Words by Sean Wilson

From freak show horror to unnerving, factual documentaries, composer Mac Quayle has diversified his sound into a range of different genres. Having burst onto the scene with his score for acclaimed hacker series Mr. Robot, Quayle now has the breadth of cutting-edge television at his feet.

He’s an established collaborator with hugely successful showrunner Ryan Murphy, having worked on the likes of American Horror Story (from season four onwards), American Crime Story, and recent Netflix hit Ratched. Quayle now reunites with Murphy for Billy Porter's ballroom drama series Pose, but this is just one of many projects the ubiquitous composer has on his agenda.

We sat down with him to discuss his background in dance and electronic music, his emergence into the scoring industry, and what it means to write music for shows that reach dramatic emotional extremes.

I wanted to start by asking about your own musical influences. How did you get into the field of scoring in the first place?

I think it starts even before my work in scoring. I have a previous career. I was in the music business in New York. Through an interest in electronic music, I found myself working in dance music. I worked first as a keyboard player and programmer, and then as a co-producer and co-mixer making dance music. I did that for years in New York and it really got into my DNA. I’m not making dance music anymore but it was very influential in terms of how I approach production and composing. How I create sounds came out of this dance music world. 

Then I moved to Los Angeles in 2004. The music industry was having trouble transitioning into the digital age. I came to Los Angeles with a vague idea of getting into scoring. I started out working as an additional composer for a couple of people. One of those was Cliff Martinez, who I was a huge fan of. 

Yes, I believe you worked with him on the score for Contagion?

That’s right. I started working with him in 2006/2007. I did 12 films with him over the course of eight years. He was very influential. His approach and his style – electronic and ambient with various other things mixed together. 

Your list of credits is enviable, including collaborations with the likes of Beyoncé, Madonna, and Depeche Mode. How did you foster those relationships with those artists?

For the most part, those collaborations were sort of after the fact. They were remixes. I probably worked on seven or eight Madonna remixes, and a couple of Depeche Mode remixes. In each of those instances, I would never work with the artist directly. We were given the entire multitrack of their song, or maybe just the vocals. Then we’d take it and turn it into what was, hopefully, a dance floor anthem. 

Occasionally, I would work directly with the artist. One of those was at [Peter Gabriel’s recording studio] Real World in the UK. The first time was with the group Electronic, itself a collaboration between Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner. The next time was to work with New Order. It was their last album before [Peter Hook] ‘Hooky’ split off and went to do his own thing. It was an amazing experience to work with those guys. I've been a fan of their music, sound, and approach since forever. 

You mentioned that making dance music instilled instincts that never left you. Are there shared principles between writing dance tracks and composing for film and television?

For me, it really depends on the type of music I’m composing. Something like Mr. Robot is a very electronic score. The principles that I had learned from dance music were very useful in that instance. There’s looping, repetition and some tracks would have strong elements of dance. A strong drum groove, say, some pulsing basses or arpeggiators. Stabs, lead sounds, or what have you. Of course, it would be done in a way that would score a particular scene, that would help tell the story. 

On another type of project, say Ratched, there’s this retro orchestral sound. It’s evocative of Bernard Herrmann or Elmer Bernstein. Dance principles are not useful there [laughs] It’s a whole other skillset. I would occasionally try to apply a dance music approach to a retro orchestral thing but it didn’t really work. 

You said that you arrived in Los Angeles in 2004 and collaborated with the likes of Cliff Martinez. What was the project that made you feel that you had arrived, that you had officially authored on your own?

Throughout the years I worked for Cliff as an additional composer, I did a number of things on my own. Short films, the odd series, and a couple of features. They were all independent, low-budget things that I’m sure you’ve never heard of. But I was getting to explore what my sound might be on those projects. I was experimenting, here and there. 

But the first time I really got to step out, the first project that had real exposure, was American Horror Story, for Ryan Murphy. That was in 2014 and it was the fourth season of that series, called Freak Show. It was a landmark moment for me, having worked mostly as an additional composer. Also, the things I had done on my own, people hadn’t really seen. Working with Ryan Murphy on a show that has millions of fans was a chance to really develop my sound.

It also set in motion a long-running partnership with Ryan Murphy who clearly favours the power of music. Is there a creative shorthand between the two of you in terms of spotting and scoring the music?

We certainly have developed a shorthand with Ryan and his team. He’s very busy, doing so many things. There are a lot of people involved. Every project starts off with a conversation about what Ryan thinks. What is the sound going to be? Ryan tends to be a big picture guy in terms of the music. He doesn’t necessarily get down into the nitty-gritty details of it. He’s more like, ‘I want us to do a retro orchestral sound for this, a period sound.’ That’s an example of a broad stroke. From there, it’s up to me and other people on the team to go and discover what that sounds like. Through some back and forth conversations, maybe listening to some other music along the way, I will then write my first presentation. Ryan will then respond, hopefully in a positive way. Then we’re off and running. Occasionally it will be the case that something isn’t working and we’ll then try something different. From there, we’re in the trenches cranking out the episodes and the cues, further developing the sound that was started at the beginning. 

