It was a time when the barrel of a gun won out over the rule of law, when women and children were bought and sold like cattle and when honest people struggled to survive in the face of crooked businesspeople and criminals looking to cash in.
It’s also the era at the heart of Strange Empire , a powerful new CBC drama that travels to the Alberta–Montana border for a fateful meeting in the woods in 1869 — one that leads a group of characters on a quest for survival and justice in the wake of remarkable brutality.
The sound of the visually striking show, though, which was shot in B.C., is anything but twangy banjos and mandolins. At times as taut and tense as a movie score, and at others delicate and nuanced, the music adds a whole other layer of drama to the show, which airs on CBC Mondays at 9 p.m. starting tonight.
CBC Music spoke with composer James Jandrisch about scoring the series, his cool family tie to Sesame Street, the trick he learned from director Michael Mann and the secret he really doesn’t want his wife to know.
What kind of sound were you going for?
In Strange Empire, there is always something sinister going on. There is always something dark, and there are undertones of something odd. Something is not quite right. There is also a great amount of sorrow in the show, and there is a lot of death. There is also a ghostly, supernatural element.
So we looked at a lot of the composers from the eastern side of Europe, specifically Aram Khachaturian, who did these wonderfully sinister waltzes back in the early part of the century, and it lent itself to the sound of the show.
The cool thing was that it was an orchestra, but being from the eastern block, they had all these interesting instruments, like dulcimers and gamelans and bells — you name it. So it had a certain sense of character already. And that was really, really interesting.
The score has Western elements, but doesn’t sound at all like a typical TV Western — more like a movie soundtrack.
I really wanted to make this sound untelevision-like. I was very fortunate to work with [director] Michael Mann the past couple of years. I met him on this an HBO series called Luck. And he kind of taught me how to slow things down. In TV especially, you try to grab the attention, try to amp it up and try to get out as quickly as you can.
In film you have more time. So generally when you look at a movie score it develops more slowly. It’s more elegant. It has time to flex its muscles and pull back. And ultimately what ends up happening is that you are more invested into the story. So that’s what I learned; and space, even though we don’t have a lot of it in this show, was huge.
Check out the trailer for Strange Empire:
What kind of instrumentation did you use?
I’m a bit of an instrument freak, and I play pretty much everything, so that’s part of the fun. And I’m a big fan of technology, and specifically how it can affect organic things. You know when you fill a bowl full of water and you hit the bowl? You get this odd kind of psychoacoustic sound. And the same applies to when you stick a bow on something that doesn’t normally tend to be bown, like a gong or a cymbal.
So I figured, let’s take that one step further and actually start physically connecting instruments. For example, I play standup bass and I have a sitar, so I put the upright bass through an amp and then connected that through a cable through the sitar, so the bass would resonate through the sitar. And the wild thing is you get this amazing, trippy kind of sound. So our approach was, let’s take these found sounds and make a sinister soundscape or an odd soundscape that could be threatening, that could be tense, that could be otherworldly.
Listen to an audio clip from Strange Empire:
Do you really play all of the instruments?
Yeah I kind of do. And I guess I blame my father for that. [Laughs] Just looking around right now I have seven guitars out. It’s hilarious. Mandolin, dulcimer, guitar, Dobro, banjo, electric guitar and Höfner bass. And with the advent of technology you can get pretty deep with the one-man band thing.
It’s also a question of time, too. You’re essentially producing an album’s worth of material every five or six days. So you have to be able to kind of do everything yourself; otherwise you’re just going to die [laughs].
Why is your father to blame?
He is just a monster musician. The guy is just incredible. And back in the day he produced Sesame Street and was the musical director at CBC. And I kind of grew up just following him around and trying to be cool, and I just felt the whole thing was amazing.
You were brought onto this series a little later in the process. What effect has that had?
In television, you get about 10 days for a one-hour dramatic show — and a big day for a composer is writing about three minutes of music. By the time this got to me, I had to turn things around in four to five days. But the interesting thing is, when the gun is to my head, the adrenaline rush helps you through, and things turn out really well. Just don’t tell my wife that. [Laughs]
But especially with a show like this you get to some very, very dark places. And I find myself some places that I had no idea I was going to be when I ate my breakfast that morning.
What do you mean?
Essentially, a composer’s job is identifying emotion, amplifying that emotion and connecting the viewer to the story. And you need to be able to feel rage. You need to be able to feel being sinister. You need to be able to feel betrayal. All of those emotions you have to basically try to grab.
Listen to an audio clip from Strange Empire:
What was a moment when it felt like everything really clicked?
In the show when we first meet the group, the music kind of plays straight out. And as things get worse and worse, the theme gets more and more messed up, to the point where it gets extremely, extremely eerie, and we’ll have discordant choirs singing the same theme. So there is a moment where one of the characters, Slotter, executes somebody, and this theme starts playing and it just gives you goosebumps, because all of these people who have been executed by this guy start to haunt him. So whenever you start hearing this twisted theme, it’s amplifying the fact that this guy is getting deeper and deeper into insanity. It’s pretty awesome.
How does it feel when you see it all come together?
When you start writing music for a project, it comes out of your brain, it comes out of your body, and it’s something that you create. But when you marry it to, in this case, Strange Empire, it stops becoming this thing that you’ve done and it starts becoming part of something else. It’s a conduit for the cinematic experience. And when it all comes together, it’s a really gratifying and cool experience. I mean, I spend most of my days in the studio. And in this case we’re now seven days a week, and about 18 to 20 hours a day. But believe you me, I am the luckiest guy in the world to get up to do something that I love.
by Jennifer Van Evra via Electronic RSS
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