(Welcome to “Notes on a Score,” GVN’s interview series highlighting the composers and musicians behind some of the year’s most acclaimed films and television series.)
Despite transitioning into the world of film scoring, Rich Vreeland still makes time for video games.
“I try to set aside time every month to play games,” says Vreeland, better known by his stage name, Disasterpeace. “My wife got me Hogwarts Legacy, so I’ve been playing that when I have time.” The self-identified Ravenclaw began his career composing for video games, most notably the 2012 indie breakout Fez. The delightfully immersive chiptune score put him on the map, inspiring director David Robert Mitchell to reach out about collaborating on his 2014 horror film, It Follows.
Eight years later, Vreeland’s ability to craft extensive soundscapes using exclusively synthetic instruments made for two of 2022’s most memorable scores: the bouncy, earthy tones of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On and the pulsating electronic paranoia of Bodies Bodies Bodies. The two indie darlings came from a little up-and-coming studio named A24. Maybe you’ve heard of them.
Despite releasing within weeks of each other, the two projects couldn’t have been more different. Vreeland began working on Marcel in 2019, five years into a production process that would be slowed down even further due to the pandemic. However, it was also a close two-way collaboration with Dean Fleischer Camp, the director of the film and mastermind behind Marcel the Shell since its inception. “Having that kind of a relationship makes the process a lot easier,” notes Vreeland.
Meanwhile, the score for Bodies was composed in just a matter of months but through a back and forth with what Vreeland describes as “more of a committee,” which included director Halina Reijn. “That was more of a studio project. It was A24’s baby, so the actual creative aspect was a little different.” It also has less music than Marcel, or any of Vreeland’s previous projects for that matter, which was intentional. “I actually pushed to have less score. It became clear that there were key moments that could benefit from score, but a lot of it didn’t necessarily need that.”
Because the production of Marcel had done its voice acting and live-action photography first, animation had not yet been completed. So, as a starting point, Camp sent Vreeland “a lot of animatics,” aka black-and-white sketch drawings edited together to simulate what scenes would look like. “I definitely had to use my imagination, to some degree,” admits the composer. However, the sonic identity was initially very clear; Camp had temp-scored the film to the luscious, ambient music of the Japanese New Age, specifically composer Hiroshi Yoshimura.
“A lot of that music tries to mimic natural sounds with synthetic instruments,” explains Vreeland. “The score [for Marcel] has a lot of physical modeling synthesis…equations that mimic the way soundwaves move through physical space.” It’s why many familiar sounds, from conventional piano and strings to unconventional household objects like whistles and pots and pans, are very recognizable while still feeling elusive. “There’s a looseness – loose, warm, ambient, ambiguous.”
Vreeland’s favorite piece in the score, the end credits fanfare “Be Orderant,” channels this into a big band chart. “The idea was, ‘what if all of these little shells and critters had their own band and they were playing music,’” he explains, describing the sound as “really bad keyboard versions” of brass samples. “One [was designed to sound like it’s coming from] inside of a can to make it sound small.”
While Marcel’s sound is otherworldly, Vreeland’s score for Bodies is instantly recognizable. “There was an opportunity to write music in a contemporary style, something that was inspired by trap and the pop trends of the last 10 years,” he says. “My music has not touched any of that, so I thought it would be an interesting challenge to internalize some of those things and write music in that way.” In the spirit of the characters’ lack of healthy communication, Vreeland incorporated heavily compressed audio samples, a concept he has previously described as both literally and sonically “losing the signal.”
“Part of that idea was about making things lossy, making them sound like they’re losing fidelity,” describes Vreeland. “The characters are lacking self-awareness and increasingly they’re turning against each other. They’re just losing it. There’s a parallel with them losing their signals on their phones, so I thought it was a really interesting analogy to play with.”
The score also channels traditional horror melodies through this digital disconnect. Vreeland described one cue, “Whokiller,” as if “someone took a sample from Halloween and put a trap beat under it.” It’s one of the many ways Reijn’s whodunnit uses its genre as a thin veil to deconstruct the social dysfunction of the TikTok generation. “We were trying to basically do something that was inspired by horror without actually being proper horror,” said Vreeland. “It’s like a facsimile of horror. That was the vibe.”
