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Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that calling these blog updates “cue of the week” was a mistake as I have not been able to maintain a weekly schedule with them.  So, from now on we’ll just call them Cue Analysis until and unless I can think of something catchier.

Anyway, the cue I’ve chosen here was actually introduced in Episode 6, but since the cue I chose to discuss was a different one that I felt encapsulated that episode better, I’ll go ahead and discuss this one now.

As you may have noticed, Zhon blends both comedic and dramatic elements, and from the beginning, my greatest challenge has been to find ways to get that across musically. I have always found the “secret agent” movies of the 60′s as well as the many parodies of them to be very entertaining.  Even the most serious ones seem to have a certain campiness to them.  Whether this was deliberate on their part or not  or just the way I perceive them due to my “modern” sensibilities, I do not know, but I get a kick out of them.

I am particularly fond of the sound of the music of those early 60′s shows and movies.  I especially love how oftentimes the lounge/exotica/space-age pop sound of the previous decade meets the burgeoning 60′s surf-rock & psychedelic sound.  Vibraphone meets Fender guitar drenched in reverb &/or tremolo. ”Square”, meet “Hip”. “How do you do?” “I’m groovy, baby what’s shakin’?”  Etc. Etc.

In any case, it’s a sound I’ve tried to incorporate into Zhon whenever it seems appropriate.  Even though the majority of the show takes place in the present, there’s something about that sound that to my ears manages to allude to stuffy, uptight “Agent” types while also maintaining that element of camp and humor.

You can hear the cue in context about 43 seconds into the Season 1 finale, Episode 7 “A Tangled Web We Weave”

Hello again, and welcome to parts 5 & 6 of my Zhon:The Alien Interviews Cue Of The Week Blog.  Episode 5 is called “When I was an Alien”, and in this episode, our title character continues delving into his past on earth, describing his need to change locations every so often when the natives begin to notice that something is not quite right.  The cue I’m including here is for a very short scene that involves Zhon “gettin the hell outta Dodge”, except in this case, Dodge is China circa 450 BCE.  The scene is played for laughs, so my goal was to come up with something that highlighted the action, but was pretty light & minimal.  You can hear the cue in context here. It occurs about 3:15 into the episode & the cue is called “Run”.  Spent a lot of time thinking about what to call that one, can you tell?

Episode 6 is called “Is it Hot in Here?”, and the cue I’ve chosen to highlight is probably one of the pieces of music I’ve done that I’m most proud of.  The scene is a dark fantasy sequence where hapless agent Killjoy loses his cool just a bit.  As soon as I saw the scene and heard the dialog discussing toys,  I knew what direction I was going to go in.  This type of almost instantaneous inspiration happens rarely for me & it’s a great pleasure when it does.  I thought of a video game I used to play as well as some of the slightly twisted cinematic takes on classic children’s stories that I’ve enjoyed over the years & the tune was practically writing itself in my head.  All I needed was to obtain some samples of a music box & a stopwatch…..

Intrigued enough to hear “Yoyo” in context?

Hello again!  I decided to combine Episodes 3 & 4 into one blog post this time. It was convenient, both cues have some similarities musically…..  Um, OK, yes, I got behind in my blogging schedule & had to catch up by doing a 2 for 1.  You caught me.  Good job, Sherlock…..

The cue I’ve chosen for Episode 3 – “Food Glorious Food”  is entitled “Steak Out”.  Oh yes, I’m such a clever wordsmith aren’t I?  Smirk away, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a pretty goofy play on words which will make slightly more sense if you watch the episode, though  no less cringeworthy, but hey, I have to come up with this music as fast as I can and usually name these cues with whatever comes to mind at the time, usually something that makes a connection to either the scene or a key section of dialog which makes identifying it in a discussion with my director easier. It’s always easier to say “Hey, let’s do a variation of the ‘Man Bites Dog’ cue from episode 3″ than to say “let’s re-use 3M54, remember that one?”

Anyway, I want you to watch the show, so I won’t give away too much.  Suffice to say that the scene is a “cat & mouse” type of thing where our main character escapes his confines and the hapless agent who is assigned to guard him must now figure out where he has gone in order to find and re-apprehend him.  Since a lot of this show encompasses both comedic and dramatic aspects, often in the same scene, the challenge was to come up with “chase” music that sounded like chase music but didn’t sound overly dramatic or heavy.  Listen to the cue and then hear it in context and see what you think.  This particular scene happens roughly about 3 mins and 40 seconds into the episode.

Ok, for Episode 4- “Rehythm”, I have chosen a cue that I am quite fond of.  In the scene where you will hear this cue, Agent David Killjoy & Zhon have a confrontation that starts out playful & is rather funny but quickly turns quite tense & dark.

