2024 IN REVIEW
Grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with so many talented folks this year! Looking forward to all the projects brewing for 2025. Here are some highlights from the past year…
2024 IN A NUTSHELL
Here’s to all the custom music, voiceover and vocal engineering, sound design, audio restoration, music arrangement/ production, and mix in the recent past, present, and near future! From basic VO and music blend to explosions, flying mailboxes and lab UI sounds to recording live vocals, strings, guitar and drums, Cool Cat Audio amplified the messages of storytellers in all media. Projects in documentary, narrative, podcast, corporate video, film, and animation media for clients in the health care, branding, academic, filmmaking, performing arts, and public sector spheres. Grateful for the collaboration. Sadly, a fair amount of the work I’m not able to share due to NDAs, etc. But I’m grateful for every bit of it!
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SOUNDTRACKS, VOL. 1
2024 saw the release of “Soundtracks, Vol. 1”, a collection spanning over a decade of my original musical scores for media in the film, animation, and podcast spheres and featuring a dizzying array of styles and strategies befitting their diverse origins. I’m also curating an ongoing Spotify playlist index that integrates the compositions with larger collections of the genres that inspired them.
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SOUND DESIGN AND ORIGINAL MUSIC FOR EXPERIMENTAL SHORTS
I was happy to head way off the beaten path to craft original music, sound design, and mix for two experimental shorts this year: “Le Cosmos”, directed by Natalie Peracchio, and “Let’s Count to Six, Shall We?” directed by John Akre (the latter of which featured some fun domino recording). Both films were well received at their premieres— Akre’s “Let’s Count to Six” at the Square Lake Film Festival, and Peracchio’s “Le Cosmos” at the Twin Cities Film Festival (where I met the director for the first time after a remote collaboration). Both films are currently still on the festival circuit; I hope to be able to share them online before too long.
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MIX ENGINEERING + MASTERING FOR MUSIC ARTISTS
I’ve been active in the music production space recently, working variously as a recording, mixing, and mastering engineer for artists like film composer Andy McCormick (Dreamland Faces), South African Ensemble 29:11, and hip hop impresario Lucky Tiger. More collaborations in the works!
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PERFORMING ARTS: MAMA FAERIE, PHANTOM LOSS, DREAM OF ME
I contributed music production and sound design to a few stage works this year. Puppetry was a theme, present in Mama Faerie’s “Show Me Your Wings”— for which I arranged Rhiannon Fiskradatz’s album as performance-ready backing tracks, adding some live percussion and scrambling her compositions into mashup de-mixes— and Oanh Vu’s Phantom Loss, which weaved Vietnamese mythology and American pop culture to explore the impact of criminalized immigration and intergenerational trauma. I also did some music editing for “Dream of Me” at the MN Fringe, in which a new widow finds a way to have lucid dreams of her deceased husband with the help of a new AI-powered device.
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EDUCATION/ GUEST SPEAKING
I gave a couple of presentations this year, at a Film Score Meetup networking event (where I talked through some of my process on the aforementioned short film “Let’s Count to Six, Shall We?”), and also at Century College (where I also joined the advisory board) for a presentation on film sound for an audio editing class.
While we’re at it, I’ll mention that I was honored by an invitation to assemble a brief explainer chapter on microphones for the Museum of Portable Sound’s upcoming gallery guide.
More noble deeds in pedagogy in the works for 2025. Stay tuned!
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SECRETS FROM THE SCENE PODCAST
It was an honor to appear on the Secrets from the Scene podcast, talking through my history and experience as an audio engineer, sound designer, composer, and mixer, resurrecting a 20-year old album project, and coming full circle as a mix engineer for other music artists. We also offer some handy tips on how to add value to your music project without spending any money.
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WHAMAGEDDON
The year came to a close as it always does, with the tension and suspense of Whamageddon. I got taken out early at Target this year. But you know what? I’ll never give up, and neither should you.
Happy New Year, and see you in 2025!
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