In our full interview below, edited for length and clarity, Vreeland discusses the science behind the synths of Marcel the Shell, workshopping the amount of music throughout Bodies Bodies Bodies, and the struggles of fighting to replace temp music.
It’s really great to get to talk to you about these two films, especially as a fan of your work since the Fez days. Do you still find time to indulge in video games?
Yeah, for sure. I try to set aside time every month to play games or just to play in general. It has been helpful to have dedicated time for that. For Christmas, my wife got me Hogwarts Legacy, so I’ve been playing that when I have time.
Are you a Harry Potter fan?
I’m a fan, yeah. I’m having a good time.
Do you get to pick your house?
They give you a quiz, and then you can modify it if you want, but I ended up in Ravenclaw, so I’m giving that a shot.
Fellow Ravenclaw, love that. Let’s dive into these two films, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On and Bodies Bodies Bodies. Now that some time has passed since their respective releases, is there any hindsight that you gleaned from the processes of working on them?
The projects were very different. Marcel the Shell was a very small production, at least from a communication standpoint. I just worked really closely with Dean [Fleischer Camp], the director. It was very nice to just have a two-person creative collaboration. He really pushed me to take the music into new territory and to really reel things back. I wrote quite a lot of music for that film that didn’t make it in because my initial instincts were a little too on the nose or a little too heartfelt – too much emotion in the actual music. He really wanted things to be more ambiguous, so that’s where we ended up. It was challenging, but having that kind of a relationship makes the process a lot easier. It also took a really long time because it started before the pandemic and then that slowed things down.
Bodies was something that initially we weren’t going to work on together and then came back around. It all happened very quickly, just in a couple of months. It was a movie that didn’t have a lot of score in it. I actually pushed to have even less score. In sitting with it, it became clear that there were key moments that could benefit from score, but a lot of it didn’t necessarily need that. I think the movie is very subtle, so it was tricky to figure out how to play that. Both movies are subtle, or had subtle requirements for music, so they were challenging. With Bodies, we were trying to basically do something that was inspired by horror without actually being proper horror, so the music plays a different role than typically what music in a horror film would do. It also has a kind of levity to it. In some ways, it’s really heavy and dark, and in other ways, it’s funny and ridiculous.
Of course.
That was more of a studio project. It was A24’s baby, so the actual creative aspect was a little different. There was more of a committee with that project.
I know you came to Marcel through your relationship with the film’s animation director, Kirsten Lepore, who guest directed an episode of Adventure Time that was also animated using stop-motion. Is there something about that medium in particular that appeals to you?
Certainly, I really appreciate the craft of it. It’s very time-consuming and it’s something different. It has a different sensibility and quality to it that is hard to explain, but it definitely has a surreal component. They were two projects that I was really drawn to. As someone who watched Adventure Time, it was a really cool opportunity to get to explore what it would be like to make music for that world. Then, hearing from Kirsten and having the opportunity to work with her again was definitely exciting, being a fan of her work.
When you were first talking to Dean about the story, what was it that you initially gravitated toward?
There’s something very intimate about it. I really liked the style of the film, but it also had a down-to-earth quality to it – people talking in the way they would talk and dealing with things that happen in real life, which is not always a foregone conclusion when it comes to something that has a young target [audience]. It’s not an overly kids movie, but it definitely skews a little younger. I thought that it was a film that had a good heart and a good message to it. I gravitated toward that.
This film had a very interesting production that took seven years to complete. I know you started working on the film in 2019. Where was the film at the time you hopped on and was Dean able to show you anything for what the project looked like or felt like at that stage?
There were some things that were staged. I had a sense of what the film was going to look like, but it was a lot of animatics, black-and-white rough sketch drawings, so I definitely had to use my imagination, to some degree. It took a while for all that to come together.
Based on that, was there at all a relationship between the edit and the score?
I don’t believe there was too much in the sense of me writing something and them editing to the music. A lot of it was them workshopping edits with temp music and then me replacing temp music. In some cases, it was source [music] that ended up staying in the film. We played with whether or not certain things would be replaced or not. The collaboration was primarily between Dean and I around things as they were already cut.
I feel like every time I interview composers for this show, the temp music monster always finds its way into the conversation.
