Michael Andrews(aka Elgin Park)

Michael Andrews is a relative newcomer to the world of film scoring. He worked as the composer on the critically acclaimed television shows "Freaks and Geeks" and "Undecleared" - but his first feature film took many of us by surprise. Donnie Darko is a surreal, almost freaky mind-trip following a teenage boy, Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) over the course of time following a bizarre accident in which a jet engine crashed into his bedroom. Donnie has daylight hallucinations, including talking to a giant rabbit named "Frank", who instructs him to commit acts of violence, and foretells the end of the world. He starts to become interested in time travel, and soon discovers that his old neighbor might hold the key to everything. It's hard to describe Donny Darko - it is best seen and experienced. The dour mood and surreal aspects of the film are greatly enhanced by Michael Andrew's atmospheric and gloomy score.

The film takes place in the 1980s, and Andrews made a conscious choice to write a "retro-futuristic" score using instruments from the 1960's and 70's. The darker dramatic moments tend play rather heavily, but work extremely well in setting the mood. "Carpathian Ridge" uses a ominous piano and female voice for the main titles. Atmosphere and low atonal notes are used in "The Tangent Universe", which is the same approach used in "Philosophy of Time Travel" and "Ensurance Trap". Use of a piano figures heavily in the score as well, from "The Artifact & Living" to "Rosie Darko" to "Time Travel" and the sad conclusion in "Did you Know Him?".

The middle portion of the score utilizes an amazing theme, first heard in "Liquid Spear Waltz", a melancholy piece, with that uses a voxophone, and even reminded me a bit of the music from that creepy computer game, "The 7th Guest". Another theme shows up in "Gretchen Ross", backed by a small choir. This same orchestration carries over into "Burn it to the Ground". "Waltz in the 4th Dimension" is a longer version of the theme heard in "Liquid Spear Waltz", but with a vocal element added for coloring. It's very creepy and surreal at the same time.

The album is capped with a new cover of the Tears for Fears song, "Mad World" (sung by Gary Jules). The song is so depressing and sad, it just ends the film on such a downer. But there's an alternate version here (as a bonus track) which is the exact same thing, but with a percussion track overlay. Donnie Darko was critically well received, even if it didn't get a big theatrical release. Still, it should be seen if not for the story and the mood it sets, but for the score - which works exceptionally well in the film, and I'm sure we will see some great things from Michael Andrews in the years to come.

by Dan Goldwasser - SoundtrackNet

In most respects, the movie Donnie Darko has become a word-of-mouth champion since its release in 2001. The wonderfully eerie fusion of gothic science-fiction with an eighties-teen-comedy-period-piece framing has gained a strong fanbase despite a deliberately incomprehensible plot and underwhelming US box office take. In an even bigger fairytale twist, the Tears For Fears song Mad World was covered for the film as a piano-driven collaboration between composer Michael Andrews and singer-songwriter Gary Jules. Almost two years later, the song was released as a single in the UK and sensationally beat The Darkness and Pop Idol to take the coveted Christmas number one spot in the charts. Thus, Gary Jules’ latest album is given a ‘proper’ UK release, along with Michael Andrews’ original score to the film Donnie Darko.

Some of the best film scores of all time fail as stand-alone musical products because they were created as incidental accompaniments to actions onscreen, and therefore when reviewing any soundtrack you have to choose whether to assess it alongside its intended context or as a product to be bought for entertaining consumption. Andrews’ score was a deliciously haunting blend of moody noir-synths and swirling chords on screen, and yet on record it draws comparisons with many artists on the Warp label. This is music at its most evocatively abstract, devoid of any of the eighties time-capsule songs that littered the film, such as the excellent Head Over Heels by Tears For Fears or The Killing Moon by Echo & The Bunnymen.