If you’ve been watching the show (you have been watching, right?), you may have noticed that Agent Killjoy is a bit uptight, stiff, by the book, almost robot like at times.  At least that’s the way I saw him and in this cue my goal was to come up with something that gives you the idea that this guys circuitry is melting inside his head as he paces back & forth up to the point where he explodes and shouts “What are you really doing here, Zhon?!” So, you may notice that the music leading up to that point is kind of robotic, yet frenetic, my attempt to create the musical equivalent of electronic overload.  Did it work?  I hope so, you decide.  I know my brain felt a bit fried after working on music for an entire day….  You can see and hear the episode in context here.

In case, you missed the hyperlinks above or actually made it all the way through my blog post and now want to see what I’m talking about, you can click this hyperlink to watch the whole series of Zhon: The Alien Interviews

The cue I’m presenting today is the opening scene of the 2nd episode of Zhon: The Alien Interviews.  In this scene our hero is questioned by TV talk show host Amanda Bella about his origins, under the ever watchful and suspicious eye of Agent David Killjoy of the NSD.

The requirement for this cue was to come up with something playful, but that also suggested a certain monotony & mystery.  As you may have gathered, a big part of this job is interpreting exactly what the heck it is that your director is trying to get across & finding a way to help underscore what is on the screen with music that helps to convey that message. Since many directors speak a slightly different language than us musician types, the conversations & descriptions can get very interesting to say the least.  Maybe someone needs to come up with a director/composer  translation dictionary!

Anyway, I’ll let you the listener decide if I achieved what I was asked for.  The music I came up with has a deliberately slow and even pace to try to convey a sense of a clock ticking ever so slowly as the characters go back and forth in their verbal battle.  The pizzicato strings give a light and slightly comic tone to the music and the ethereal vibraphone sound introduced in Episode 1 returns to highlight Zhons otherworldly yet mischievous nature. There are a few pauses that might sound random if you’re just listening, but if you watch the scene, they’ll make more sense. That’s part of the fun.

If you watch the whole series, and I hope that you do, you will hear variations of this cue come up regularly whenever you see certain interactions with these same characters.  Though I did not plan it to be this way at the time, it’s become a sort of signature motif.  What I like to call a happy accident.

You can see & hear this cue in context by checking out Zhon: The Alien Interviews Episode 2-“Everybodys Kung Fu Fighting”

Today I introduce my cue of the week, where I discuss a particular music cue that I did for the episode running that week.  Sometimes it will be a particular favorite of mine, other times it will be a cue that (hopefully) really makes a particular scene stand out.

This cue occurs towards the end of the very first scene of the first episode. It’s the first piece of music I wrote for the series after coming up with the main title theme.  The initial request from co-director Tyrel Good was to come up with something that somehow managed to be both sinister and playful with a dreamlike quality.  He mentioned that he could almost imagine hearing something that sounded like music  from the 60′s sitcom “I Dream Of Jeannie”….  Huh?!  OK, that threw me, but hey I’m always up for a challenge and it gave me an excuse to get on You Tube and check out Barbara Eden in that slinky costume, er,  I mean check out some of the music in that show….. (sure hope the wife isn’t reading this)

As I was thinking about what to do I remembered how growing up watching some of these shows, whenever there was some kind of dream sequence or mysterious thing happening, there would often be some musical sequence that was either played on the harp or sometimes the vibraphone.  It was with this idea in mind that I started on the piece….

Long story short, the end result was interesting, but Tyrel and I both agreed that it went a little too far in the direction of the absurd and comical with not enough of the dramatic, so I needed to either tweak it or scrap it and do something different.

In the end, what I came up with is something that combines elements of 3 different ideas into what you hear now.  Ironically, the sound of the vibraphone, which I almost didn’t use at all & thought I would not use again, has seeped into most of the series, albeit in a heavily processed & effected way.  Turns out it works really nicely in many of the scenes that feature our title character interacting with the people questioning him, while also paying tribute to the sounds in some of our favorite retro shows and movies about secret agents, quirky characters & mysterious beings.

Well, that’s enough back story.  Here’s the piece.  Like many pieces of music written to underscore something we see on screen, it might not seem like much on it’s own. It’s not particularly musical or memorable.  But in the context of the scene, it seems to help get the idea that the director wanted to express across.  And that’s ultimately what my job is.  Or so they tell me…..

See and hear the cue in context by watching episode 1 “Here’s Zhonny” at http://whoiszhon.com/foryoureyesonly/episodes/june1st2012.php

For most of this year, I have been working on the music for an internet webseries called Zhon: The Alien Interviews. It’s a sci-fi series produced by Tucson AZ’s RobEricMedia LLC and I’m honored to have been asked to be a part of it. I just recently finished scoring the 1rst season and am about to begin work on the second. As each new episode airs, I plan to release a “cue of the week”, which will consist of my personal favorite piece of music written for that episode.