It’s definitely a two-headed monster. In a lot of cases, it’s been really positive because it’s been exposure to new music to be inspired by. Temp can be really good in one way but not in another way, and that might be just enough to see what a scene needs in order to be successful. Certainly, there have been times where temp was a little irritating. The big example that I always give is in It Follows where they temped the film with music from Fez, so I was kind of competing against myself.
That’s funny.
In one or two instances, I didn’t win that battle, so I had to do a soundalike of my own music, which was very bizarre.
Flattery, but also not.
Yeah, just kind of psychologically confusing. [laughs] In other cases, like in Marcel, there was some source music in the movie and we were in between on whether or not it would be replaced. Dean was open to it, but ultimately, he chose to go with source music. Some of that was my fault, either not understanding well enough what his intentions were with some of those choices. In other cases, it was just, “let’s try and let’s see what works best.” When you’re really close to something, it can be hard to always have perspective on whether or not something is best. One of the things that I learned on Bodies Bodies Bodies is that it’s really helpful to get away from the writing for a little bit and just watch the movie all the way through and take notes and think about what’s working and what’s not working because sometimes you’re just too narrowly focused and it’s hard to make good choices creatively.
Thank you for that very honest answer. Another composer I spoke to about this said, “Temp is a tool like anything else.”
Totally.
As you’ve spoken about in other interviews, the entire soundtrack for Marcel is fully synthetic, yet so many of the sounds you created are very recognizable. When I’ve done deep listening on the score, I’ve heard horns, bass, woodblock, xylophones, and even train whistles, or a mallet hitting a pot or a pan. Were you intentionally attempting to recreate certain instruments and, if so, were there specific instruments in mind?
The direction of the score, aesthetically, has a lot to do with Japanese New Age music from the early 80s. A lot of that music tends to be more ambient and tries to mimic natural sounds with synthetic instruments. That was my high-level goal with a lot of the sounds, to find sounds that are synthetic but have an organic quality to them. Especially because a lot of the inspiration was from that time period where synthesis was just starting to get really big, it led me to really hone in on particular kinds of synthesis that would allow me to do that. The score has a lot of FM synthesis instruments in it and physical modeling synthesis, which is basically like mathematical models, these equations that mimic the way soundwaves move through physical space. You can get these really quirky instruments that are very expressive.
A lot of physical modeling synths have a lot of expressiveness in terms of what you can do with them, and that’s really important when you’re trying to make something sound natural and like it’s being played by humans. There’s a lot of that [in the film]. There are some real sounds in there, but they’re not recorded. It’s sampled stuff and is intentionally not trying to be very obvious, even though there’s some flute and strings and piano. There’s a looseness – loose, warm, ambient, ambiguous. My favorite piece of music is the credits music [“Be Orderant”], which is sort of like a fanfare. I basically tried to make a big band out of these very unusual sounds. Some of them are really bad keyboard versions of brass instruments. One [was designed to sound like it’s coming from] inside of a can to make it sound small. The idea was, “what if all of these little shells and critters had their own band and they were playing music.”
That is 100% what I get from it. I love “Be Odorant.” That song really does feel like it could be played by a band in real life with some mutes or something.
Totally.
You talked about how the score for Marcel required you to be less on the nose about certain cues, but songs like “Be Odorant” are very intentionally rhythmic, which is something that is immediately noticeable when somebody is watching a film. Was it hard to be “less on the nose” with songs that immediately capture attention like that?
The rhythmic stuff typically comes in when the music is trying to be fun and bring a little bit of levity. The music tries to capture the spirit of Marcel. For whatever reason, the rhythmic stuff, especially a lot of world-style rhythms – like cross-rhythms and Latin rhythms – that kind of stuff seems to work really well with the style of the instrumentation and the characters. It was a good counterpart to some of the more somber music in the movie.
Let’s move on to Bodies Bodies Bodies. The film was pretty far along at the point that you joined in. Similar to the question I asked earlier about Marcel, what was it about the story that attracted you to the project?
I thought the movie was different, and I thought it was funny in a strange way. I also thought that the structure of the film – the way it unfolds, the whodunnit aspect of it – would be an interesting challenge musically. Being asked to write music that was horror but not horror was very interesting and hard. I like the idea, having done a fairly well-received horror film [It Follows], for my next horror movie to be something that’s not even really a horror movie. It’s like a facsimile of horror. I thought that was kind of fun. I also knew that there was an opportunity to write music in a contemporary style, something that was inspired by trap and the pop trends of the last 10 years. In general, my music has not touched any of that, so I thought it would be an interesting challenge to internalize some of those things and write music in that way. All of that was floating around in my head when I was working on it.
