Yesterday was a busy day.

Passed Recordings periodically creates community compilations from the artists on the label and members of the Ambient Soundscapes discord - for this Halloween season, the concept is an ambient re-scoring of the 1922 classic Nosferatu. There were enough contributors that two entire scores were created - the one that my piece is a part of premiered yesterday, and is included below.

The way the collaboration was structured: The film was segmented into scenes, and then scenes were assigned to artists as they expressed interest in participating. My scene runs from 31:45 to 36:31 - I took the approach to compose a score directly to picture as much as was possible, while still retaining some sense of a composed, standalone piece. There were some existing samples and motifs composed by the artist Take Me There, which I used as a bit of inspiration and guidance on musical key. I particularly enjoy the shifts between narratives in the scene, as it allowed me to add wildly different moods and sections to the piece, culminating the the eerie, woozy piano at the end.

Secondly, I had the honor of performing with Moonwatcher and Scotchamo last night at Nashville's Random Sample gallery as part of their Screams of Silent Cinema tour, each of us performing a live score to a silent film. My film was the 1911 Italian L'Inferno, which I approached with a very loose framework of techniques and sounds, allowing me room to improvise and perform to picture as much as I could. You can see my notes on index cards taped to the table with my equipment in the main image.

I rehearsed this a number of times over the last couple of weeks leading up to the actual event, which I did record - so there's the possibility I could post a video of a rehearsal take in the near future... but the actual performance felt the best in the moment, though not recorded outside of being streamed by Random Sample on Instagram. I could do one more take and attempt to follow a similar structure, or I could just accept that it's escaped into the aether.

More coming very soon. As promised, here's Nosferatu: