Artist News

Serial soundtrack released as final episode of series one goes live

By | Published on Thursday 18 December 2014

Serial

Despite claims made by everyone else in the CMU office, the podcast known as ‘Serial’ is a thing that has been incredibly popular since it launched in October. I mean, you can’t move for it on Twitter when a new episode comes out. How the hell have my colleagues not heard about it? It makes me worry about what else they’re missing, to be honest.

Anyway, the ‘This American Life’ spin-off (you’ll be telling me you haven’t heard of ‘This American Life’ next) has been so popular that the composer of its original score, Mark Henry Phillips, is releasing it as an album by popular demand. Hear that, colleagues? BY POPULAR FUCKING DEMAND!

Phillips apparently had so many requests to release the score that he began putting tracks up on SoundCloud, but now he’s realised he could actually be making some money from it, so he’s making it available on iTunes.

Speaking about how he approached scoring a podcast, he explains: “When we were first discussing working together, I told them I wanted to approach it more like a film than a podcast. Often that means having simpler music that creeps in and doesn’t really announce itself to the listener. There’s an adage that the best score is one that doesn’t get noticed at all and I really aimed for that”.

The tight turnaround on the weekly podcast episodes also mean a tight turnaround on the music. Phillips says: “Sometimes I only had 20 minutes to get a piece sounding good. But in a way it was liberating. You can’t really get caught up in the small stuff like how the bass sounds. I was forced to focus on the bigger picture: how can the music help the story?”

The final episode of the first series of ‘Serial’ is also out today. Will we find out if Adnan killed Stephanie? Wait, maybe it’s already out now. I don’t have time to listen right now, so don’t you say a bloody word if you have listened to it already.

Here, instead, why don’t you listen to these selections of Mark Henry Phillips’ music for the show:



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