So I'm kind of curious, it sounds to me like given the different things that you're doing, you have to do a lot of context switching. I would think that that doing scoring for a TV series is different than directing a movie, which is different than writing a book - some of the other stuff that you've done over the years, you've done sound design. You're talking about doing a video game work where there's actually code implementation. Are you literally talking about getting to the point where it's implementing some of the code that goes in the game?

Jeff: Thank God I'm not doing that part, but we have a couple of people who are really good at it. So I sort of run the show and, I'm scoring, I'm writing music on two games at the moment.

Darwin: So how do you cope with the context switching of that? It seems like that'd be really difficult.

Jeff: It sounds worse than it is I suppose. Ultimately what defines me and what connects all of these, what seemed like very disparate dots is just that I was born with and continue to have an insatiable curiosity. Everything I do is done to that in some way, even writing a score or working on a solo project to me is a series of questions. What would happen if... What would it sound like if... I enjoy communicating, to me the whole idea of pop culture, whether it's a game or a film or TV show, is that it's a shared emotional experience. At the end of the day, what a composer does and frankly what everybody involved does, but I think it's unusual and special with music, is that it's all about creating experiences.

It's about creating, not creating an emotion, but creating a space in which the audience can have an emotion. So I'm in the business, if you will, of creating experiences, which I think is what art is in general. It's what pop culture is, it's what film is, it's what games are. So yeah, doing one thing is different than doing another, but for me I'm just scratching the same itches that I've scratched in my whole personal life and musical life, professional life, which is just, "Gee, I wonder what it would be like to do that?"

Darwin: Right. Well, you open the door right there. So I'm going to walk right through it, which is talking about your background. I love this idea of a life of curiosity and it's sort of the trek at trying to resolve that curiosity. Tell me a little bit about where you're coming from. What is your background? Did you come up as a band kid through school? Did you study music or what is the way that you went through the early years that set you up to be somebody who clearly is comfortable with music, comfortable with technology, comfortable with writing, comfortable with conversations with other artists? This is a complex matrix of things that you have to negotiate. I'm curious where that person comes from.

Jeff: Well, first of all, here I am in Los Angeles and this is where I was born. I'm from here. I'm first generation, my parents were immigrants and they loved music. They didn't really play, my father was an amateur violin player and didn't play very often, but he loved to collect records. So I grew up listening to classical music and few other things. There wasn't really a lot of pop music growing up. I have an older brother and sister who listened to some pop stuff, but, I think from an early age, I was kind of drawn to a fairly eclectic range of musical influences from jazz, prog rock, pop, classical, avant-garde classical, and Wendy Carlos' Switched On Bach and her film scores. I was a flute player in school, it was literally the only instrument left to be checked out.

So there it was my one shot being able to sit next to that cute girl in band so it's going to have to be flute. So, by the time I was in high school, I was writing and arranging pieces. So I could have a band and do do some things musically, little bit of writing, composing, but wasn't really thinking about it. I was getting deeper into jazz and my music teacher was a member of a jazz band, and that meant a lot to me. It was a band with a trumpet player named Don Ellis here in Los Angeles who played quarter-tone trumpet and had this ultra avant-garde big band drawing influences from Bulgarian music and Indian raga. He had a electric string quartet, french horns, and quarter-tone trumpets, and I love this stuff. Then I got to study with his lead woodwind player, and then eventually his keyboard player, the Bulgarian jazz pianist, Milcho Leviev became my teacher, in exchange for being his cartage guy with his Fender Rhodes. This utterly destroyed the inside of my car, but it's how I got free lessions with no money.

Darwin: Probably destroyed your love of the Fender Rhodes too.

Jeff: Oh yeah. I can't look at one now. By the time I finished high school, I had no interest whatsoever in being a musician. I actually ended up going to college as a fine arts major. I'd also grown up as a photographer with a dark room and a close relative was a very successful photographer, also here in Los Angeles. And he used to teach me, so I went to college doing that, but always doing music. It was in the very beginning of college where things started to kind of click. Number one, I ended up with a random roommate who had an utter love of soundtracks. And I had no inkling of film music at the time. He had this big collection of soundtracks.

