New studio completed in November 2020
 Ms. Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries Series 2
Commenced work on the new series of MFMOD together with my 'Zeitgeist Music' co-composers Brett Aplin and Dmitri Golovko. We're excited to again collaborate with the brilliant team at Every Cloud Productions! After licensing the first season, AMC Networks’ Acorn TV returns to commission the second season of Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries with Acorn Media Enterprises from Every Cloud Productions in association with all3media international. From the creators of global sensation Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, Fiona Eagger and Deb Cox, this 1960s-set spinoff features the fearless, fun, and charmingly down-to-earth Peregrine Fisher (Logie-nominated Geraldine Hakewill, Wanted) in the lead role as Phryne Fisher’s niece who inherited a windfall from her famous aunt and sets out to become a world-class private detective in her own right. Called a "vivacious crime series (standing) alone and above any comparisons to the original series" by IndieWire and “clever crime fare” by The New York Times, Season 1 exclusively premiered on Acorn TV as four feature-length mysteries in the U.S. and Canada in April 2019. Season 2 will feature eight one-hour mysteries. The Acorn TV Original Series will begin production this October and exclusively premiere on Acorn TV in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and in its home country on Acorn TV Australia in 2021 and thereafter on the Seven Network in Australia. Leading independent international distributor all3media international will manage distribution in the rest of the world.  Locusts wins 'Best Music Score' at the 2020 Melbourne Indie Film Festival.
Due to Covid 19 this was delayed with winners only announced today.  Ten years (to the day) after the original CD release of the Underbelly Soundtrack, it's finally available on all major streaming platforms.
My thanks to everyone at Sony, Screentime and the Nine Network for making this possible!  Zeitgeist Music launches and official website goes live. A new venture aside from my solo projects, Zeitgeist Music was established as a collaborative team in 2018 to provide original music scores for film & television. Combining the talents of multi-award winning screen composers Burkhard Dallwitz, Brett Aplin and Dmitri Golovko, Zeitgeist Music has collaborated on international feature films such as The Longest Shot, TV drama productions including the ABC/Netflix series Pine Gap, Network Seven’s Ms Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries, Network Ten’s My Life is Murder and the critically acclaimed STAN/ABC Disney drama series The Gloaming. The composers at Zeitgeist Music have over 55 years of combined experience in film and television productions, and have produced a hugely diverse back catalogue of award winning works, that range from hybrid electro-acoustic, small ensemble to full orchestral scores. In the ever-changing landscape of tight and often overlapping post-production schedules, Zeitgeist Music is uniquely placed to deliver original music scores of the highest quality.  From L-R: Brett Aplin, Burkhard Dallwitz, Dmitri Golovko
 Cover art: Felix von Dallwitz
I JUST CAN’T SING (EP) will be available on all major streaming platforms from 10.4.2020 This was a little side project I did 13 years ago in 2007. Back then there was no streaming and it would have been difficult to release this independently. As a result it remained on the shelf until now. Thanks to innovative companies like GYROstream in Australia, this is no longer the case. My thanks to all the talented people listed below who contributed. Credits: Recorded and Mixed by Michael Letho. Live recordings at Mad Cat Studios and Allan Eaton Studios, Melbourne. Acoustic & Electric Guitars: David Herzog Electric Bass: Jeremy Alsop Drums: Dave Beck Vocals (Worry You of My Mind): Julie O’Hara Vocals (Terminal Restlessness): South of the River Gospel Choir Choir arrangement: Annemarie Sharry Brass arrangement (I just can’t sing): Daryl McKenzie Vocal samples courtesy of Spectrasonics Vocal Planet  The Guardian Luke Buckmaster
The Gloaming review – shades of Twin Peaks in fog-swamped crime drama 4 / 5 stars Ewen Leslie and Emma Booth investigate a grisly murder in Stan’s moody and noirish new genre series Every once in a while a film or television series comes around with an aesthetic so eye-watering it makes plaudits such as “evocative” or “painterly” seem manifestly inadequate. Occasionally – as is the case with Stan’s eight-part mystery-drama The Gloaming, from creator and writer Vicki Madden – the visual oomph of the production seems to manifest as a kind of viscous residue, sticking to your psyche the way a sweat patch clings to your armpit. Take a bow, Marden Dean: the show’s gimlet-eyed cinematographer, who also shot Breath, Boys in the Trees and The Infinite Man. The Gloaming is the latest in an emerging trend of Tasmania-based productions that view the island state as a place of terrible beauty, located somewhere south of the mainland and west of hell – following on from Jennifer Kent’s period piece The Nightingale, Foxtel’s gothic drama Lambs of God, and another series helmed by Madden: the terrific, darkly ravishing 2016 