Friday, June 24, 2016

Steampunks: Reject Town | The Music of Harvey Beaks

"Reject Town" composed & produced by Ego Plum. This song is from "Steampunks", the brand-new hour-long Harvey Beaks musical that originally aired on June 23-24, 2016 on Nickelodeon USA. Video edited by Aaron Cohen:



Here's a behind-the-scenes peek at the recording of my favorite song from the Harvey Beaks’ Steampunks Musical! Reject Town is a joyously dark anthem about the virtues of a little community built of trash and filth! This exclusive footage features members of the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra and the Seattle Opera performing the music LIVE in the studio with final animation played side-by-side. This also features extra-special footage of the multi-faceted and extremely talented voice of Dade (who shall remain nameless!).

As far as writing something like this, I’ll usually have a few starting points in my head; musical points of reference, if you will. In this case, I wanted a cross between, “You’re a Good Man Albert Brown,” by THE DUKES OF STRATOSPHEAR (Andy Partridge/XTC’s alter-ego) and a little bit of “House of Fun” from the Camden Town Ska band, MADNESS. So that becomes the palette in my head from which I then move towards orchestral arrangements and other elements that make it sound like the world of Harvey Beaks. After recording with the orchestra, I also layered some trash-can percussion, pipes, and random clinky clangy things to round out the sound. This special took close to 60 musicians to execute. Not to mention our talented team of engineers, our copyist, orchestrator, conductor, assistants, and many others! We are really lucky to be able to do at this scale in this day & age of disposable entertainment. Harvey Beaks is a gem! -Ego

Be sure to watch STEAMPUNKS Part 1 on Thursday, June 23 at 4:30PM and Part 2 on Friday, June 24 at 4:30PM on Nickelodeon! Special thanks to my friend Aaron Cohen who edited this video together.
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