And the first one I listened to was a score by Jerry Goldsmith for a B-movie called Logan's Run, which has done with orchestra and his ARP 2500. It was really cool. And, I didn't forget that. Around the same time, this little local university that I went to here in LA, a Cal State college, got a grant to make a purchase for serial number one of a digital musical instrument that was simply called The Dartmouth Project and a group of young professors and grad students came out to install this fairly substantial computer system. This is a long time ago, so the computer was massive given what it could do, but it was an algorithmic composition system where you actually could write code and build timbre and build compositions. It was run by Jon Appleton, Sydney Alonzo, and the grad student who was mostly in charge of the coding was a guy named Peter Nye, who was, I think, Pixar's employee number one.

He had helped develop the Sound Droid. So they installed it, they got it up and running, they showed it to me and I was fascinated. Then it was Christmas vacation and I just could not be away from this thing. So I stole a copy of the key and slept in the music building of my college for a while and taught myself how to program this language. And it was using a form of FM synthesis as well as some other techniques, but you could do some really radical things with it. And I got into doing a blend of digital with some tape manipulation and taking it into some unexpected territories and that was pretty revelatory cause it was my first time typing code into a computer terminal.

College didn't work out for me, I dropped out and I ended up for four years writing code and developing instruments for Roland. [I was] one of the few Americans who was actually writing a software and doing development. I went to Japan to do some of that, did that for four years. During that time MIDI came about 1984, I got very involved in that, but to be honest, I was incredibly unhappy because I wasn't making music. I was helping other people make music. I was still writing music, I was just doing avant-garde experimental electronic music with what few instruments I could. I had a little Roland modular that I was able to get cheaply and that Jupiter 8 behind me and a few other things. And this gentleman who had Moog modular serial number two, gave me a key to his house and he said, "I'm not using it, you use it."

So I was writing for dance ensembles and choreographers, and that was great. I was getting a lot of ideas out of my system and I was scoring little student films, experimental films, and short films. So I had a little hand in that, little hand working also with other artists doing gallery installations and doing interactive, or spatial sound installations. But by the end of four years, I was really just chomping at the bit to do my own thing. So a couple people had expressed an interest in having me do sampling, and I was one of the first guys here in LA to get deeply into sampling. I was doing a secret behind-the-scenes project for Fairlight, for their, about to be released, Fairlight III. And I developed a fair amount of content for that, along with Roland's very first sampler, which was at a similar time.

So I became a studio gun for hire here in LA. And I started with programming synth sounds for studio musicians. Eventually they recommended me to some record producers. And I started working with guys in the rock world. I was working with Albhy Galuten who produced the Bee Gees and the Eagles. I had a long time working with Maurice White from Earth, Wind, and Fire, and that was an amazing education because he was a consummate producer and the attention to detail and finesse and understanding the spectral range of music from his perspective as a drummer even was pretty profound. I spent a couple of years working with Malcolm Cecil, and Tonto at the time was here in Los Angeles. So he would let me come and play with Tonto up in Topanga Canyon. And eventually after working with those and a number of other record producers working on albums, eventually I realized that I had become sort of unknowingly...

I'd become a sound designer for film composers and television composers. And to be honest, some of them were a little older and electronic music - now we're getting close to 1990 - was a little challenging for them. There was just an explosion in synthesizers that were a little more affordable and MIDI and DAW's and samplers that weren't five figures. So I started programming on a lot of movies for a lot of composers, and that's where I met Mark Isham and worked with him for a number of years. And that's where I met Hans Zimmer, who was absolutely critical to my career as a composer, as a sound designer for him. But eventually I became a ghost writer and I spent years writing on scores without my name on it, which is a great education. That was college for me, was doing all the ghost writing, but then eventually, actually both Mark Isham and Hans Zimmer recommended me for what ended up being my first television series and my first feature film. And then I've been a composer since.

