Brian Reitzell & Alex Heffes - Red Riding Hood

Brian Reitzell is a fascinating score composer who fashions new instruments to achieve very specific moods and sounds. For 30 Days Of Night he doctored a pottery wheel with felt, mallets and tubing. Their eerie, grinding tones helped the film’s outstanding soundtrack to achieve a rich uniqueness. For Red Riding Hood, Reitzell teamed up with Alex Heffes, who always conducts his own scores and has quite a varied set of film credits (Last King of Scotland, The Rite). Perhaps he was the grounding force to Reitzell’s more avant guard approaches. As a result, Red Riding Hood has a balanced mixture of synthetics and orchestra. “Kids” contains straight ahead drumming, liquid guitar accents and music box melodies, while “Dead Sister” turns up the ominous vibe with bowed cymbals, cobwebbed strings, hallowed vocals and a creepy anklung-esque bit of percussion. The ever-mutating “The Reveal” features the most in-depth look into the collaboration, as analog hadrosaurs shudder in the shadows while ominous cellos and horns shift the mood in a delicious fashion. Retizell’s drum programming and analog treatments are quite captivating at times, carrying a ton of momentum and intrigue. Other choices like hammered dulcimer, ambient glissades and a beautifully lamenting guitar (from “End Suite”) ensure the work steers clear of typical soundtrack schlock. To choose Fever Ray as a lead musical voice for a major motion picture is exciting, and Reitzell’s production and sound choices match the group’s tribal electronics, seemlessly incorporating the music into the fray. A big surprise is how enjoyable Reitzell’s collaboration with Anthony Gonzales turned out to be, as the symphonics cleanly blend with the sweet boy vocals and the classic M83 fuzz and space whir. The vocal-based tracks are well-chosen highlights as opposed to awkward stand-ins. While soundtracks often sound like they are aping a film one can’t see, Red Riding Hood is an apt demonstration of how collaborations can produce a fresh and focused voice for a film one doesn't really need to see to enjoy.

Listen to this bizniss here.