Classical composer Erik Satie designed piano music for suitable background occasions, and in some respects Andrews has crafted a twenty-first century Satie album that soundtracks a thunderous nightmare the no-man’s land caught between reality and the imagination. Yes, Mad World shows up in two versions at the end, but this only serves to add to the cerebral overload. Clearly, Donnie Darko won’t appeal to many non-soundtrack enthusiasts, but there are many people out there who will be giving this a constant spin on their stereo, even if Mad World is totally overplayed already, and that’s essentially the main reason why most would buy it. - CD Times

The most successful art is often unplanned, and for Michael Andrews, composing the score for a film as unique as Me and You and Everyone We Know was just another in a long series of happy accidents.
Andrews fell into film score composition by chance when the band he was playing with—cult soul/jazz collective The Greyboy Allstars—was asked to score Jake Kasdan’s first feature, The Zero Effect. One year later, Andrews got hired to write the music for the highly regarded, though short-lived TV show, Freaks and Geeks (NBC), and soon after, he landed the score for indie film hit, Donnie Darko. Andrews considers himself primarily a guitar player, but Darko’s director, Richard Kelly, told him he didn’t want any guitar in the movie. So, he taught himself to play piano by ear. It’s part of the reason that the score is, as Andrews describes, so simple. “In a way,” he says, “your faults become your trademark.” Darko’s original score album went on to sell over 100,000 copies (in part because of Andrews’ remake of Tears for Fears’ Mad World, featuring Gary Jules), and Andrews became a composer to watch.
Andrews, who talks at warp speed with an infectious, nervous enthusiasm, is really part composer, part producer (he finished producing Inara George’s critically acclaimed album All Rise earlier this year), and part performer. He heard about Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know when he ran into the husband of producer Gina Kwan (with whom he went to college) at a party. Kwan’s husband praised July’s exceptional script, and so Andrews asked for a copy. It blew him away.
Coincidentally, during that time, July had been listening to the Darko score, which she loved. “I would die to work with this person,” she thought, but assumed Andrews was out of her league; still she began strategizing ways to approach him anyway. Based on his interest in the script, Andrews arranged to meet July. He was then working on material for a new solo album, and when they met and July heard some early tracks from his record, she was all the more convinced he was perfect for her film.
Andrews and July share similar outsider backgrounds. Andrews does not have any formal music composition training, and July, though she had made a few short films prior to Me and You, had been known primarily for her writing and performance art. July knew that she wanted the music to not to sound “like movie music,” and to sound as if someone who didn’t quite know how to play music had played it. As if the music was somehow a mistake that worked. It’s a theme that provides a thread throughout the film: people come together accidentally but they must make a conscious decision to act after fate has done its part.
Initially taking cues from the characters’ dialog, Andrews began writing the score. For example, when Richard, played in the film by John Hawkes, says he’s “prepared for amazing things to happen” and that he wants his kids “to have magical powers,” Andrews came to understand the film’s world as a kind of alternate reality where people believe in fate and chance—and this was the world he needed to paint with his music. He also saw the feelings July was trying to get across in her film as very primary. “She tries to break things down to very basic, simple shapes—the simplest shapes possible, and that totally influenced me in my music.”
Working out of his custom-built backyard studio in Glendale, CA, Andrews spent three months creating the score using an orchestra of obscure vintage synthesizers (a miniature hotwired Casio keyboard was unearthed at a garage sale for $10) and drum machines. His concept was to play what he termed amateurish, emotional, naïve, magical and simple music on highly unemotional, inorganic instruments—for example, a calculator with built-in twelve-note keyboard that lends a haunting portamento melody to one of the film’s motifs.
Other instruments used in the score include Andrews’ modified piano (rather than hitting the strings directly, the hammers first make contact with a piece of soft felt, creating a warmer, slightly muffled tone), as well as his Moog and Vocoder synthesizers. Despite all the electronic gear, no MIDI was used in the recording, so that all the humanness, all the subtle variations of rhythm, are intact. Inara George adds vocals in several climatic moments throughout the film. In some cases, cues were composed of only two or three tracks in order to attain the magical simplicity for which the film called out.
As with many film scores, it took some time for composer and director to learn each other’s languages. Gradually, Andrews and July began to “get in tune with each other’s psyche,” a process he refers to as paralleling that of the film’s characters, who are each struggling in their own ways to communicate. “It was like he was channeling me,” says July. “It’s a movie about connecting, and not being able to connect, and we had to live through that—that’s where the music came from.”
Large porti - Dan Crane