In another interview you did about this film, you spoke about incorporating lossy noises into the score, comparing it to a damaged MP3 file. You specifically mentioned this fascinating idea of both literally and metaphorically “losing the signal.” Could you elaborate on the impetus to incorporate those sounds and where the motif can be heard throughout that film?
I had a lot of great conversations early on with both Halina [Reijn], the director, and the editing team about how we might approach things. In one of my earliest demos, I was playing around with the idea of using the texting sound effects from the film and incorporating them into the score. That didn’t make it into the film because there were mixed feelings about that being a little too straightforward. I thought it was interesting, but part of that idea was about making things lossy, making them sound like they’re losing fidelity. The characters are lacking self-awareness and increasingly they’re turning against each other. They’re just losing it. There’s a parallel with them losing their signals on their phones, so I thought it was a really interesting analogy to play with. As shit starts to hit the fan, this effect becomes more prevalent in the score. It was a type of effect that I hadn’t used a whole lot of, so it was interesting to play with that and see the sounds you could come up with.
From the sounds of it then, the choice to have minimal score in the film until that point was very intentional.
Yeah. There was definitely workshopping. I pushed to have less score in the beginning of the film because it didn’t really feel like it was working. It felt a little disjointed. I think it helped to bring [score] in a little more subtly and then like, boom, you know? Now we’re in the thick of it. There was a lot of back and forth trying to figure out where music should go, how much music we should have. That went on for a pretty long time and it was challenging.
Two of my favorite elements of the score are the cues for Bee and Sophie, who are the two characters at the heart of the story. How did you come to design those themes?
The idea with Bee was that she was the eyes into the world, so there was this push for Bee to be the character that we’re with the most. There was an attempt to portray her in an innocent way in the beginning and then to have that theme carry through and evolve with how she, along with everybody else, loses it. Whereas Sophie, her character is a little bit darker. She has more of a mischievous quality and she gets into that earlier in the film than Bee does. All of that definitely contributed to some of the ideas that were floating around. I definitely played a lot with what those themes would be, but definitely a lot of it had to do with these two characters being the two pillars of the story. Two different ways of going through this scenario that are similar but different. Bee represented a little bit more of an outsider perspective because she’s the outsider in the friend group and she’s the one who has the most overt insecurity, whereas Sophie is an insider.
There’s also a track called “Whokiller,” which comes in during a deduction moment where the characters are trying to figure out who between them is the killer. What was the thought process behind this piece?
That was inspired by some of the instrumental trap music that was in the film when they’re just hanging out and talking, like in the background. There’s something about that music that’s not underscoring anything in particular, it’s just painting the scene. It’s less reactive and it’s more like commentary. We came to the conclusion that the music plays this role, almost like a vignette, where it has an awareness of what’s going on, but it’s not necessarily responding to things super hard. That music plays that role where it can almost be like the music on the stereo they were listening to. It has this beat, like someone took a sample from Halloween or some horror movie and put a trap beat under it. That was the vibe. It’s fairly stationary, it’s not lots of dynamics. That style seems to fit the film well at times and fit the characters who are immature and not fully developed human beings, to some degree.
The last question I have for you is the question I ask every composer who I talk to. Are there any scores you’ve heard recently that have inspired you and that our readers should pursue listening to?
There’s a game composer who’s really great. His name is Tomas Dvorak. He also goes by Floex. He does music for Machinarium and Samorost 3.
Oh, very cool.
He’s one of the best game composers around. His music is really cool. I’d definitely recommend checking out those games and his music.
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On and Bodies Bodies Bodies are now available to buy or rent on all major video on demand platforms, as well as on Blu-Ray and DVD. Disasterpeace’s scores are also available to stream on all music streaming platforms.
Larry Fried is a filmmaker, writer, and podcaster based in New Jersey. He is the host and creator of the podcast “My Favorite Movie is…,” a podcast dedicated to helping filmmakers make somebody’s next favorite movie. He is also the Visual Content Manager for Special Olympics New Jersey, an organization dedicated to competition and training opportunities for athletes with intellectual disabilities across the Garden State.