MRH : Do you find that, because his style is so unique and he takes those kinds of chances, Shore's creative risk-taking was one of the inspirations from which you drew to build your score for The Roost, because it's a really unusual score, even for a modest and low-budget film. Often the music is one of those last things on the schedule, and it's done quickly. Did some of the concepts originate from writer/director Ti West, or did you bring them to him?

JG : It was kind of both. The director showed me the film and he said, ‘As far as I'm concerned, this film needs a horror film score with a huge amount of horror in the sound and the music, and if you don't have the sound and the music, you're missing half the film, and if you're missing half the film, then it's not a film, so please bear that in mind.'

So we watched and spotted the film together, and he said he wanted some things to be more action oriented, and then there are some things he wanted to be more unsettling, and just play off of that.

With all the good musicians that I know in New York, I suggested that we use a string quartet. I'm good friends with the guys from Flux Quartet, so I talked to them about doing the score; it's actually the two main guys from Flux, Tom Chiu and Dave Eggar, as the rest of the quartet wasn't able to do it.

I explained to Ti that if he wanted these two different approaches, the strings will give him more flexibility. He definitely wanted the Evil Dead synth stuff – he was very big on the homage with that – and then I played him some modern string quartet writing; we listened to a bunch of stuff like Ligeti, Giacinto Scelsi, Penderecki, Krumm, Miloslavsky, and he actually took to it. I was kind of surprised, because he took to it really well. It was really funny.

We just spent a whole bunch of time just hanging out, listening to different things, but I think with The Roost, they were doing the sound effects at the same time that I was doing the score, so when I would do mockups, I would just post them up to the website for the sound designer, and I would check out what he was doing, and he would check out what I was doing, and we'd talk about how we were going to layer things together.

MRH : Was there a lot of experimentation done to get those actual sounds?

JG: With stuff that I wasn't totally sure about myself, and where I wasn't sure if the director was going to be happy with, I scheduled a rehearsal. The players are fantastic, so we just banged through stuff very quickly. We actually did that at my place, and then I just put it up against picture and sent it down to him, and all of it survived; we didn't have to go back and have me rewrite that stuff.

MHR : I think it's in Joshua - the other score coupled with The Roost on MovieScore Media's album - where you use the strings to mimic swarms of insects. Was a great deal of it written down and the musicians performed it? Or were there a series of ideas, and through their performances, you came up with some of the more unique sounds, like sustained chords and scratchy vibrato, and high shrill notes that actually wiggle instead of tremble?

JG : Most of the score is written out in one way or another. I look at the two different approaches: there's the Ligeti approach, which is so notated; and then on the opposite end of the spectrum there's the Penderecki thing, which is graphic events that take place that have parameters for the musicians, and they can choose various things within notes that they can arrive at these events; while I used a little bit of that, most of it is formally written out.

It's just a string quartet, but there are some places where we had to overdub, because I needed more notes. I like horror because you get to shine way more, and in a lot of different ways than you do with other films. I've done a fair amount of animated stuff, which again, compared to other things, you do get to shine quite a bit there, but in the horror stuff, you get to do all these crazy modern things, and they're a lot of fun.

That really dark stuff in the opening title music is Dave Eggar, the cellist. He and I are old friends, and we actually lived together for a while, so I've done a lot of session work with him. He has this crazy stuff that he can do to make the cello sound like a distorted guitar, just through using harmonics and bow technique.

I knew that I wanted to do that kind of sound for the film's beginning, so he and I kind of worked on that stuff. There's a section where we talked about textures, but I don't personally understand how he goes and does it. There's a little bit of delay and some panning going on from the engineer, but there's no distortion or anything; that's all just the cello, and what he's able to manipulated out of the cello.

When the director heard certain stuff, like when they were playing ponticello, he'd say ‘Oh I love that! More of that.' So at certain parts of the score, we sort of amped things up a little bit. The opening credit music is like that: it's six tracks of cello, and there's some scordatura that's going on there, too. Dave would tune very low on the C string. Then where the bat theme comes in, that's obviously overdubbed, with Dave and Tom playing against themselves, because it's hard to create a string orchestra sound with just four players.

Check out sound samples of sul ponticello and other happy sounds at the University New South Wales website HERE [requires Quicktime]