Score, sound design and Dolby Atmos mix
From Audible: “Professional wrestler Ashley Massaro died by suicide in 2019. Ashley vs WWE follows events leading up to her death and examines allegations of abuse while she was wrestling for WWE. As journalist Isobel Thompson delves into Ashley's story, she investigates whether her allegations are just the tip of the iceberg. This story takes Isobel from the UK, to Ashley’s home of Long Island, and into the world of WWE wrestling in the early 2000s - where the power, influence and misogyny of the real world played out through the characters in the ring.”
The Squid Scam
Music composition and sound design, for ITN/Audible
In 2021, scammers stole $16 million from thousands of investors across the globe, by capitalising on the hype around NFTs and the success of the hit Netflix series Squid Game.
The scam was so believable, the BBC, Yahoo and CNBC covered its initial trading success, before later publishing headlines revealing the full scale of the fraud. Investigative technology journalist Janhoi McGregor takes a deep dive into the murky underworld of Crypto and NFTs, to attempt to uncover the true identity of the squid scammer. Much of their web trail was wiped out, but digital detective Janhoi follows the crumbs left behind in an attempt to find justice for the victims.
Podcast of the Week, Guardian and Stylist Magazine
A selection of music and sound design from 2022
SteelHeads
Theme tune I composed the end theme to this drama from Goldhawk Productions.
From the BBC’s website: “When a young British tennis pro, Joleen Kenzie (Jessica Barden), is diagnosed with a rare terminal illness, she has herself cryogenically frozen at an experimental lab in Seattle, in the hope that one day – perhaps hundreds of years into the future - there will be a cure and she can be revived.
“She wakes up to a world divided... and Joleen is now captive.
“From the creators of The Cipher and Passenger List, a chilling new medical thriller inspired by true events starring Jessica Barden.”
Bad Women: The Ripper Retold
Music composition, sound design and mix
From Pushkin … “It’s a cold case like no other. In the fall of 1888, five women were brutally murdered in the slums of London. The attacks were so violent that the killer earned a nickname — Jack the Ripper.
“But everything you think you know about Jack and those murdered women is wrong.
“Historian Hallie Rubenhold uncovers new facts about the five victims - revealing the appalling treatment they faced as women in the 1880s, and completely overturning the accepted Ripper story.”
Cautionary Tales S2
Music composition, sound design, mixing
That’s another fine mess you got me in to. More Cautionary Tales, allowing you to smugly learn lessons from the comfort of your headphones while other people lurch from disaster to catastrophe.
“We tell our children unsettling fairy tales to teach them valuable life lessons, but these cautionary tales are for the education of the grown-ups — and they are all true. Tim Harford (Financial Times, BBC, author of “Messy” and “The Undercover Economist”) brings you stories of awful human error, tragic catastrophes, daring heists and hilarious fiascos. They’ll delight you and scare you, but also make you wiser.”
Brilliant – The Guardian
One of the recommended podcasts “to get you through lockdown” – The Sunday Times
Fabulous series – Bill Dare, creator of “Dead Ringers”
Fascinating and inventively told – The Daily Mail
Reverberate – Guardian podcast
Music composition, sound design and mix. From the Guardian: “The Guardian’s Chris Michael explores incredible stories from around the world about when music shook history. Each episode focuses on a turning point in a city’s story, as told through a song that sparked a moment – and reveals the deeper social and political issues that shaped these pivotal events”
The Messenger
I composed and produced the title music for this new Audible series. From Audible: “When investigative journalist Shiv Malik was betrayed by a source he considered a friend, he spent almost fifteen years tracking down the truth about what happened. The Messenger is an extraordinary audio tale of friendship, lies, betrayal, terrorism, the destruction of a marriage, and the insidiousness of fake news long before it went viral. In the wake of the 7/7 London bombings, Shiv Malik began working for the BBC to discover how young South Asian men like him had turned into suicide bombers. That's when he met notorious Islamist spokesman Hassan Butt, who told Shiv that he'd repented and left al-Qaeda. Hassan wanted Shiv to write his biography, and Shiv thought he'd found the biggest story of his life—a story that would help to change the world for the better. Little did he know that Hassan Butt would almost destroy his life. Over the next three years, Shiv and Hassan became friends, until one day there was a knock on the door from police investigators and everything fell apart. In eight revealing episodes, featuring Shiv's own audio recordings of his conversations with Hassan, Shiv searches for where he can place his trust: in the reams of evidence, in the cops, in a terrorist who swears he's changed, or in a friend who has no one else to turn to?
Innermost
Music and sound design
From the Guardian: “The Guardian is today launching Innermost — a special six-part podcast series – hosted by Leah Green, which takes us inside the homes of Guardian listeners to ask about their lives, the small, funny or tragic, weird or wonderful moments they have recently faced.
Unlike traditional podcasts, Innermost features unique stories from Guardian listeners and the ambient sounds they record. The result is a series of unexpected and intimate vignettes where the listener is transported from one place to another in the way the guest defines.
Each episode of Innermost will take the audience to new corners of the globe. From a 30-year-old heroin addict in London, to a woman in India who only met her husband once prior to lockdown and a secret, escalating war between neighbours in North West England, over bird seed.”
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
A podcast from Pushkin Industries featuring some of the world’s biggest cockups – and what we can learn from them. Plan continuation bias anyone? Disastrous music and sound from me.
