Kusiak Music & Kenny Kusiak In the News

John and Kenny Kusiak spoke with Marjorie Howard of YourArlington.com recently; here’s an excerpt:

“The scene is a busy street in New York City in 1910. A piano plays, and we see horses and buggies clip-clopping by as men in top hats and women in long dresses walk by. Chord changes and a background of strings move the action along until the focus is on the brand-new Penn Station. The music swells and horns join in as we see the grandeur of the building. We next see the men who built the station and the musical tempo picks up, not unlike a train gaining speed.

For the PBS documentary, “The Rise and Fall of Penn Station,”the background music provides mood and feeling. Often overlooked, music made for TV programs, commercials or movies is its own art form, evoking emotion and adding texture without overtaking the subject matter. With no music, the PBS film would have a narrator and scenes of people walking by and a building. But there would be no oomph.

Arlington composer and musician John Kusiak has been creating the oomph for television, movies and commercials for more than 40 years, writing music for the PBS show “American Experience,” numerous commercials and movies and lately for podcasts. He does it from his home studio equipped with synthesizers, computers and keyboards. His son, Ben, used to wander downstairs to watch his father at work and to listen, sometimes joined by friends from school…”

Read the rest of the article.

Morally (In)defensible podcast

Morally (In)defensible, the new podcast from the creators of Crimetown and The Jinx, has hit the airwaves — or AirPods — this week.

The podcast is a lead-in companion to the premiere of FX's new five-part docuseries, A Wilderness of Error, based on the best-selling book of the same name by author and documentarian Errol Morris.

Featuring music from both Kenny Kusiak and the Kusiak Music Library, this is another family affair.

Take a listen and let us know what you think!

Have you checked out Crimetown Podcast yet?

If you haven't been listening to the Crimetown podcast, you've got a treat in store. Thirteen episodes have wrapped with five more to come...

"Welcome to Crimetown, a new series from Gimlet Media and the creators of HBO’s The Jinx. Every season, we’ll investigate the culture of crime in a different American city. First up: Providence, Rhode Island, where organized crime and corruption infected every aspect of public life. This is a story of alliances and betrayals, of heists and stings, of crooked cops and honest mobsters—a story where it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Hosted by Marc Smerling and Zac Stuart-Pontier. New episodes out most Sundays at 2 pm." -- from the Crimetown website

Enjoy the podcast and listen for our music -- tracks from the Kusiak Music Library and some new compositions by John, Andy and Kenny are used in each of the episodes.

Wait, what is the Kusiak Music Library, you may ask?

We've been working to get several decades' worth of Kusiak Music compositions online for easy browsing. There's over 1,250 tracks up so far with more to come; as time goes by and the rights to pieces revert to us, and as we have time to add the bajillions of alternate and otherwise never-used pieces of years gone by we will add more. (Did we mention it's several decades' worth?)

The Kusiak Music Library is invitation-only for now, but feel free to get in touch if you have a project that needs music (many lengths, tempos, moods, and genres available).

Composers Attend Team Foxcatcher debut at TriBeCa Film Festival

Last week, John and Kenny Kusiak caught up with filmmaker Jon Greenhalgh at the Team Foxcatcher TriBeCa Film Festival premiere. If you've seen Foxcatcher (2014) with Steve Carell and Channing Tatum, this is the true story and even more poignant as it makes frequent use of home video footage from the Shultz family. John composed the score for this moving, well-attended documentary and says he tapped Kenny to compose additional music for "some of the more ambient sections." (Andrew Willis also assisted with with additional music and Rob Jaret helped with orchestration and score preparation.)

During and after the Monday and Tuesday screenings, the Kusiak Music group got to meet Nancy Schultz (wife of slain wrestler and the documentary's focus, Dave Shultz) and other people interviewed for this absorbing film. At one of the after parties we met Bill Ordine, a reporter on the scene who wrote "Fatal Match," a true crime novel about the events. We also had an interesting conversation with Joe McGettigan, the prosecutor in the DuPont trial. Aside from the fun of the film festival scene, the further details and context we got from these conversations was a special treat. All the questions raised from the film about professional sports, propaganda, and wealthy privilege were passionately discussed.

Working with Jon Greenhalgh was a great pleasure and Ben Cotner of Netflix did an amazing job in producing the film. It was great to see so much interest in the film: all four screenings were sold out!

Team Foxcatcher makes its Netflix debut on April 29th. Highly recommended by all of us at Kusiak Music!

Prelude & Altered Landscapes: A Sound Installation with Family Ties

There is a special opportunity for our Boston-area blog readers coming up. John and his son Kenny collaborated on a sound installation for artist Shelley Reed's beautiful exhibit at Wheaton College entitled Tiger in the Living Room.

Reed's artwork has "a contemporary edge, despite its reliance on centuries-old artworks. Her black-and-white palette imbues the work with a cinematic quality, and the large scale of the work (some life-size) invite the viewer to step right into her sumptuously charged environments, filled with figures and wild animals of all kinds in various states of tension with their surroundings and each other..." Read more at the Beard Gallery site.

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Artwork by Shelley Reed

John described how this unique father-and-son project came about...

I had composed music for a film called "John Portman: A Life of Building" in 2011. The score came out very well and we had the opportunity to record some live instruments for it. Then in January of this year, John Portman asked me to create a surround sound mix of some of the cues from the score to be background music in one of his new hotels in Atlanta. For various reasons, the plug got pulled on that project –– especially unfortunate since the environment of sound came out really well! 

When I played it for my son, Kenny Kusiak, he said, “Well, you’ll just have to find another venue for it. How about a gallery or an artist?” I immediately thought of Shelley Reed, an amazing painter (and also the wife of Peter Rhodes, a film editor and friend I’ve known for years).

This past July I played the surround music for Shelley and she immediately responded to it. In a fortuitous coincidence, she was planning a gallery show of her artwork in the fall at the Beard Gallery at Wheaton College. After some discussion, we decided on one section of the music that was about 12 minutes long called “Prelude.” She mentioned that it would be ideal to extend it and create a total of 24 minutes of audio, which she said is approximately the average amount of time someone might spend in the gallery looking at her work. She requested something that had environmental sounds related to the imagery in her work.

That’s when I brought in Kenny, who is a sound designer and musician in Brooklyn, NY. He came up with a very cool ambient section created almost entirely with environmental sounds, sound effects and a few other audio odds and end. We called his section "Altered Landscapes.” When we put the two sections together, it became “Prelude & Altered Landscapes.”

You can view this exhibit and sound installation during gallery hours from October 23 through December 16, 2015.

Kenny and John will both be attending the Gallery Opening & Reception on Monday, October 26, from 5:30 to 8:00 PM and they would love to see you there. Stop by and say hello!

RSVP to the Facebook event here.