Potemkin Soul

An alternative rock song that kind of touches on the experimental/progressive fringes.

Enjoy!

Dangerous Land

A rock song with an anthem-like chorus and guitar riffs.

This song is quite close to my chest for two reasons:

Musically, I wanted to capture that teetering sense of danger as if you've just noticed a drop of blood or heard a very strange noise that is out of place.
Lyrically, I'm conveying truths that most of us can agree on, but it just may be hard to express.

It is a dialogue between Misfortune (tragedy personified) and ourselves. Misfortune welcomes us in and sings the verses and we, the people, sing the triumphant chorus.

DANGEROUS LAND

Welcome to a land where perfection is banned

but it's the hope of every soul.

While it's sexy to be bad, the truth is ironclad

that we all want good to take control.

Pre Ch: Misfortune hunts this dangerous land.

Chorus:  You are the compromise in my eyes

               No surprise

               You love to watch me die and glorify

               Now I know why

               I don't belong here, but I'm needed

               So I'll stay here until I've succeeded

               And when that time comes, listen for the drums

               The old evacuates, the new will celebrate

Lock into the beat where success needs you to cheat

You'll be mocked to try the honest way.

To sit upon a throne, you need time in a jail-zone

What if God heard you pray?

Pre Ch

Chorus

Bridge: In a land where wrong is right, the flame of truth shall cast it's light

             like a burning laser-beam, some will turn to run and scream

             The rest of us will break our bonds, fly free and see our chains are gone

             Our rescue plea has found us aid

             No more will we ever have to be afraid.

Chorus

Lyfstraf Suite

This was composed as a potential main opening theme for the film, Lyfstraf. It includes most of the major themes of the movie.

Enjoy!

PS3 Fighting Game

An old school friend of mine, who was always into his console gaming, actually managed to turn it into a career and became the first South African to secure the rights from Sony to develop a fighting game for the PS3 console.

He contracted me to compose a score that was gritty, but also something that would seem kind of cheesy for a fighting game: disco music!

So I wrote quite a bit of material, of which the highlights are in the playlist, but I'll let you, the listener, decide whether or not I was successful in blending disco with gritty in some of the tracks.



Enjoy!

Lyfstraf Soundtrack

Somehow I always felt that the first time I put music to a movie, that it would be a horror film.

My sister put me in touch with a guy from a local film school who were taking on the oddly specific task of making South Africa's first feature-length Afrikaans horror movie.

It was actually a great experience to work with the director and the producers and it is something I'll always cherish.

So here for the first time publicly, are the highlights from the Lyfstraf soundtrack.



Enjoy!

Sabbath

Here's another track from my Ten Commandments album, which I've spoken about before.

This one is highlighting how important it is to take one day of rest out of the seven-day week. Whether you do it on personal principle, or because it's medically sound, or just because God says so, there is a very real ramification and lifestyle relfex when we apply it (or don't apply it).

I've removed the vocal tracks on this one because I wanted to expose the music, which is personally one of my favourite choruses that I've written.

Once again - being very literal with my music - I have set the time signature to 7/8 (seven days a week) which ends out being in 6/8 (because a day of rest has been taken)



Enjoy!

Joe Soap

I'm quite a fan of Thomas Newman's percussive and rhythmic style, which is what inspired this piece. It was used for a short video clip called the Joe Soap series.



Enjoy!

He's Artistic

Rain Man is one of my favourite movies of all time. I remember watching it as a young boy and realising for the first time that there must be thousands of movies out there that have lots of talking, no epic explosions (except when Tom Cruise talks about inheriting the rose bushes) and it's absolutely brilliant from start to finish.

This tune, however, only takes it's name from a scene in the film where a nurse asks Tom Cruise's character, "He's artistic?", to which Cruise replies, "No, he's autistic!"

That little bit of dialogue was originally in this piece, blended in with the music as a texture for the intro. I left it out (it worked better without it) and so it's just the title that shows any connections to the film.


Enjoy!

Closer to Chocolate

As some of you may already know, I like to be quite literal with my music when I have the chance.

So in this case, there was a 'making of' video that demonstrated the designing of a magazine cover, which in this case, had a chocolate theme.

Good job I told it was chocolate, right?

My client gave me a lot of freedom in my creativity, except for the fact that because the video wasn't only about chocolate - it was a behind the scenes video that had chocolate in it - it needed a bit of an industrial feel to it. 

So I composed a grungy sort of molten chocolate tune, which ended up sounding like this:

In fact, the actual video it was used for can be seen here.

Enjoy