In the season two finale of The Film Scorer Podcast, acclaimed Northern Irish composer Hannah Peel joins the show! We primarily talk about her score for the new series adaptation of John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos (which you may know as The Village of the Damned). It’s a supremely cool score, mixing dark, oppressive and gentle soundscape electronics with voice. The most notable aspect of the latter – and the part that sold me on the score immediately – is Hannah’s manipulation of her own voice to mimic the sound of cuckoos. In the midst of this, Hannah actually talks about why she thinks experimentations with voice have become more common in recent scores, and we talk a bit about her journey into composing media music as well as the thought that goes into curating a soundtrack release.
The Midwich Cuckoos is available to watch on Sky in the UK and may be forthcoming elsewhere. Hannah’s score, and all of her other music, is available digitally, particularly on BandCamp (with The Midwich Cuckoos being released in conjunction with Invada). You can find out more about Hannah by visiting her website.
Have a listen to our conversation below or wherever you get your podcasts (including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube).
About The Midwich Cuckoos
“The Midwich Cuckoos is an unnerving fable for our turbulent times, a thrilling strange and at times horrifying journey into parenthood. In this new adaptation, Midwich is a small English commuter town, liberal and aspirational, populated by families and affluent streets. A place where nothing much happens – that is until the twilight hours of a summer’s day when a sleepy corner of the town is plunged into panic.
With analogue synthesizers recreating the horror of the ‘Hive Mind’, tape manipulations, drones, woodwind and melodies echoing the song of the cuckoo bird, Peel creates a score that perfectly balances the organic instrumentations and melodies, juxtaposed with an increasingly dark electronic ‘invasion’.
Peel goes on to explain, ‘Creating the score was a constant endeavor to find the balance between darkness and light, fear and beauty. It was a very fine and intricate equilibrium between the normal sunlit logical world as we know it, and a subversive unfamiliar musical language.‘” – Courtesy of Sky and Hannah Peel.