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Brian Reitzell Creates His First Horror Movie Score

Brian Reitzell, the former drummer of Red Kross and Air, took an untraditional approach while creating the score to David Slade’s vampire-laden film 30 Days Of Night—he turned to a pottery wheel.

“I was trying to figure out the different sounds and colors and instruments to use,” explains Reitzell. “I thought if someone came at me with an ax or was trying to kill me or eat me, that was going to be such a horrific experience and was going to be totally new and unfamiliar, so I didn’t think what I was going to hear was something like an orchestra.”

So, Reitzell jury-rigged the pottery wheel with tubing purchased from Home Depot, affixed various items like a drum stick or felt mallet, miked the contraption and stood back. “The pottery wheel can spin up to 280 rpm,” he says. “You have to wear goggles and body armor. I was scared to death.

“There are no rules,” Reitzell says. “I’m hired to do the music, whether that means I’m picking from my record collection or collaborating with Air or Spoon’s Britt Daniel [for Stranger Than Fiction] or scoring. Whatever it takes for us to get the music that we envision for the film, that’s what I’m going to do.”

Up next, Reitzell will reunite with Air’s Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin, with whom he scored The Virgin Suicides, to compose music for a non-existent movie. “It’s probably a sci-fi type film, but it’s very emotional, maybe someone trapped in a spaceship kind of thing,” he says. “We’re conceptualizing it now. It might be that we take a book or take some images and just start to score to those images and then a film will find us.”

The soundtrack for 30 Days of Night is available from Ipecac Recordings at www.ipecac.com.

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