Scores
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This was my first horror movie score - I had a great time working with my friend, director Chris Eigeman for Blumhouse / Universal. This was a blend of organic and inorganic sounds, with some pulsing chase scene clangs and clawing strings, and occasionally a sweet haunting melody. The film imagines other realities very close to our own, and what might happen if get what we we wish for. Netflix released it October 2018. Check it out here.
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I got the chance to work with director/actor Paul Giamatti and producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer on the show Breakthrough, which is a series on Nat Geo. Co-producer David Jacobson loved a little ukulele and choral sound track I sent to him, and I based most of my score on this instrumentation. The piece, which is essentially a short documentary, is a very interesting investigation into the idea of the cyborg and the inter-relationship between humans and machines. You can check it out here.
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Tomorrow You're Gone is the second movie I've done with director David Jacobson, starring Stephen Dorff, Michelle Monaghan and Willem Dafoe. For the score David wanted guttural, rough sounds, and I worked a lot with guitar delay and other distortion to help evoke the lead character's trouble discerning reality. Screen Daily called it "An elegantly dreamlike drama" and praised the "atmospheric jazz score, which help give(s) the film its rich and dreamy quality". Monsters and Critics wrote about the "Good soundtrack of suitable horrific, vaguely electronic, sparse and course tunes by Peter Salett".
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In 2006 I scored David Jacobson's Down in the Valley starring Edward Norton and Evan Rachel Wood. Five of my songs, written for the movie are featured as well, including the main title. Basically they had started by using my song "Fly Sparrow Fly" at the top of the movie, and when they decided to hire a new composer I was able to come in and score the film with music and songs. The movie went to Cannes and of course I was sure was going to change my career entirely. (Didn't quite happen). The movie to me is a work of elegiac genius, and its obvious flaws are nothing compared to the complexity of thought and emotion it produces (whew). For more check out Sunshine and Fly Sparrow Fly on the songs page.
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Director Harris Fishman and I have been friends for a long time, and over the years he had been telling me about a doc he was working on, and he eventually showed me some incredible clips from the lives of Ron and Joy Holiday. Eventually picked up by HBO, the documentary Cat Dancers is a fascinating look into the lives of these two Radio City adagio dance stars of the 1960's, who over time developed their own very unique show - dancing with tigers all around the world. But that wasn't all that was unique about them; they lived in a menage a trois relationship with their younger trainer Ron. This is a beautiful and offbeat film, and I had a great time collaborating with the band String Theory on the score.
Cat Dancers won the special jury award at the 2007 SXSW Film Festival and also screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Palm Springs Film Festival and Vancouver International Film Festival.
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My good friend the producer Jenny Maguire came to me with the documentary 21 Below - an extraordinary piece about a middle class family in Buffalo NY struggling to stay together. The doc centers on Sharon, who, while experiencing the earliest signs of pregnancy with her first child, returns to her family home. There is so much real drama in the piece, intense issues surrounding family, class, race, illness and death. My score was very simple, acoustic guitars and light strings, as I wanted to stay pure and let the intensity of the story speak.
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