“We tell our children unsettling fairy tales to teach them valuable life lessons, but these Cautionary Tales are for the education of the grown ups – and they are all true. Tim Harford (Financial Times, BBC, author of “Messy” and “The Undercover Economist”) brings you stories of awful human error, tragic catastrophes, daring heists and hilarious fiascos. They'll delight you, scare you, but also make you wiser. Featuring original music and an award-winning cast including Alan Cumming and Archie Panjabi (The Good Wife), Toby Stephens (Die Another Day), Russell Tovey (Quantico) – and Malcolm Gladwell.”
Available from your local podcast outlet …
From the top
Some recent theme tunes …
Fever pitch
Some demo music, for better or worse, hurled out in to the abyss …
Adulting – an original Guardian drama by Eddie Robson
I wrote the music and created the sound design for this six-part drama – the Guardian's first foray in to such things.
"The six-part series explores the challenges of growing up in today’s world through the stories of five friends who are reunited ten years after leaving university. Adulting was created by award-winning radio producer Simon Barnard and writer Eddie Robson, who has produced scripts for Doctor Who and Hollyoaks. Adulting cast includes Hannah Murray and Joe Dempsie from Game of Thrones and Skins, Pearl Mackie who played Bill Potts in Doctor Who, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett from Misfits, and Kathryn Wilder who starred as Ophelia opposite Tom Hiddleston’s Hamlet at RADA."
Have a listen here: Adulting
Haunted
I've composed the music and created the sound design for this Panoply podcast, produced by Chalk & Blade – a great exploration of what lies beneath everyday stories of spookery. From the Panoply website:
"Do ghosts exist? If not, why do we see them? In each episode Danny Robins looks at a real life ghost story in forensic detail trying to work out what really happened, with the help of experts, sceptics and the people who witnessed something they just can't explain.
Danny visits a famous racetrack where drivers return from the dead; sees a suburban house haunted by a racist ex-tenant; talks to a widower who shares his bed with a phantom; and meets the parents who became convinced a ghost wanted to kill their baby daughter."
Touch Radio 133: tic-tac-toe
tic-tac-toe was written for Gilbert Ratcliffe, who in 2017 was a final-year dance student at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire. For this performance, called “You Watching Me?”, choreographed for a small group of dancers, Gil wrote:
“My research was centred on the physical and mental manifestation of my journey with Tourette’s Syndrome. I explored it through the collaborative process between choreographer and dancers to see if we could create a non-narrative, abstract dance work that was able to elicit an emotional, performative response.”
You can listen on the Touch Radio page: http://touchradio.org.uk
Painting by Melanie Young
In pod we trust
Been back in podcasting land for a few weeks. I was asked to create a theme tune for the Guardian's new Chips With Everything show, plus create music and sound design for a Glabs project called Defining Moment, with Guardian US. Ongoing through the summer is also the lovely Andy Zaltzman's Summer of Sport. Anyone who knows me understands that I'm so sport illiterate I wouldn't know which end of a football to kick, and even I find SOS highly entertaining. Tune in for news of chessboxing, donkey cheese and how grouse are preparing for the Olympics. Below I've uploaded the theme tunes for the shows.
If you go down to the woods …
After many days and weeks in front of screens, it was great to get out and about with Chris Watson to record and produce a series of short stories inspired by woodlands and forests – a project funded by the Woodland Trust for the Guardian. The four authors who wrote stories were Alan Garner, Ali Smith, Alec Finlay and Evie Wyld. We recorded them in the locations that inspired their stories, then went away to soundtrack them, dipping in to Chris's rather extraordinary archive. The stories can be heard here and are also uploaded below.
Any port in a storm
"Any port in a storm" is a piece I made for the TouchRadio strand. It can be listened to at the Touch website. Details about the piece, from Touch, are below, as well as the photo we were sort of dying touse, but since the piece came out rather more ominous than I planned, we exercised restraint.
To call this field recording would be crediting the situation with more adventure than it deserves. At five in the morning, with a hangover starting to percolate, the ideal conditions are surely to just roll over, hit record and go back to sleep – and that is pretty much what happened here. End of disclaimer.
Boats, whether out at sea or in harbour, have a particular vocabulary of sounds. On the water, they are masked by the white noise of the ocean, in which – as many sailors have reported – you can hear almost any sound imaginable. Moored up, where things are quieter, the water laps and slaps the hull while the wind plays aeolian harp on the mast.
That rigging sound is often a chorus of tapping lines against masts, but this particular boat – a cruising yacht with a Bermuda rig, moored at Yarmouth after a day’s sailing – had an unusually musical voice, sounding clear notes as the wind passed through its structure. At sea this was a contented hum, but at night it felt much more ominous.
The tones in this piece were recorded in one of the sleeping cabins in the stern, a little resonant box. Of course, there has been some processing – mainly to remove the snoring of sailors.
Edge of the world
A few years ago I was lucky enough to sail to St Kilda, in the Outer Hebrides. I say sail, but it really involved watching other people do clever things with sheets and knots while I faffed about with microphones and nausea. I made a variety of recordings there, some of which I'm pleased to say have been used in a radio programme about St Kilda, produced by Francesca Panetta for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. You can hear the show here.
The big sleep
Stories to fall asleep to … Perhaps, if the sound of a severed head on a petrol pump gets you off. These short works, commissioned by the Guardian and John Lewis, have been turned in to podcasts for which I did sound and music. The idea is you don't reach the end, which is a perhaps a counterintuitive challenge for an author. There are going to be five in all, but here's a link to the second, by John Burnside, and the first one, by Will Self.