Album Notes

With over 25 film score credits to his name, Andrew Gross, has been making making a name for himself as composer with considerable skill and a unique voice. Known mainly for his comedy scores (8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, The Good Girl, Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny), Forfeit allowed Andrew to explore his dark musical demons.....

NOTE: This CD also contains 4 bonus tracks from the film, Solitude.

Composer's Notes (from the Forfeit CD booklet):

The scores to Forfeit and Solitude explore beauty inside darkness. The films themselves investigate psychological aspects of humanity. I found that juxtaposing pure, simple sounds against a more complex and distorted background was a successful approach to keep the humanity at the forefront of the film, no matter how ugly the situations became.

Forfeit afforded me the opportunity to delve into the dark world of greed, obsession and revenge. That these are carried out in the name of God, made it especially tantalizing for me. The religious overtones of the film led me to choose a boy soprano as the voice of purity, and a healthy dose of distorted ambient sounds (both synthetic and acoustic) to underscore the psychological turmoil at the heart of the story.

Solitude is the first score that I performed all on my own, without the use of other musicians. The film's style was both gritty and intimate--every shot handheld, every scene lit with available light. Because the film was so unique, it required an unconventional approach to the score. The filmmakers and I elected to use familiar sounds in an unfamiliar way. I chose bowed violin harmonics and piano as my pure sounds; and a combination of electric bass harmonic overtones, synth, and low de-tuned bells to express the darker nature of the film.

--Andrew Gross