Darwin: Man, I've got like about a hundred questions about this stuff. So I'm going to try and limit it to the ones that are just really poking me in the eye. First of all, I'm really curious about The Dartmouth Project. It sounds like a very fascinating thing, but it also sounds like something that could have been developed two weeks ago, let alone developed - what, this would have been 1980. I'm guessing pretty close to that. You embedded yourself in this thing over Christmas vacation and it sounds like you kind of took the opportunity to bring together a lot of things, fire up tape recorders and do some tape manipulation, but also learning the coding aspect of this. How much of that ended up being the thing that got stuck in the back of your head, so that later on were when you started getting back in or getting into sound design, you had that to draw on?

Jeff: Well that could, that could be a long answer as well. Being probably one of the very first people on the west coast of the United States to work with a digital synthesizer and a digital programming language was an amazing experience. It was crude, it was problematic. We were kind of the beta team in a sense, eventually it was sold and it became the Synclavier.

So it became New England Digital. Then after a few iterations, it became the Synclavier. So this was the prototype really, it got me started. And one night I was at a concert in a little theater here in LA, and I overheard a conversation behind me, a man talking about teaching a computer to improvise music. And I thought I got to talk to this guy and I turned around and I introduced myself, actually this became an important part I left out - meeting this guy, Ray Jergens, who was a jet propulsion laboratory space scientist, an actual rocket scientist and his passion for music. And in his spare time, he created a language to improvise and send music through voltages and triggers. So we were working with analog synthesizers and he became my mentor.

If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have gotten the job at Roland; if it wasn't for the job at Roland, I wouldn't have gotten a shot at studio work, doing sampling and programming and sequencing and just becoming this general digital gun for hire. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have gotten involved in MIDI, and if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have gotten involved in the early days of Max programming, which became a part of my career, working with Max on some films. I probably did probably the first major film done using Max at least to some extent, which was for Steven Soderbergh. It was a movie called Kafka with Joel Gray and Jeremy Irons. That was a very experimental score and it wouldn't have happened without Max and then I programmed some different ideas and algorithms to use in the movie Traffic, which was just great.

I'm very fond of that score. And that was a number of years that I spent working and becoming very close with my still very dear friend, Cliff Martinez. It's all about being open-minded. Again, it's that curiosity of, "Well, what if we let Max make some decisions here and what if we use Max to mangle some audio in some unexpected ways. And if we like it, we like it. If we don't, we throw it out."

Darwin: Yeah. I think a lot of people would be curious, because it was more than just sonic manipulation. You're saying you were actually using it for some of the algorithmic compositional process that that was available.

Jeff: It was a few different functions - with the first movie Kafka, it was patterned after Eastern European gypsy folk music, but done with really avant-garde sources. Cliff, who's a drummer (because he was the original drummer in the Red Hot Chili Peppers) doesn't play keyboards, doesn't play any thing more than he plays drums. He had a mini drum pad. And so I wrote a Max patch that would allow us to insert scales and melodic material into it with some randomness, some potential variations, so that Cliff could play these really complicated, really ripping-fast rhythm patterns with sticks and different pads took on different functions for the algorithm. But ultimately we created something that for some people sounds incredibly convincing as Eastern European gypsy folk music, but it also led us to start taking that and deconstructing it into parts of the background. So that sounds would manipulate and shift and morph in collaboration between the computer and what we want. And then some parts of it were purely deterministic of just taking weird sounds and putting them in the sampler, playing around.

