Composer Paul Koch Puts Music to Parental Woes in “Redux Redux” & “Black Heat”
We are in a time of multiverses in pop culture. Jumping from universe to universe is not reserved for superhero flicks anymore. In Redux Redux, there is not a team of magically powered beings traversing time and space to save the day. Instead, it’s a mother frantically moving from universe to universe to find one where her daughter is still alive. Providing the soundtrack to this mother’s desperate journey is Paul Koch. He sat down with Beyond the Cinerama Dome to discuss his musical roots, frequent collaborations with the McManus brothers, and how his other recent project, Black Heat, bears some unlikely similarities to Redux Redux. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Beyond the Cinerama Dome: I read that you went to Berklee to study music, but I was curious about when the love for film came. Was it later, or did it kind of grow from your childhood as well?
Paul Koch: It definitely came from my childhood. I've always loved movies. I didn't realize the two could go together for a very long time. I used to act in plays in middle school and I loved movies, I loved acting, but I was never very good at it.
I've always loved, you know, sci-fi movies. Back to the Future was a favorite of mine. I think a big spark for me was That Thing You Do because that was the dream, right? These guys were playing in a band and I was in a band at the time, or shortly after.
These guys are playing music in their garage, and then you follow their rise to stardom and their downfall, but that part I didn't care about when I was a kid. That was a formative moment for me to be like, oh, music can be a job. It can be something people really do as a career.
Photo by Sela Shiloni
Do you remember what it was like when you realized that a career in film and score composing was possible? Was there a soundtrack that made that realization for you?
I was always generally aware of John Williams. Growing up in Rhode Island, we were close to Boston, and every year he would do concerts with the Boston Pops playing all of his music. We went there for high school field trips to see him. I had this awareness of him, but it didn't seem like something attainable.
It seemed like, what, am I going to be the next Beethoven? That's not a real job. When I went to Berklee, I knew I was interested in that type of music. I just didn't think it was something I could really do. I took the film scoring 101 class, and just really connected with it. Being in bands for so long, you try to get everybody together to play and somebody is busy and somebody doesn't care and somebody isn’t practicing. Composing, you can do by yourself. That was my moment, I think.
You're still in a band now, right? MOONROCK?
Yeah, yeah. It's loosely called a band (laughs). It's my best friend, Scott [Sapcariu], and me making electronic-classical hybrid music. We don't know how to perform it without getting a band of 40 people, so we just release the music now. We’re treating it as our Sergeant Pepper era without having gone through the beginning of the Beatles’ career.
Do you find that scoring for film or writing for the band works a different part of your brain? If you hit a writer's block on one, can you switch to the other or do you feel like you're using the same parts of your brain to do both?
They actually feed each other, which is nice. There will be times where I'm writing a cue for a movie and my brain wants it to go in some other direction that isn't appropriate, so I'll just stash that away. Maybe that's a MOONROCK song and it might become something else.
When you're doing film, the picture is the main thing. You're serving somebody else's vision, somebody else's story. They're not concrete guideposts, but you've got stuff on screen that you have to follow and be appropriate with. MOONROCK is a place where you can just go the other way.
That's kind of why we started doing it, because I had spent so much time writing for other people and being an additional composer. I'm kind of writing in somebody else's voice for somebody else. This was a great way to really express wherever we felt the music wanted to go and whatever direction. We kind of came up with our own little stories in our heads about it.
It's a place where it's a lot more free. It's also very daunting, which is why we haven't released that much music. The blank page is very scary. I love having the inspiration right in front of me playing out. It kind of balances out when I get too much of one, to go do the other and vice versa.
Courtesy of SXSW
Redux Redux isn’t the first time you've worked with Kevin and Matthew McManus. What is that working relationship like now? Did you get brought on early for this one?
I've worked with Matt and Kevin for a long time. I've known them since I was a little kid, so we've worked together for a very long time and, at some point, I'm very lucky to say they just stopped asking me to score their movies. They just said, hey, we're filming near where you live, you want to come by?
I said, sure, I'd love to see what you're doing and they introduced me to everybody as the composer for the movie. I was like, oh, I am? Like, great, this is amazing! That was the first time I've been on the set of a movie that I've scored because I'm usually brought on way later. I didn't know anything about what the movie was about. I just knew the scene we were shooting. I didn't even know the context of it. I hadn't read a script or anything. I knew it was a multiverse, something or other. It was interesting to be there not knowing anything.
It was funny too, because I was there for the scene at the swamp toward the end. There are these bullfrogs that are just so incredibly loud the entire time. They had to keep cutting to get around the sounds of the bullfrogs. I kept on joking like, this is what the score is going to be. It's going to be all bullfrogs, not knowing anything about the movie.
In the end, I got a little clip of bullfrogs. I put it into a sampler, and I turned it into a kind of a creepy pad. You'll never know that it's there, but there are bullfrog sounds in the score in the end.
The score seems very synth-heavy, which also seems very similar to your MOONROCK. Do you feel like you got to flex more of that muscle in terms of this film?
Yeah, definitely. If I were any kind of a writer…I'm not have words, as you could tell by that sentence that I just tried to spit out. This is the kind of movie I would run to go see. Basically, it checks every box I have for a movie that I like.
I heard the term recently, lo-fi sci-fi, which I wasn't aware of before, but it perfectly explains the kind of movie that I like to watch. Just this science fiction concept that you don't go too deep into things and you just explore. What would it be like living in this world? It's a space movie where there aren't aliens who are going to blow up the world. It's low stakes in terms of the world, but really big personal stakes. This movie is that. Thematically, it's right up my alley. It just felt like what I feel inside and what kind of music I want to write.