disappearance thriller The Kettering Incident. Like Kettering, The Gloaming is bathed in frosty moonlight and ensconced in fog and haze. It has a Scandi-noirish atmosphere and a plotline drawn from a more defined genre playbook: the police procedural thriller. A twisty narrative involving deaths and disappearances is led – as is customary – by a pair of good-looking detectives who discover the case they are working on Is Personal and may connect to a crime committed many years ago. We see vision of events related to that crime in a surreal introductory sequence depicting young teenagers Jenny McGinty (Milly Alcock) and Alex O’Connell (Finn Ireland) venturing towards a big old creepy house, past a forest of tall, bony trees and a collection of grimy tombstones. The property’s occupant is less than thrilled to see them and fires a shotgun at Jenny at point-blank range. This moment is depicted in a way that obscures the face of the attacker and the impact of the bullet. Alex grows up to be a police detective played by Ewan Leslie – delivering another highly effective, twitch-inducing performance following recent appearances in The Cry and Safe Harbour. Alex is directed to partner up with Molly, who is played by Emma Booth: a very commanding presence, here and in the icky 2017 horror-thriller Hounds of Love. The pair haven’t seen each other in a couple of decades and share some kind of a past – although, three episodes in (the first three eps form the extent of this review) it’s not clearly exactly what. Molly is called in to inspect a corpse at a crime scene early in the first episode, in a creepy and surreal moment, like a David Lynch production, and, like Twin Peaks, involving a body found near water – in this instance, a very cinematic-looking waterfall in the background. This body has not been wrapped in plastic but wrapped in rather gnarlier barbed wire. The significance of the barbed wire is one of several points of discussion. Many things are unclear, though it’s obvious that – if you’ll pardon the Ghostbustery parlance – there’s something strange in the neighbourhood, with potential links to occult practices. Grace Cochran (Rena Owen), leader of the local church community, looks more than a little suspect. And the mentally unhinged young man Freddie (Matt Testro) is a dark horse: forever one step away, it seems, from taking the story to very twisted places. The “this time it’s personal” connections that make the case of heightened interest to Molly and Alex, as well as some stilted dialogue, occasionally give The Gloaming a whiff of all-too-familiar dramatic contrivance, antithetical to its otherwise thrilling air of surprise and intrigue. Given the show’s genre framework, you wouldn’t call it strikingly original, but it sure is striking: particularly as a work of atmospheria. Does Madden write the appearance of mist into her scripts? Did she breathe down the necks of Dean and the directors (Michael Rymer, Greg McLean and Sian Davies), reminding them to fog up the lens? Legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa extensively used wind machines, intensifying the environment and infusing his films with symbolic visuals: the winds of change, the winds of good and bad fortune, the winds signifying chaos and tumult. Madden is doing something similar with mist, here as in The Kettering Incident. Its menacing and mysterious qualities thicken up the frame, covering it with a kind of enigmatic, semi-translucent vapour. In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens described a “steaming mist in all the hollows” as a force that “roamed in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none.” He called it a “clammy and intensely cold mist” that “made its slow way through the air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might do.” Roaming forlornness, an evil spirit, an unwholesome sea: these feel like apt words to describe the brilliant brume of The Gloaming. Certainly better than “evocative” or “painterly”.  Signed on to score the new 8 part drama series The Gloaming together with my co-composers Brett Aplin and Dmitri Golovko.
Filmed in Tasmania it stars Emma Booth and Ewen Leslie, plus Aaron Pedersen, Rena Owen, Matt Testro and newcomer Josephine Blazier. Created by Vicki Madden (The Kettering Incident) it is directed by Michael Rymer, Greg McLean and Sian Davies, produced by Madden’s Sweet Potato Films and John Molloy’s 2 Jons. The series is a co-production with Stan and Disney’s ABC Studios International, developed by Madden’s Sweet Potato Films and John Molloy’s 2 Jons and produced by Madden. Molloy and Fiona McConaghy with Keli Lee, Nick Forward, Jon Adgemis and Michael Gudinski are executive producing. When an unidentified woman is found brutally murdered, Detective Molly McGee (Emma Booth) must team up with Alex O’Connell (Ewen Leslie), a fellow cop with whom she shares a tragic past to solve the crime. What begins as a routine investigation exposes something more insidious as political corruption and shady business dealings intertwine with sinister crimes and occult practices. To catch the killer, Molly and Alex have to face the ghosts of their past, the unsettled dead that linger in the liminal space between light and dark, life and death — The Gloaming. |
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