Today, I am including the main title theme that I composed for the series. To find out more and watch the show in its entirety, please visit http://whoiszhon.com/ You can also watch the trailer for the show on my Video/Music In Context page.

Ashes Of Seraphim is an independent short film by director Michael Peterson that I signed on to score some time ago. Unfortunately, the movie is on hold as Michael awaits funding to complete the movies visual effects. He has recently started a kickstarter campaign to get the necessary funding and as soon as that goes live I will share it with you. In the meantime, you can check out the music I did for the films trailer which I recently re-mastered for the kickstarter video. You can also hear that music in context on my Video/Music In Context page.

(Please forgive the redundancy of 2 players, but I’ve included both an HTML5 & a Flash version since I’ve been hearing about issues with html5 on browsers like firefox and many mobile apps don’t show flash.)

HTML 5 Version

Flash Version

So, it’s been a pretty busy time. I am preparing for a move to a new home for starters. Always exciting. Can’t you just feel my excitement? Yeah, didn’t think so. It’s a subtle sensation. It’ll be a lot of work, but after the dust clears, it should be a good thing.  But the actual process of moving is never really fun, is it?

I am currently back in California for a few days, sitting in the guest room of my longtime friend and bandmate Jeff Diehm’s house. I’m here for rehearsals with our band The Last Dance and also to do a short set with Jeff’s solo project Autumn Cannibals which I highly recommend. The Last Dance and Autumn Cannibals will be performing at DragonCon in Atlanta on September 2nd.

Over the last couple of weeks, months, whatever it’s been since I last blogged, I did music for a local producer named Robert Kaufmann who is putting together a video music program to be called “The Rock Channel”.  I did the intro/credit music for it and will be posting a snippet of that very soon.  I also did music for a promotional video for an organization that I am a member of called IFASA   IFASA stands for The Independent Film Assoc. of Southern Arizona and is an organization dedicated to promoting the Arizona film industry.   You can see and hear the video here.

After my move is done, it should be right about the time for me to start work on 2 film scores. I will be working on Director/Special Makeup FX Artist Michael Peterson’s Ashes Of Seraphim and on Tyee Matthew’s “High School Hell”

Eventually, I also hope to continue working towards getting my certificate of completion from a U.K. based media composition course called Music For The Media that I have been working on and off on for a couple of years.  MFTM is a real-world composition course dedicated to helping both beginning and experienced composers learn more about composing in a variety of media situations, everything from commercials and corporate training videos to film and animation work.  It’s run and tutored by actual working composers and is a great way to learn about this field and why it takes more than just the ability to play or even write music well to navigate it.  Highly recommended!

Wow.  I think that about covers things.  Now it’s time for lunch!

I don’t know Mr. Schumacher personally, but am an admirer of his work with artists I admire such as Calexico and Neko Case. And the music world recently lost a more well known name to cancer: 7 time Grammy winner Roger Nichols, best known for his work with Steely Dan and a pioneer in sampling and digital recording. Despite being a world renowned producer and engineer of some of the biggest albums in music history, Mr. Nichol’s fight with cancer has pretty much left his family penniless. Even though Craig Schumacher has some health insurance, he is looking at a huge bill in the end, further complicated by the fact that his cancer treatments will make it impossible for him to work for large periods of time. While he may survive his cancer physically, who knows whether he will survive in financially.

These tragic events highlight a huge problem in America. Without getting into the politics of it, I think people really need to consider the fact that so many people in this country fall through the cracks in our current medical system. Not just poor people or “lazy” people who don’t work, but many of the artists and musicians you and I admire and look up to are at risk of losing everything if they happen to become ill. When you dedicate your life to becoming a professional musician you take many risks. You risk spending most of your life struggling to make a living, you risk your life and health on the road playing in smoky bars and eating sub-par food and you basically give up on things that many Americans take for granted: For most musicians there is no pension plan, no employer sponsored health plan, very little even in the way of Social Security benefits for your retirement years unless you also have some kind of corporate day job on the side.

I hope you will join me in taking a moment to reflect on this and think about how you can play a role in bringing some necessary changes in this country. This is after all, America. The worlds largest superpower. The country that put a man on the moon and made it possible for average people around the world to own automobiles and fly in planes. Is the idea that no American should have to go bankrupt when he or she gets sick really that farfetched?!

I have recently begun an association with the Tucson AZ production company Image Alchemy Productions.

IAP’s first self-produced film is called “Ashes Of Seraphim“, and I recently completed the music for the teaser which you can watch on my Video/Music In Context page.

I will be helping out with location audio and will be scoring the film which has an expected release date for sometime in the summer of 2011. You can also listen to the music by itself on my film music page.