it when it is released in December in the UK. Thanks again.. Christian Henson (composer - Grabbers).