“Spider-Noir,” Amazon Prime’s new series starring Nicolas Cage, is a unique genre blend, merging superhero action with detective drama. That provided a unique challenge for its composing team, Kris Bowers and Michael Dean Parsons.
“The series is really calling for music that is engaged with the picture, and has not only thematic material but also is scored with the picture, and advances with the picture, and arcs with the store,” Bowers said during IndieWire’s Craft Roundtables.
Bowers and Parsons were joined by an esteemed group of composers from some of the biggest shows of the past year at our composer roundtable. Also present were “Alien: Earth” composer Jeff Russo, “The Madison” composer Brenton Vivian, “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” composer Mac Quayle, “Murderbot” composer Amanda Jones, and “The Boroughs” composer John Paesano to discuss their shows and how they created scores that matched the material onscreen.
Parsons explained that when working on the score, he and Bowers initially looked at New York influences to fit the period setting of the show and its frequent noir homages. As the score evolved, they started incorporating more eclectic influences that they believed matched the New York setting, expanding their palette and the show’s sonic identity.
“Another big part of our discussion outside of the thematic writing initially was setting,” Parsons said. “Because this takes place in New York, and looking at that rich noir history we thought, ‘Man, we’re going to have a lot of early jazz influence.’ And it was very interesting because the showrunner said, ‘You know, for me, New York is punk ’90s guitar.’ That started to be like, ‘Wait this is not just a noir homage kind of score.’ We’re going to take recordings and stretch them out, we’re going to record street trash cans and bucket drummers and turn that into percussion and make it into this thing that’s not just a homage but all these different influences coming together.”
Watch the complete panel in the video above. IndieWire’s TV Craft Roundtables is now streaming on @PBSSoCal and the PBS App as well as IndieWire.com and our social channels.
