28
March 2025
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Cue of the Week: “Upside Down”

Last week’s music selection accompanied a puzzle in Escaping Wonderland wherein the player is standing on the ground, as gravity would normally lead us to expect. However, magic is afoot, and the puzzle also needs to be tackled by someone standing on the ceiling.

To score this moment, I wrote an “upside-down” version of the previous piece. Where the original melody goes up, the new one goes down, and so on. I also had fun swapping instrumentation and register, and otherwise making this cue feel like the mirror inversion of its sibling. (Follow the link above if you’d like to compare the two.)

Click below to play… or jump to Spotify or Apple Music.

14
March 2025
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Cue of the Week: “Downside Up”

This week’s music accompanies an Escaping Wonderland puzzle which requires simultaneously navigating both floor and ceiling. (Gravity is unusually flexible in this particular area.) This week you’ll hear the “normal” music, and next time you’ll hear the accompanying upside-down cue, which, appropriately, inverts the melody.

Click below to play… or jump to Spotify or Apple Music.

28
February 2025
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Cue of the Week: “Snowy Woods”

Continuing the musical exploration of Escaping Wonderland, this week’s selection comes from the game’s Bitter Glade region. As the title suggests… there’s a lot of snow. But there’s also fun problem-solving and impish humor, and the score tries to reflect all of the above with a wistful but light-footed tone.

Click below to play… or jump to Spotify or Apple Music.

14
February 2025
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Cue of the Week: “The Bitter Glade”

In this week’s music selection, high strings and melancholy voices evoke the snow-capped forest in the Bitter Glade region of Escaping Wonderland.

Click below to play… or jump to Spotify or Apple Music.

13
February 2025
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“The Expanse: Transport Union Edition” score is underway!

I’m excited to be working on music for the official tabletop RPG adaptation of The Expanse! The game draws from the novels by James S. A. Corey, which in turn gave rise to the fabulous TV series. (Corey is actually a pseudonym for a partnership of two authors, one of whom – Daniel Abraham – is among my favorite speculative fiction writers.)

Currently in progress, the score contains some thematic music as well as underscore evoking some of the environments of The Expanse: Earth, Mars, the Belt, and more mysterious regions as well. More details once the project is done!

07
February 2025
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Cue of the Week: “A Floating Cat”

The Cheshire Cat music from 2020’s Down the Rabbit Hole was impish and bouncy, and remains one of my most streamed cues. In Escaping Wonderland the famous feline has a far more ominous persona, gloating over a frozen waste of a forest from which he’s driven all residents.

As you’d guess the music has changed as well, now a brooding melody for bass clarinet against cold string harmonies. There is however a quirky agility to the tune. (An evil cat is still a cat.)

Click below to play… or jump to Spotify or Apple Music.

31
January 2025
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Cue of the Week: “Freeing the Juice”

Although Escaping Wonderland is a nonviolent video game, there’s plenty of fun action, often involving a slingshot. This week’s music selection accompanies a moment where the player knocks tubes into alignment in order to emancipate a flow of stolen creative energy in defiance of a callous Jabberwock and… it might be easier to play the game than for me to explain all this.

Anyway, enjoy today’s slingshot-minigame-in-a-cave music!

17
January 2025
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Cue of the Week: “Jabberwocky”

A game set in Lewis Carroll’s universe can be rightly expected to include a particular manxome foe. In Escaping Wonderland, he’s portrayed as the heartless boss of an overworked miner population, who needs to be taken down with some well-aimed slingshot sabotage.

To musically represent the dragonesque creature I gave a solo to the contrabassoon, the bigger and more ornery brother of the regular bassoon. It has a sinister growly quality that I felt was perfect for the character.

Click below to play… or jump to Spotify or Apple Music.

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