The Music of Joshua Penman

Film Music

Most recently, I scored a PBS documentary entitled Deep Down. The film is a beautiful and nuanced look at mountaintop removal coal mining in rural Kentucky. For the score, I created a kind of Appalachian ambient chamber music, with violin, cello, banjo, guitar, and keyboards. All of this music is available for licensing.

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I also scored a spiritual art film called Caravan of Light. For this film, I created a psychedelic, spiritual, ambient score with santur, tabla, didgeridoo, violin, cello, percussion, and lots of synths and electronics.

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As I move forward in the world of film composition, I also produce a lot of demos. I use some real instruments and some fake (MIDI) instruments. Some of them are for films that I will score later; some of them are for films I will not score; and some of them are for films that end up never being made. If only I could tell the difference beforehand! However for you, dear reader, these demos are a good glimpse into how I approach vastly different musical situations.

First, some demos for Panzer 88, a new World War II supernatural thriller. For these demos I got to flex my “epic Hollywood orchestral sound” muscles. The Birth of the Wraith is a kind of dark version of the superhero origin story, Outside Kyrtepka is an eerie scene of supernatural carnage on the ice, and Wraith Attack is a panic-filled action sequence.

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I also have a demo for Little Boy Blue. It contains a dream sequence and a fun, frenetic chase sequence. In the second half, I was going for a kind of cross between Trainspotting and Pulp Fiction.

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Most recently, I produced two ambient demos for the film Tales of the Waria. The first is more naive, the second more tragic.

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