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A couple of months ago I noticed that I’d missed a call from the States, so when I had the time available I called this number back. Turns out it was Phil Fairclough, who had just left running the BBC’s Natural History Unit to hep start up Granada’s rival Bristol production hub, Granada Wild, 25 years ago. And weirdly, was the person who gave me my first ever job, scoring National Geographic’s seminal series “Built for the Kill“. He was working on an interesting project, a 5 minute virtual reality film set in the land of the dinosaurs, and was looking for a composer who would think outside the box and not write a typically orchestral/hybrid score for a cast of dinosaurs, something which I’m familiar with having scored both “Attenborough & the Giant Dinosaur” and “Attenborough & the Sea Dragon“. After some discussion I put forward that we should use 70s analog synths as our basis for the instrumentation and he agreed that’d be a great starting point. After some to’ing amd fro’ing we are almost there with the score and the film is looking and sounding fantastic. And personally it’s been amazing to work with Phil again, who’s so good at giving structured notes that actually make a lot of sense and steer the music to a perfect place. Thanks, Phil!

I was approached by Tom Newman to score this film he was working on for the charity Waging Peace, a
very touching tale of Liela, an elderly lady, and her harrowing journey from Sudan back to her home in England. It was a real pleasure to collaborate with Tom on this, we really get each other and when we work together, there’s always a period of exploration before we narrow things down to how we want them to sound and behave within the story’s framework.

Waging Peace is a charity that helps Sudanese asylum seekers and refugees settle and lead meaningful lives in the UK.

You can check the film out on my Work page here.

My studio bud and head of Soundcanvas asked me if I wanted to collaborate on a short 3D animation. “Hell yeah!” I replied. We went for quite an ethereal theme to counterbalance the technological aspect of the film, which you can check out on my Work page here.

Planet.com are a company that’s all about knowledge. Knowledge of what is happening on the Earth, all the frikkin’ time, in REAL time. They have satellites all over space filming us 24/7. This sounds scary but can be used for good, though I’m sure it can also be used nefariously.

Anyway, I was approached to score this little film explaining Planet’s Broad Area Management service by the folks at Remarkably and gladly accepted.

You can check the film out on my Work page here.

Wow, a lot has happened since I last wrote. I scored a short film last Autumn for a charity that was narrated by Charlize Theron, then had a major building project to do so left music for a while. Jumped straight back into it with three case studies for Google Ads in the Spring of 2024 (Showcasing one of these on my Work page here), and then another medium length film for a charity called Waging Peace which I’m still finishing with the awesome directorial and creative mind of Tom Newman.

Completely unrelated to scoring but I wrote an album of Chiptune inspired music for Sky’s music library, SATV, at the tail end of 2022. It was super fun to work on this and I had a great time writing it, you can check it out here : https://www.satvmusic.com/#/album/SATVDG157/a989e83e56e8ac93

From top, L to R : The editor dude, Oliver Goetzl, Lars Pfeiffer, Chris Kugelman, Alex Stoloff

Sorry for having been a bit lame at not posting for a while, got lots of things going on here (more on that later). Just wanted to recount a little about my time at Jackson Wild Festival which took place in the very peaceful surroundings of Seewinkel National Park in the South of Austria (Burgenland). It was my first time back in Austria since I went there on a school trip when I was 18 so I was really happy to be going back as I loved it the first time round. Having just completed scoring a show for Austria’s national broadcaster ORF a few months earlier, I was really looking forwards to meeting some of the people I’d worked with such as Marc Kosak and Gernot Lercher, and I’ve got to say it was a real pleasure to meet them in real life, and catch up with some old buddies like Lars Pfeiffer and his crew. Also, meeting new lovely people such as party girls Bibiane Zeller-Presenhuber & Birgit Skulski, the inimitable Oliver Goetzl, the legend that is Klaus Scheurich and his lovely partner in crime Annette, serious music-head Petra Lederhilger, wild outdoorsman Chris Kugleman and many others, particularly from Terra Mater and ORF. Had a few meetings, took advantage of the pool and sauna, drove into Hungary for a day (we were about 15 minutes from the border), but most of all, went to some great discussions and screenings and met great people. Thanks so much, Jackson Wild, you guys rock!

From L to R : Klaus Scheurich, Alex Stoloff

I had the pleasure of having a few zoom chats with this lovely chap called Marc Kosak and he mentioned that ORF were working on this show about eggs. Yeah, eggs! He asked if I’d be up for scoring it, which, being a lover of all things egg, I was totally on board for. It was a little tough at first, working with a German script, but the footage was good and the stories pretty interesting, and overall I’m super pleased with the results. At first I wanted to go with a real experimental sound design vibe and recorded some eggs cracking in the soundbooth at our studios then ran them through a whole bunch of modular gear :

But that was a little too ‘out there’ for the Universum brand, we had to reign it back a bit so I stripped it all down and went for recording live flutes, violins, and bagpipes (big shout out to Stu Barker and Patty Q, always a good time working with those two).

Got there in the end, and the show got 23% of all terrestrial viewers on its first broadcast so I’m super happy with that. Thanks, Marc and all the team at WEGA films!

Just had the pleasure of scoring a little animation for ‘oddly satisfying’ Stockholm based digital artist Andreas Wannerstedt  in collaboration with award-laden Tom Joyce (otherwise known as Sound Canvas). Here‘s a little write-up about Andreas’ work and the rise of ASMR (Autonomous sensory Meridian Response) in The Guardian. This was a real treat to work on as it was the first time I’ve worked alongside my studio bro, Tom, and it was also a bit of a challenge since I’m so used to working on long form projects nowadays. This clip is 22 seconds long and had to loop, and we wanted to create an ambience of togetherness and humanity through the use of music and sound design.. think we did a pretty good job with it, hope you like it!

Alex

I had the pleasure of being asked to judge the music category for Wildscreen 2020, which was a real honour as well as being super fun and informative in equal measure. My co-judges were none other than Nainita Desai and Segun Akinola, two incredibly talented and respected composers, and we spent a good 4 hours over Zoom debating the final 10 films out of the 56 that we’d had to watch and whittling them down to a list of 3. I’ve got to say the standard of composition overall was superb and we had real trouble deciding on the 3rd place spot, but the first 2.. there was no question that they’d go through, they stood out a mile from the rest of the scores. I’m not allowed to name anything yet as judging is still taking place, so you’ll just have to keep your ear to the ground for when the finalists are announced, but it was a fantastic experience and great to chat music with some amazing composers whom I hope to meet in the flesh one day. Thanks, Nainita, Segun and the Wildscreen Team!