Reimagination

Justin Michael La Vallee

Reimagination

Justin Michael La Vallee

I grew up on rock and roll. Went to high school in the nineties and learned the world through Nirvana, Janes Addiction, Doc Martins, flannel and lots of coffee.  The day after graduation I moved to NYC and set out to claim my right to stadiums, tour busses and record deals. Just like every other kid with a music dream.

A couple years later, after several odd jobs and still none of the above, I found myself crashing on the floor of a friend at NYU. One night we watched the film "Amadeus" and my life changed. I had heard classical music before of course. Everyone has.

The movie is fictional but the way they portrayed the relationship Mozart had with his music was so powerful to me and there was something so beautiful in how technical the process was portrayed of composing for orchestra. I spent the whole night in the stairwell drinking coffee and reimagining my life.

By around 5am I was clear on my new destiny to be a composer and at 9am when they opened the doors to the NYU admissions office, I walked in and told them I wanted to enroll in the next semester. They said “sure, just send us three scores of your best pieces and good recordings with the application and materials and we’ll have a look”.  But I didn’t know how to notate music.  

So the long journey began…

After 2 years of insanely hard work, I enrolled in night school at Julliard and a year later got accepted to The Manhattan School of Music to study with Richard Danielpour. After 3 more years of even more insane hard work I got accepted to The Curtis Institute of Music and got a degree there in Classical Composition.  

These five years were made of magic. I had a residency in Italy, spent a semester at Princeton working with Toni Morrison, wrote a viola concerto and had the best teachers in the world. But halfway through, I was sucked back into my rock and roll dream. I joined a band in NYC, while living in Philly and going to Curtis. It was crazy. I was commuting back and forth between the 2 cities almost every day.

Playing NY clubs like CBGB’s at night and attending music theory class the next morning in Philadelphia. Several years later after graduating from Curtis, moving back to NYC, making 3 records, touring and fighting the fight, it happened again. I found myself missing writing for the orchestra; missing the classical discipline, the avant-garde, the sheets of score paper. So I moved out to LA and started learning how to write music for film.

Life is a decision you make every moment. Don’t get stuck.

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.

Tobias and I founded a music scoring company with 2 other colleagues in Berlin and spent 5 years writing the soundtracks for countless films, tv shows, commercials and VR pieces. In 2019 I was sent out to SXSW by Music Tech Germany to represent Berlin and presented our company during the tech part of the conference. While there, my life changed. Again.  

I had never been exposed to technology. Not really. We all use tech, but while there I met people who BUILD tech. It was the most exciting thing I had experienced since seeing "Amadeus" all those years before.

It occurred to me that with imagination, you could reimagine work itself. When I came back to Berlin, Tobias and I started taking a look at the way we all work in film and music and realized it wasn’t working. So we went to work on fixing it. 3 years later, we have built freque, a tech company that solves some of the most basic problems at the intersection of these two beautiful industries. We’re on our way back out to SXSW next month to showcase a new way of working and introduce a new technology to the world. Another most magic time. Again.

Life is a decision you make every moment. Don’t get stuck. Change, grow, take risks, discover. Reimagine.

freque.

Justin Michael La Vallee

role
co-founder & managing director
age
42
favorite movie
Kill Bill

I grew up on rock and roll. Went to high school in the nineties and learned the world through Nirvana, Janes Addiction, Doc Martins, flannel and lots of coffee.  The day after graduation I moved to NYC and set out to claim my right to stadiums, tour busses and record deals. Just like every other kid with a music dream.

Reimagination

A couple years later, after several odd jobs and still none of the above, I found myself crashing on the floor of a friend at NYU. One night we watched the film "Amadeus" and my life changed. I had heard classical music before of course. Everyone has.

The movie is fictional but the way they portrayed the relationship Mozart had with his music was so powerful to me and there was something so beautiful in how technical the process was portrayed of composing for orchestra. I spent the whole night in the stairwell drinking coffee and reimagining my life.

By around 5am I was clear on my new destiny to be a composer and at 9am when they opened the doors to the NYU admissions office, I walked in and told them I wanted to enroll in the next semester. They said “sure, just send us three scores of your best pieces and good recordings with the application and materials and we’ll have a look”.  But I didn’t know how to notate music.  

So the long journey began…

After 2 years of insanely hard work, I enrolled in night school at Julliard and a year later got accepted to The Manhattan School of Music to study with Richard Danielpour. After 3 more years of even more insane hard work I got accepted to The Curtis Institute of Music and got a degree there in Classical Composition.  

These five years were made of magic. I had a residency in Italy, spent a semester at Princeton working with Toni Morrison, wrote a viola concerto and had the best teachers in the world. But halfway through, I was sucked back into my rock and roll dream. I joined a band in NYC, while living in Philly and going to Curtis. It was crazy. I was commuting back and forth between the 2 cities almost every day.

Playing NY clubs like CBGB’s at night and attending music theory class the next morning in Philadelphia. Several years later after graduating from Curtis, moving back to NYC, making 3 records, touring and fighting the fight, it happened again. I found myself missing writing for the orchestra; missing the classical discipline, the avant-garde, the sheets of score paper. So I moved out to LA and started learning how to write music for film.

Life is a decision you make every moment. Don’t get stuck.

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.

Tobias and I founded a music scoring company with 2 other colleagues in Berlin and spent 5 years writing the soundtracks for countless films, tv shows, commercials and VR pieces. In 2019 I was sent out to SXSW by Music Tech Germany to represent Berlin and presented our company during the tech part of the conference. While there, my life changed. Again.  

I had never been exposed to technology. Not really. We all use tech, but while there I met people who BUILD tech. It was the most exciting thing I had experienced since seeing "Amadeus" all those years before.

It occurred to me that with imagination, you could reimagine work itself. When I came back to Berlin, Tobias and I started taking a look at the way we all work in film and music and realized it wasn’t working. So we went to work on fixing it. 3 years later, we have built freque, a tech company that solves some of the most basic problems at the intersection of these two beautiful industries. We’re on our way back out to SXSW next month to showcase a new way of working and introduce a new technology to the world. Another most magic time. Again.

Life is a decision you make every moment. Don’t get stuck. Change, grow, take risks, discover. Reimagine.

freque.