You are a genre-bending, experimental composer and filmmaker, equally comfortable with electronics, sound design, orchestral palettes, and filmmaking. How do you move between these modalities so freely, and how do they inform each other?

When I was around 8, I was hypnotized by John Barry’s film scores, and would listen over and over on a small cassette deck that I walked around with. I also started making my own tape loops and delays with two cassette players and James Bond scores. So, from a very early age I had set in motion my career as a film composer and gear nerd. I am an autodidact—a self-taught composer—and I’m dyslexic. I can’t read music. I tried to study composition at Juilliard, but I kept breaking the rules! They really were not interested in synthesizer music, and I wanted to combine synthesizers with orchestral elements. At the time, that was almost unheard of. Also, not being able to read music well, because of my dyslexia, was not great for that environment.

Then, I went to the San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts to study to become a photographer/director. In that process, I became a really good editor. I also discovered synthesizers, as they had a recording studio at the school. I became obsessed with synthesizer music, and realized I could combine my love of synthesizers and video editing/filmmaking. This led me to scoring films, TV, and advertisements.

Who are your influences and what inspires your musical and general creative evolution?

My first love was John Barry and his James Bond scores. His jazz voicing and string arrangements influence me deeply still to this day. Brian Eno and his early ambient music projects, like Music for Airports, taught me how to dream up music with electronic tape manipulations and synthesizers. Leonard Bernstein was my neighbor in NYC, and I was always hanging out with his kids and around his music, as well as the whole Broadway scene. Vangelis and his use of melody was second to none. I happened to meet Hans Zimmer at the screening of my first film that I scored. We became friends, and when I came to LA, I used to spend hours sitting behind him, watching him score to picture with walls of synths and samplers. I knew then that it was possible to combine synths with the orchestra, exactly how I was hearing it in my head.

Tell us about Heliosphere 8, and how you blend your composition with your filmmaking.

Heliosphere 8 is my new Cinematic Ambient Music project, which came about during the combination of the pandemic and the strikes, when work was at a standstill. I had become stuck in a creative rut of only composing for Film/TV projects. I had stopped writing just for myself. I decided to create my own short films with Cinematic Ambient Music. So, I’ve come full circle since art school. I am combining my filmmaker, editing, and directing vision with my music and sound design. I really love working with music to picture and picture to music. With YouTube being such a powerful distribution tool for creators, it’s been really fulfilling going down this path of creating these pieces of Cinematic Electronic Music and also creating the music videos.

What are you excited about, and can you tell us about your upcoming projects?

Because of the Heliosphere 8 project, I was approached to bring Heliosphere 8 into the immersive and spatial audio world with YouTube’s new Eclipsa system. Eclipsa Audio is a new open-source 3D spatial audio technology developed by Google and Samsung. It’s designed to create immersive audio experiences, similar to Dolby Atmos. YouTube is going to have spatial audio built into its codecs. That will allow artists to create in immersive audio and have it available on YouTube. It will also be built into the new Samsung TVs. This opens up a whole new world of creativity and possibility, and is incredibly exciting. I’ve always aimed to compose music as an immersive experience—even when the technology wasn’t there. When we compose for film, we are creating an immersive emotional landscape, and Atmos mixes are used to create depth and suspension of disbelief, mostly with the sound design, but rarely the music. Now I get to intentionally compose within the immersive space, utilizing not just sound design, but instruments to create multidimensional emotional experiences.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

Put yourself in a position where you have the power to say “no.” I think it’s programmed into women’s DNA to say yes. Being able to say NO is very powerful. Also, I would have told myself to buy Bitcoin when you could buy 1,500 for $1. I thought about it at the time… but didn’t! I would have way more synths by now… and probably said no to some projects that were not good for my mental health, but necessary to pay the rent.

You were one of the early mavericks in the women Film/TV composer world. How has the environment changed for you, and what does the Alliance for Women Film Composers mean to you?

When I started out, there were virtually no women scoring Film/TV. Hans Zimmer told me that it was going to be really difficult for me as a woman composer. He had been trying to get Shirley Walker hired as a composer, and there was tremendous pushback. She was a monstrously talented composer. I never realized that it was an issue, until I kept getting doors slammed in my face. I thought that I was just a shitty composer and that I wasn’t good enough. I learned that men get to fail upwards. I often hear from within the industry, even from women, that “they just want to hire the best composer.” Well, the ‘best composer’ is the composer who’s had a lot of chances to fail, and still get hired. As women, we haven’t had many chances up until now to get a shot at scoring Film/TV. We need massive visibility and role models for us to achieve anything close to parity. The Alliance for Women Film Composers is a very powerful organization that gives women this visibility and is creating role models. It’s giving women composers a voice and showing the world that women composers are a force to be reckoned with!

Interview by Lili Haydn

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