Terrortory Music

I promise I'll get back to the rough week story, but I have to take a moment to talk about the music of Terrortory.

I've been kind of quiet about it because I wanted it to be a little bit of surprise of the style in the movie. I was originally going to go for what I normally love--orchestral. For me it's always been the mark of a serious movie, and I've loved it as far back as I can remember.

But things came up, and the film took longer to finish than I thought, and my usual composer Chad Seiter was working on the ReCore game for Microsoft that had him flying to London to conduct sessions with the Philharmonic Orchestra...

We scrambled for a replacement. A buddy of mine said he knew of a guy in the UK named Terence Jones, so I contacted him. He did a test scene for us and he was very good.

Here's where you can hear the score for Terrortory and buy the soundtrack:
https://terencejonesmusic.bandcamp.com/album/terrortory-ost

The only thing was, he didn't think he'd have time to score the whole thing in the time we had. That led me to go with the backup plan I'd had in my head for a while...

I've been a synth fan forever...I mean, I'm an actual child of the 80's. I grew up on that stuff. So I'd been a member of a synth FB group for a while and I put out a call to a few of those guys and said "Hey, anybody interested in doing music for segments of my movie?"

I figured if each segment was done in the old-school synth style--which has been making a comeback since Drive/The Guest/It Follows, and more recently Stranger Things--then it could be cool.

First guy to come back was a dude named Daniel Deluxe. He didn't have a lot of time, because he was getting ready to go on tour. He's pretty well known. You can hear some of his stuff, including his very cool Corruptor album here:

https://soundcloud.com/daniel-deluxe

I gave him Smiling Jack, which is probably my favorite segment of the bunch, and he went to work. Hit it out of the park, man. It was great. A few tweaks, and we were good to go.

Got a couple of other people who tried segments but either weren't experienced enough yet to do it up to what I was looking for, or like in one case, quit after a day because they didn't realize just how much work it was.

Another guy got back to me. His name was Ben Moseley, and his musician moniker was "Bishop of Battle". I mean...it was kismet, right? (for those who don't know, that's the name of the villain in one of the segments of the 80's horror anthology Nightmares, which I watched the crap out of as a kid)

I gave him Siren. We went back and forth to get it where I was happy, but man was he talented. The Siren piece is haunting, and reminiscent of things like the Vangelis Blade Runner score.

You can hear some of his other stuff(including a cool Oingo Boingo cover) here:

https://soundcloud.com/bishop-of-battle

But it didn't end there...

I had nobody for Prowler, so I asked Ben if he'd be up for doing that one also. He watched it and said "Sure". He wanted to do it a little differently since it has a lot of humor in it. He referenced the funny "Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill"segment from Creepshow as the sort of thing he'd be trying to do.

The person doing Drone quit--too much work. So I'm scrambling, and I ask Ben..."I know you're not done with Prowler, and we're like 3 weeks out from the premiere...any chance you'll be able to do Drone also?"

And like a boss, he said "Send it to me and let me see." I did, he took it on, and he hit all of them out of the park. Saved my ass, I can tell you that.

Somewhere in there I also got all of Terence's orchestral score to the wrap-around, and it was excellent. I barely asked for any changes. It builds slowly and by the end really brings on the horror.

The final piece was the end credit music. I wanted it to be a fun, 80's pop style music. My temp music I laid in was "Ain't Nothing Gonna Break My Stride". That sort of thing.

I spent days listening to songs on soundcloud from synth groups. I made a list of my top 8 and sent it to Zig. We decided which four were the best, and I emailed each of the groups to see if they were interested.

Well, happily for me, one named Foret De Vin got back and said they'd consider it. They read the contract and said, "Let's do it." Here's the song over the end credits--so 80's it's awesome! They're from Sweden, and Europe seems to be having a major 80's revival...makes me want to move there.
https://soundcloud.com/foretdevin/hold-the-night-feat-robert-beachgrove

Get on their Facebook here:
https://www.facebook.com/foretdevin

If you like these guy's music, buy some of it--help support these talented guys, because they're amazing and willing to help out us indie filmmakers.
(and if you're not familiar with soundcloud and bandcamp, there are usually links to the musicians FB/Twitter/etc on the right side of their soundcloud page, so give them a Like!)