Darwin: Yeah, I was curious what sort of like the balance of work would have been, because like you say, Cliff's an amazing percussionist, but I don't necessarily think of him as like a guy who's going to sit down with a keyboard. There are some things, when I listened to it really represent your music. And I think some of them might go back even to... You did a set of loop libraries for, I think it was Liquid Cinema or something like that way back when. I think it was called Prosound maybe, but it was called Liquid Cinema or something like that. But I remember I loved those things, but it's something that I remember thinking about as sort of like a stamp of your work. You tend to do stuff that's very percussive, but not always drum-like. Which is weird, but I find fascinating. Also I find whenever I try doing something like that, it either sounds like really poorly done drumming or really poorly done bongo playing. How do you pull that apart? I mean, on one hand I listened and I'm like, I can imagine you were on an MPC or something playing, but you also weave a lot of variation. You weave a lot of synthesis and processing into the sound. So then it makes me think, "Well, maybe it's a different process that I can't even imagine." How do you go about creating these really percussion-driven tracks?

Jeff: Oh, well, I always feel that if you work with more traditional drum sounds - say samples of drum sets and percussion instruments - you know, sounds that we know, and we connect with as part of rock or Latin music or world music, tabla, whatever it is once you, once you work with the real sounds, then there's a little bit of an expectation of what you're going to do with those sounds musically. And, you know, certainly I have a friend who's a first rate tabla player who taught me enough that I could do some programming on a, on a score, a couple of scores where I wanted the tabla to sound really good. Occasionally I would just hire a tabla player and that solves an enormous number of problems. But, you know, I, as sound manipulation has gotten easier and faster than it used to be with tape manipulation, my ability, my interest, and desire to take samples or work with found sounds and start building from there and working with loops.

For a long time, my favorite go-to technique was to take toms and run them through harmonizers. So that each tom hit was actually playing a kind of a chord in one sense, it makes it kind of deeper and bigger, and it's a more cinematic sound, but it's also an unexpected sound. And I'd spent a couple of years in Jon Hassell's band as his keyboard player and electronic percussion and, co-writing and co-producing, and he made the use of the harmonizer on his trumpet as his signature sound. And I did it my own way with my woodwind instruments. I have on hundreds of cues that I've written for film and television played different wooden flutes, ethnic flutes, or just my regular flute or alto flute, but running it through different harmonizer patterns and some intelligent harmonizers are just straight up pitch shifters. So that interest in creating these unexpected harmonic nuances ended up being really cool in drums and percussion. Spending time just on modular rigs to develop percussion sounds, Max and Reaktor became really valuable instruments for experimenting with mucking up, not just drum sounds, but drum patterns, percussion patterns. So I'm a big fan of interactive drum programming. I'll do the first half and I'm going to let the computer do the second.

Darwin: I am in a lucky position of being able to get a glimpse of your studio, there. What's interesting is I look around your studio, most of the gear is analog gear. From what I can tell other than the Beatstep Pro it's all analog gear. Which brings me to a different point, very different from when you were working as a studio gun for Maurice White and some of these people, back then you got to be a studio person because you had to play, but you also have to have real facility in gear like samplers, like the EMU sampler, or Linndrum or some of these kinds of things. You were talking about the harmonizer as sort of like a critical piece of studio gear. A lot of those things have kind of evaporated into the box, right? Do you have any fondness for the hardware implementation?

Jeff: Not really, I'm done. I hung that up so long ago. I only got into modular, well, I go in and out of modular. I'll buy a rig, sell it, buy another one, sell it, honestly in my world, especially with film and television, you're on the clock and your creativity is limited not by what you can do by, but by what you can do by the end of the day today. So my whole history has been how to be as efficient as possible without losing anything in the way of creativity. And frankly, being an audiophile is so low on the list, you can barely see it, I don't really care. I don't really have a big interest in the emulation and simulation of analog equipment by plugins. It's great, but I don't get it.

