Following the completion of the horror film Stay Alive, John Frizzell shifted from that score's more experimental, aleatoric style to a fusion of more accessible action-suspense music for Primeval. Like his prior scores, however, nothing's conventional in John Frizzell's latest score, which incorporates traditional African music supervised & recorded on location by the composer.

Although our conversation revolves around his 85 minute score for Primeval, Frizzell also describes the rewarding benefits in working with African musicians, some philosophical and cultural differences, and the use of current innovative software.

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Mark R. Hasan: From our prior conversation, you explained that you spent a great deal of time researching and recording authentic African instruments and performances, which is pretty unusual for a horror film, and I guess the temptation nowadays, particularly if a production's budget is pretty modest, is to exploit existing sound and music libraries. Did the filmmakers want authenticity, or was it your own choice to immerse yourself into a fresh musical culture?

John Frizzell: Well, from the beginning, Michael Katleman, the director… wanted to be as creative and ambitious as possible, as I always do with my own work, and so it involved coming up with a plan to find new ways to approach what we were doing, and the logical answer to that was to break the mold and go to Africa, and see what I could find.

MRH: That's pretty unusual, because I think in most cases people tend to draw from existing sound libraries.

JF: I can't stand that [laughs]. I mean, there've been times when I've been forced to do it and I used some sound, and then I hear it on a commercial six months later, and my skin starts to peel off and I fee uncomfortable.

I want my work to be my work, so for me it's really important that the sound be unique in the score. I push really hard for that, and you can't always do it, but in this situation we found a way to do it [and it became] the most musically invigorating thing I've ever done.

MRH: I guess one of the benefits of going on location is that you're actually there to experience the discovery processe: you're exposing yourself to sounds and instruments that you've never seen and heard before, or are perhaps practiced in very small communities or organizations.

JF: I was fortunate to find a guy named Craig McGahey in South Africa, who was able to put me in the room with some great musicians, like [Dizu Plaatjies, from the band Amanpondo]. Dizu's one of the real legends of traditional African music…He knows everything, all the history.

MRH: Were there any specific instruments that you found were the most special, and felt were ideal for your score?

JF: I don't know if there was one instrument, but I think there were concepts that I didn't realize were in traditional African music that really amazed me. One of them was the use of flanging and overtones and spacings; where things almost sound like a wah-wah sound, almost like the way you'd use a wah-wah pedal. Or they'll use a mouth bow, and you shape your mouth in different ways to accentuate different overtones at different times; that can be in a sense the melody, if the tapping is the rhythm

MRH: I think I remember that motif does appear in some of the film's early cues.

JF: Yeah, there's a lot of that in it.

MRH: The design of the score didn't strike me as being melodic at all. I think there's two cues with brief vocal passages that bookend the score, but there are rare, soothing moments in an otherwise impressionistic score that emphasizes linear tonal impressions, layered with some other sounds, plus chunks of percussion.