One of the things I thought would be easy — as I know a fair amount of musicians — was getting Infest Wisely scored. What I discovered was that people who write and perform songs aren’t necessarily able or inclined to compose music to order. I’ve seen this before with illustrators that aren’t good designers, even though both are visually-based skills. (Though Marc Ngui, whose hilariously dead-on fake ad was used in this week’s ep, can do both. He also did this anti-milking public service announcement for ep 2 that ended up being cut.)
For most of the music we found pre-existing tracks that suited the mood. The final episode, Leveller, was particularly tough, even though we had the kick-ass The New Kings music for the chase scene from early on. In the early edits, to get across the general vibe he was going for, Benny had put in temp music (AKA guide music, AKA music we didn’t have the rights to use in a final cut) for the intro and outro atmospheric music. We had a couple of tries with getting people to compose it, but they either didn’t have time or ended up making neat music that didn’t have the right build for the sequence. Happily, our marvellous sound engineer Steve Denheyer was able to hook us up with great tracks his brother Mike had made.