I just want really excellent control and just good sound quality out of a plugin and I'm happy. I was working on a movie back when I was working with Hans Zimmer called Blackhawk Down. It was a Ridley Scott movie, and I was tasked with scoring a few scenes in that and I just made it my position that I'm going to do it in the box 100%. This was in 2000, and it hadn't really been done before on a major film. We were all still using mixing consoles and outboard samplers and reverbs. And I said, "No, whatever I can do in the box is going to be in that movie." And I did quite a lot that that's in the film. And I think it's the first music in a major film that never passed through a wire.

I'll be honest with you, that's how it's been for me since - I find the world of plug-ins both compositionally and timbrally far more interesting to me, granular synthesis gives me the opportunity to explore and then create and lock it in. That's what I want and I'm not a purist about it. The reason I'm back into modular is it's a different way to make music and the tools influence the end result. The history of art has technology built into it, and it starts with the ink used in cave paintings, indelible ink, which led to paint and led to working... In so many ways, the advancements of art are linked to science. It's true in visual arts, it's certainly true the advent of motion picture and going from analog to digital video games going from 8 bit to 64 bit - technology has opened up creative avenues for you and me for artists.

I relish that tremendously. So I will use technology because it makes me think and act a certain way. The modular does that for me, certainly the world of plugins, the world of Max or Reaktor, all of that is about finding inspiration in ways that will create something unique. And hopefully by me being the filter of what I think ends up being a good experiment or a good result from an experiment or a bad one is sort of what defines what my music is. I'm the creator, but really I'm also the filter, and my particular brand of filtration is a big part of what creates something that sounds like me, if that's a thing.

Darwin: Sure. That makes sense. The one thing I would say is that filtration process, and I've heard it in the interviews talk about the importance of like the happy accidents as part of your work development. I'm curious, one of the things that's different between a piece of hardware and a piece of software is that because you're interacting with software using controls like a mouse... I seem to approach it at a much more intellectual level where when I'm working with a piece of hardware with knobs and controls, it's a much more visceral and a different kind of sensitivity. What do you do to break that down, especially when part of your goal is to make sure that you have efficiency and speed at the center of what you're doing?

Jeff: Well at the core of every project is a goal, and the goal is the experience like we were talking about before. In collaboration with a creative partner, whether it's a producer, a director, or a game audio director, there's a conversation about style and that old notion that there's only five stories, and every movie and every TV shows based on the five stories of the hero's journey, and the love arc - it's fairly true. There's a very limited number of stories to be told, but the manner in which we tell them is truly infinite. And just as there's an infinite number of ways to tell a story on screen, there's an infinite number of ways to express the underlying emotion of that story musically, in a way that meshes with what's going on visually.

So at the top of my hierarchy of importance is how can I do musical that reflect on the story, the characters, but the style in which the story is told and at a very practical level, the expectations and the desires of my director. So sometimes they say, "I want something more conventional." If somebody says "I want something completely unusual and unexpected", well that's music to my ears to say the least. I'm happy to do that. Every project I start usually starts with many days of just experimenting with no goal at all. It's not about writing that first theme or tune it's about building the sonic world that that score is going to exist in. It's probably the most important step of writing any kind of score is to build the pallette that's going to create that score.

And the palette is both in terms of tambour and color in terms of rhythm, in terms of what tools have I chosen to assist me. And because the sounds that I create will then turn around and inspire me compositionally, every synthesizer programmer or electronic musician knows that you come up with a sound and then the sound tells you how to play it. That is just as true with a piano and a string quartet. You can't write the same for string quartet as you do for piano. You get an inferior result. When you write for the sound and for the polyphony of a piano versus the polyphony of a string quartet, you end up with just very different things. So I'm not only setting up sounds, I'm setting up a process and I'll spend a lot of time developing sounds, going out and sampling things, manipulating samples, building kits of sounds and loops, deciding to maybe experiment with a new plugin that maybe does something that no plugin has done before.

