Extremis: Interview with Chris Haigh and Matt Welch
Twisted Jukebox’s latest trailer music release is a slamming new epic hybrid album; entitled Extremis, it offers “Epic Orchestral mutated with Monstrous Electronica”!
Extremis was co-composed by Chris Haigh, and Matt Welch who is also director of Twisted Jukebox.
The artwork was done by Sam Hayles – aka DOSEprod.
On the occasion of this release, we made a short interview with the two talented composers of Extremis:
Trailer Music News: How did you come up with the idea of making an album together, Extremis?
Matt Welch: We’ve known each other for a few years now, with Chris previously writing some trailer tools for our Twisted Tools series. We’ve been asking Chris to do an album for us for some time now but due to him being extremely busy, it’s been tricky to nail down a time.
Chris Haigh: Yeah, like Matt said, we have been in talks on me doing an album for Twisted Jukebox for a while but I’ve always been tied up in other projects. Luckily Matt came to me with the idea of us writing an album together just as I was finishing off on other projects, so it was the perfect timing. I was also very excited at the idea of co-writing an album just because I’ve only ever composed tracks/albums on my own and thought it would be a great challenge to see what we could come up with together.
TMN: Can you talk of your collaboration? How did you work together?
CH: Well, we basically set it out like this. Matt would tackle the album from the electronica side of things coming up with filthy synth sirens, dirty bass lines and mammoth beats. He would then send me a basic sketch and structure of the track. I would add all the orchestral organic elements, like melody, chords and themes. Then when I was happy with that, we’d listen through together to talk about changes that needed to be made etc. If all was ok then I would move onto the choir parts. All my orchestral and choir stems were then sent to Matt for him to work his magic and really build the track adding a lot more electronic elements and tweaking the arrangment. This would go back and forth until the track was sounding complete. Extra elements where added as needed, for example we may feel one of the tracks needed some big organic trailer percussion and slams on top of what Matt had done, so I would go away and do some extra percussion and then send that back to Matt to slot in to the track. Most tracks worked like this except for maybe two. Which basically meant that I started the track with the organic elements and structure and Matt added his elements to what I had done. Both ways worked really well and as we got deeper into the album we felt more comfortable, knowing how each other worked.
MW: And being in different parts of the country, there was a lot of time on the phone and bouncing files across the net! Haha.
TMN: Do you plan to do more albums in collaboration in the future?
CH: I think it would be great to do that. I really enjoyed the process.
MW: I’d 100% love to, it seemed to work really well for the first time we have ever collaborated together and I couldn’t be happier with the end result. Hopefully we can aim for something near the end of this year.
TMN: Yes, that would be exciting!
Extremis is available to the public for purchase through iTunes and Amazon. For licensing information, contact Twisted Jukebox. Feel free to follow them on Facebook, Twitter and SoundCloud.
