SAUSAGE PARTY composer Christopher Lennertz creates beautiful music for filthy edibles – Interview

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 09/13/2016
SAUSAGE PARTY soundtrack | ©2014 Madison Gate Records

In person or conducting, Christopher Lennertz has a boyishly enthusiastic personality that could easily make you imagine he was a member of The Goonies just a few decades before. So it’s no surprise that he’s becoming a go-to composer for funny animal kids’ movies are increasingly playing a part on a diverse resume with the likes of ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS, HOP, MARMADUKE and CATS & DOGS: THE REVENGE OF KITTY GALORE.  It’s a merry melody orchestral style that sings with colorful brightness and adventure. Yet in R-rating land, Lennertz is having just as much fun getting down and dirty for […]Read On »


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Composer George Fenton parks with THE LADY IN THE VAN – Interview

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 01/19/2016
THE LADY IN THE VAN soundtrack | ©2016 Sony Classical Records

If one might have the cliched attitude of old school English composers as adhering rigorously to the classically imperious music of Queen and Country, then they likely haven’t heard much of George Fenton’s prolific work over the last four or so decades, let alone had a crotchety, crazy old lady parked in their driveway for fifteen of them. Not only has Fenton contributed one of his most delightfully attitude-filled scores to represent THE LADY IN THE VAN, but he also has the distinction of having actually met the fearsome Ms. Shepherd, a curmudgeonly homeless woman who became a grudgingly accepted […]Read On »


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Z FOR ZACHARIAH: Composer Heather McIntosh survives with the last woman on Earth – Interview in Z FOR ZACHARIAH

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 09/07/2015
Z FOR ZACHARIAH soundtrack | ©2015 Varese Sarabande Records

With female driven, YA dystopian fiction being all the rage at the multiplex, one of the genre’s first, unintended entries was a 1973 post-nuke diary written by a sixteen year-old survivor named Ann Burden. As penned by MRS. FRISBY AND THE RATS OF N.I.M.H. author Robert C. O’Brien, (and posthumously completed by his wife and daughter), the award winning book Z FOR ZACHARIAH details the the life of Ann and her beloved dog Faro in a radiation-free Shangri La. located somewhere in rural America, She’s settled into a comfortable, if yearning existence since her family vanished years ago seeking civilization. […]Read On »


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THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.composer Daniel Pemberton goes R.E.T.R.O. – Interview

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 08/27/2015
THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E soundtrack | ©2015 Watertower Records

With its mod rhythms, shagadelic exotica, bold brass, bongo-driven percussion and sheer, string joy in death-defying adventure against world-conquering wannabes (while of course not musically messing up the hero’s Carnaby Street tailoring), the era-specific sound of spy jazz has been making a making a comeback at the cinema, played for delirious height of kitsch by Geoff Zanelli and Mark Ronson in MORTDECAI, THE KINGSMAN‘s head-blasting drive by Henry Jackman and Matthew Margeson, or used for pure chase adrenalin by Joe Kraemer in MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: ROGUE NATION. But while those two movies are latter-day exercises in battling villainous Eurotrash, THE MAN […]Read On »


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DESERT DANCER composer Benjamin Wallfisch finds movement in forbidden territory – Interview

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 05/23/2015
DESERT DANCER soundtrack | ©2015 Varese Sarabande Records

More than ever, the regions of the Middle East and Asia are the tragic grounds for thousands of people trying to make better lives for themselves in the face of religious repression and grinding poverty. This is the musical link when it comes to Benjamin Wallfisch expressing the souls of Iran and India in his immensely moving, reality-based scores to DESERT DANCER and BHOPAL: A PRAYER FOR RAIN. The first speaks for the struggle of Afshin Ghaffarian, a young man whose spirit refuses to stay still for the murderous, moral police that stand for his country’s Islamist government – a […]Read On »


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Interview: SNOWPIERCER composer MARCO BELTRAMI is on the right sound-track

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 07/14/2014
SNOWPIERCER | ©2014 The Weinstein Company

Among the genre-centric composers who’ve carried on the torch from Jerry Goldsmith, few stand out for blazingly inventive sci-fi and horror scores like the maestro’s USC protégé Marco Beltrami. Just as his mentor used his memorable thematic talents for orchestrally, and electronically conveying psychopaths, aliens and futuristic adventure, Beltrami has jumped on a similarly imaginative and prolific bandwagon. Since the psychopathic score for the smash 1996 hit SCREAM stabbed Beltrami into the Hollywood map, the composer has used every trick from chilling melodies to thunderous percussion and angelic choruses to embody the fantastical and fearful, music capable of rapturously symphonic […]Read On »


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Interview: BYZANTIUM composer Javier Navarrete hears vampire grrll power

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 08/06/2013
BYZANTIUM | ©2013 IFC Entertainment

America might have its upstart, sparkly rock-and-roll vampires. However in Europe the cinematic myths surrounding these creatures tend to be somewhat more romantically sophisticated, encouraging their scores to be similarly cloaked in poetic refinement. It’s a crimson wellspring where Intimately Baroque instrumentations conjure images of corseted eroticism and raging orchestras relish in unholy evil, all while a chorus simultaneously evokes the undead’s transgression against God, and their impossible dream of returning to his good graces. With his music’s striking mix of tenderness and savagery, Javier Navarrete takes on feminine, melodic shape to tap into the jugular of time-honored vampire music […]Read On »


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Interview: STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS composer MIchael Giacchino pilots The Enterprise

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 05/25/2013
STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS soundtrack | ©2013 Varese Sarabande Records

Sure man, not to mention Hollywood, had boldly gone before in turning a TV show’s five-year mission into an ongoing cinematic voyage- the first 27 years of which involved its original “classic” cast before the com was handed over to a new generation. But just when that film future seemed to have grown a bit stale, a hotshot named J.J. Abrams leaped into the captain’s chair to reboot the franchise in a way that was as audacious as it was winningly nostalgic with 2009s STAR TREK. Taking the beloved crewmates back to their beginnings with a surfeit of style and […]Read On »


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Interview: BIOSHOCK composer Garry Schyman rockets to the INFINITE

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 04/28/2013
BIOSHOCK INFINITE | ©2013 2K Games

Subtlety and spareness aren’t the first words that come to mind when hearing the burgeoning genre of video game music, a realm that most often calls upon epic orchestras, electronics, thrashing guitars and choral hosannahs to create the kind of lavish sonic environments and rhythmically accelerating action that bring on the joystick adrenalin. But if that soundtrack gameplay seemed increasingly familiar, 2007’s BIOSHOCK burst onto the scene as a full-fathom dive into unique terrain. Co-creator Ken Levine sent the player into the undersea city of Rapture, a 30s style, Ayn Rand-esque fiefdom gone to horrible seed, its art deco corridors […]Read On »


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Interview: Composer Alex Heffes investigates the EMPEROR

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 03/30/2013
EMPEROR soundtrack | ©2013 Lakeshore Records

The weight of history can be as dramatic as it is romantic, a counterpoint explored in any number of classical films, and symphonically lush scores that have dealt with the West’s awakening to the war-torn East. Now, that majestic sound has been robustly picked up by British composer Alex Heffes for EMPEROR, the new film from director Peter Webber (“Girl with the Pearl Earing”) that contrasts General MacArthur’s postwar search for the guilt, or innocence of the country’s god-ruler Hirohito with a military investigator’s desperate quest to determine if his Japanese fiancé has survived his nation’s bombing of her motherland […]Read On »


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