I got lucky in LA and worked on a couple really big films. A song here, an orchestration there and eventually started writing feature length scores. Then it happened again. I got hired to score INUK, a feature that was shot up in Greenland. A really beautiful movie, fiction but based on real stories, about a children’s home in Uummannaq, Greenland. I was in Venice beach in my surfing shorts and got a call from production telling me I had 48 hours to get on a flight to almost the North Pole. I was to go there on location and record Inuit musicians to combine with orchestra and create an authentic indigenous sound for the cinema.
I didn’t have long underwear, socks, a warm jacket, a hat. Nothing.Three and a half days later I was sitting on a dog sled being towed by 9 dogs across the bay of Uummannaq.Greenland is like the first day of the world. Outside of time. White, frozen, dangerous and terrifyingly beautiful. The movie was mixed by Gregory King, who’s work was nominated for an Oscar on “The Insider”, came in to compete for best foreign picture in the 85th Academy Awards and was an experience that completely changed my life. Again.
I got a call from the director of the children’s home a year later just before Christmas. She said they had somebody coming up there to spend time with the kids, conduct some concerts with them but his mother died and couldn’t come. That guy, by the way, is Ron Davis. One of the most outstanding blues musicians in America. I agreed to go and packed a bag for 3 weeks. I stayed for 2 years.
During my time in Greenland I was sending music and sound design back to LA for movies and tv shows. And when I was getting ready to go back to LA, I got hired to do the music on a project for Guillermo Dell Toro’s show, The Strain, on FX. They were doing a VR piece with actors from the show to exhibit at Comicon and I got asked to do the soundtrack. The problem was that the deadline for the score was going to fall when I was trying to get out of Greenland. And this can take a few days or a few weeks depending on the weather.
Not willing to risk the delivery, I shot down to Berlin and asked my very dear friend Tobias Wagner to help me score it. I set up in his studio there, we did the job and on my 5th day in Berlin, met the woman I married 4 years later. I never made it back to LA. Again, my life changed forever.