Courtesy of SXSW
Matt and Kevin, since I've worked with them for so long, they're really open to letting me try things. They give good guidance and it really feels like a collaboration. I'm never afraid to go outside the box with them a little bit and just say, like, I tried this, what do you think of it? Sometimes they love it, sometimes they don't, but it's being able to try those things that I think is really important. I got as close to the temp as I can while being safe, but trying to do my own thing.
You start to really overthink it, but if you can just let your brain go, which is kind of like what we do with MOONROCK. We just let the music find itself. If you're able to do that with a film, it can get really good results.
Since I couldn't see Redux Redux, I watched The Sound of Block Island yesterday, which is another one you did with the McManus brothers. It fits that same vibe of lo-fi sci-fi. It was really interesting to see a different collaboration you guys had done together.
That movie was super fun. It came out in the middle of Covid as part of a virtual film festival. We had our premiere at a drive-in theater and a rooftop in downtown LA. We didn't get that full experience of premiering it, which we really wanted to. With Redux Redux, we got to right that wrong and got to experience it at SXSW, which is so fun.
I was going to ask, did you get to go to Austin?
I did! It was my first time at SXSW and I see why people go. It was so much fun. There are so many things to see that I didn't get to see. I'm sure you had the same experience. I didn't see nearly all the things I wanted to see or talk to the people I wanted to talk to, but, yeah, it's a great town. I'd never been to Austin before, so it was a lot of fun.
Redux Redux is a multiverse story and I feel like we're in a heyday of multiverse stories. But with yours, do you feel like the score had to change when you would go through the different universes?
One of the really, I think, unique things about this multiverse story is that the universes are all very similar. The whole idea is that Irene’s daughter has been brutally murdered and she's going from universe to universe, trying to find her or find one where she's alive and everything's the same. The diner might have had different-colored mugs, or the person who's a cook might be a server now, and it's just like these little teeny tiny differences.
The music didn't have to be totally different. They don't go to a world where there are dinosaurs in a world where everybody is made out of yarn. It's all the same place, so the music was really following Irene's story and why is she in this next universe? Why is she going here? Is this part of the routine, or is she escaping something from the previous universe? Rather than scoring the setting, because it was largely the same, we're really following Irene's story and her story with her daughter and the other characters she meets along the way.
Courtesy of Dark Star Pictures / BLacklight
I also want to ask about Black Heat because you co-composed that and it has come out recently too. It's another kind of parental story about caring for their kids. Did you find any unexpected similarities when you were putting these scores together?
Score wise, there's always that personal story. There's always the love of the parents. There are these moments in both movies where the parents are talking about their kid. The parents aren’t together in Black Heat and their daughter's alive. That's the whole story. They're trying to get her out, so there's a lot more hope there than in Redux Redux. Irene might have had hope in the beginning of her journey, but it's really starting to wane at this point because she's been to so many universes, and her daughter's dead in all of them.
Musically, there wasn't a ton similar, but definitely the approach to scoring some of those more emotional moments was the same. Being a parent myself, I can…luckily, I can't relate to having to find a missing child, but I relate to that connection with your children. The approach to it was the same, but musically, it came out pretty different.
For Black Heat, you also co-produced a song called “Hard Life,” and it’s very interesting that you also had a hand in that. Can you talk a little bit about the experience of creating a song that goes along with the score?
This is the first time that I've done that. I guess I'm practicing for my James Bond movie in the future or something.
We had talked about it briefly when I was scoring the movie and NLE Choppa was one of the stars in the movie. He's great and he makes great music. The director Wes Miller said, there's a chance we might do a song, and if we do, we'd like you to write it with him and bring in sounds of the score so it really sounds like a part of the film.
I wrote a bunch of ideas, taking in elements of the score and elements of the types of songs that are in the score. There's a lot of ’70s soul music that's in there too. I'd write a little ’70s thing and then sample it, treat it like I found it in the back of a record shop and use that as a sample in what became a hip hop song. My friend Scott, who's the other half of MOONROCK, he's a really great drummer and programmer. He came in and it was kind of like our MOONROCK co-production, where he plays drums. There's a lot of hip hop trap drums in the score to Black Heat.
We sent the track over to NLE Choppa and it was really soon after that he sent all his vocals and they're amazing. We were just blown away by it. Then, Talha Barberousse, who's also in the movie, she plays the daughter, she came over here and then she did background vocals on the song. We wanted to really tie into that father-daughter relationship, even though they're not father and daughter in the movie.
We sent it back to each other and he had Kerry Washington, the singer, not the actress, do a verse at the end and sing her own background vocals. It was very much like a back and forth on it, but every time it went back and forth, it got a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit better.
We're super proud of the song. It's something that's very different from what I've done before, but I loved it. it's something I definitely want to do more of.
I mean, you said your James Bond song. Would you do that?
Oh, yeah. I wouldn't turn that down. I'm a huge James Bond fan and if I'm thinking of pie-in-the-sky goals, that would be the one. That's really fun.The songs are always great. I've got a playlist of every Bond song, and I'll listen to that when I'm in the mood.
It would be great. I'm not expecting it anytime soon, but you put it into the world and who knows what will come out of it exactly.
Support Your Local Film Critic!
~
Support Your Local Film Critic! ~
Beyond the Cinerama Dome is run by one perpetually tired film critic
and her anxious emotional support chihuahua named Frankie.
Your kind donation means Frankie doesn’t need to get a job…yet.
Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Letterboxd, & YouTube. Check out Movies with My Dad, a new podcast recorded on the car ride home from the movies.