Bringing in my iPad just for sonic manipulation, cause there's a lot of great iOS audio stuff out there that's very experimental, and I love all of that. So I build this environment, but I keep it limited, if it's too massive, then every piece you write will sound the same, it's white noise. It's every possibility simultaneously. For me, I build into my initial concept, extreme limitation. I'm only gonna work with these six sounds or these 20 sounds, or I'm going to stick to working in certain metric ideas or certain timbral ideas or do something in Reaktor or Max. I don't really use Max much anymore cause I don't use Ableton and it's just as an integrate anymore. So that it's just part of the process, be an instrument maker, then be the composer who writes for those instruments, then decide what works, what doesn't, start sharing it with the other people you're working with and see what rises to the top. Rinse and repeat.

Darwin: Does that work for projects like your solo albums as well as film and TV?

Jeff: Yes and no. The first album that I put out was only in 2017, just just a few years ago. And that actually started off because I had worked on a Brazilian film, shot in the Amazon, and they sent me all these field recordings that were incredible boats on the river, birds, insects, wind, you name it. And they gave me hours of these field recordings. And the bulk of that score was written purely by manipulating field recordings and making the score. So there were no synthesizers used and really no conventional instruments. I think one time, once or twice a little piano was sort of waft through there, but it was really a purely textual score. And I was auto-tuning birds and creating very constricted tonal ideas. Some of the pieces I wrote for that film became the springboard for that first album Projector.

So the Projector album does have some electronic instruments and some acoustic instruments and some of it's with this British cellist, Peter Gregson, who's a brilliant musician, few guitar players, David Julian, who did the Momento score, plays on the album. It really started as these sonic ideas. But on a score, I am always beholdened to what other people need and want. Even a soundtrack album is still very derivative of somebody else's vision that I am assisting in the completion of that vision. Even though every note is mine, it was created at the behest of someone else, but when I did my first album, I thought there are things that I want to express musically that I just can't in a score. I love these, these initial pieces, these sketches that I'd written for this Brazilian film, and that became the impetus. The second album Vapor, which just came out this year, not to sound like a cliche, and I've heard it on your show already, it's absolutely "my COVID album".

So, quarantine hit and like every artist I know the first few months where this were exhilarating, "Leave me alone. I'm going to be in my studio because I literally can't leave." And it was at that time, I decided to completely redo my modular rig. And I had decided that I was going to lose an endorsement here, I suppose, to get rid of every Doepfer module in the rack, because they are purely conventional modules. They are basically just a Moog synthesizer in modular form. It doesn't have the same, and I started replacing it with some of the great new generation of much more interesting experimental, both analog and digital, modules. It's just an explosion of ideas over a very short time. Every morning I would get up and I would just do an improvisation on the modular recorded in multi-track into my DAW. And then I spent the next few months just reworking editing, being the creative filter - and that became Vapor. So that's a very modular album, it's probably 80 or 90% modular with a few other elements thrown in.

Darwin: Wow. Well, Jeff, unfortunately our time is up, but before we go, I'd like to have you just tell us what's coming up. You mentioned already that you have a TV series that you're working on.

Jeff: That won't be out for a while. Well, I'm not sure what's going to be next exactly. The new edition of my book won't be out till next year, I guess I'm planting a lot of seeds right now. A couple of games that'll be out next year. Actually one might be out - a game called Quantar, which is a VR game, so you gotta have the goggles is coming. My book, the Reel World third edition, will be next year, this television series, which I can't really say, next year. Other games next year, and hopefully before the end of the year will be my next album, which is tentatively called Lume, L-U-M-E. And, it's just putting the final touches on that now. And that actually has a full orchestra as well as the modular and vocals. And it's a more ambitious, very different sound and I'm actually really happy with how it's come out.

Darwin: Well, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to have this talk.

Jeff: Thank you so much, and thank you for what you've been doing in your musical world and on this podcast, which I have been listening to and love it and recommend it to all my super nerd-geek friends.

Darwin: All right. So with that, then I will say goodbye, have a good one.

Copyright 2021 by Darwin Grosse. All right reserved.