American Horror Story goes to some real tonal extremes from witches to freak shows to asylums and more. Do you have to identify a consistent musical theme or backbone running through the show? Or is it a sense of reinvention with every new season?

The one thread that goes through is that it needs to be scary and, as much as possible, not generic. Somehow left of centre or out of the box. Aside from that, every season is a different story featuring a different cast of characters. I’m now on season 10 so that’s going to be my seventh, overall. Every season, I’ve been trying to come up with a new sound for it. As I look back over the seasons, I think we’ve been pretty successful. They all have different identities. But it’s a challenge. Every time a season starts and we’re trying to figure out, it’s both exciting and terrifying to think of what we can do next. 

Has there been a particular season that you’ve enjoyed working on?

I have some favourites. Freak Show was exciting. It was great to be in the captain’s chair of the composing department. That was really fun. Besides the fact that I’d been given this great opportunity, it was so rewarding in that I was put into a situation and I just had to be creative, very quickly. I just went for it and did all this wacky stuff and they loved it. 

So it was really rewarding to just go for it and have them go, ‘Yeah, bring it on, let’s get crazy with it.’ The next one was Hotel and we went very electronic. That was pretty satisfying. Season nine was called 1984, so it took place in that year and the idea was to do a retro synth slasher score. Kind of like John Carpenter. It was a lot of fun to get to go and play in that world. Those are maybe the three seasons that stand out to me. 

With Ratched, you’re dealing with a completely different subject matter and it’s an established character, albeit this time we get her origin story. You mentioned the influence of Bernard Herrmann earlier, so how did you unlock that character? Because she’s incredibly complex. The orchestral sound was certainly not something that was in my wheelhouse. I’d had one taste of it in another Ryan Murphy series called Feud: Betty and Joan. That was my first foray into that idiom. It was really terrifying [laughs] All of my tricks and the stuff I knew – none of it worked in that context. But it turned out OK and Ratched was the second time going into that world. It felt right for the show. One of the first themes was the theme for Ratched herself and I don’t tend to overthink these things. I just tend to go for what feels right. 

I stumbled across this thing on the piano one day that was alternating back and forth between a diminished chord and a minor chord. It felt like it had these elements in it. It was speaking to the character, both her human side, her damaged side, and also her evil side. This sense of diabolical evil-doing these unspeakable things. The diminished chord showed that she was off the rails but the minor chord ensures that we feel a little bit of sympathy for her. It’s perhaps the simplest justification for a theme ever, but it seemed to work. It got a lot of use in the show. Again, it wasn’t something that I really thought about. It just felt right, this particular harmonic movement. 

With Ratched, you’re dealing with a completely different subject matter and it’s an established character, albeit this time we get her origin story. You mentioned the influence of Bernard Herrmann earlier, so how did you unlock that character? Because she’s incredibly complex.

You know, the orchestral sound was certainly not something that was in my wheelhouse. I’d had one taste of it in another Ryan Murphy series called Feud: Betty and Joan. That was my first foray into that idiom. It was really terrifying [laughs] All of my tricks and the stuff I knew – none of it worked in that context. But it turned out OK and Ratched was the second time going into that world. It felt right for the show. One of the first themes was the theme for Ratched herself and I don’t tend to overthink these things. I just tend to go for what feels right. 

I stumbled across this thing on the piano one day that was alternating back and forth between a diminished chord and a minor chord. It felt like it had these elements in it. It was speaking to the character, both her human side, her damaged side, and also her evil side. This sense of diabolical evil-doing these unspeakable things. The diminished chord showed that she was off the rails but the minor chord ensures that we feel a little bit of sympathy for her. It’s perhaps the simplest justification for a theme ever, but it seemed to work. It got a lot of use in the show. Again, it wasn’t something that I really thought about. It just felt right, this particular harmonic movement. 

One of your recent Ryan Murphy collaborations is Pose, starring Billy Porter. This is about the ballroom scene in 1980s New York. What was the principle behind scoring that?

I’d just gotten my first job in New York, as a very young lad [laughs]. They wanted a retro synth score to speak to that period. I thought that would be fun. I enjoy doing that on Horror Story. As a side note, so much of the work that I do is ‘in the box’. I use plug-ins, libraries, lots of virtual synths. I’ve just found that so useful in terms of speed and convenience. That’s just how I work. But for this score, Pose, I wanted to use hardware. Just analogue synthesisers, so that’s what I did. I set up eight synths and I used piano and drum samples in the box. But all the other sounds were from these synths. It was really freeing to not just be relying on a thousand plug-ins. These eight hardware synths were my band. 

The show contains a lot of source music. There’s a lot of music in the ballroom scenes. But not a huge amount of score. The score was, for the most part, going to be the heart of the show. There’s a lot of emotional drama that happens, both uplifting and sad. There were a lot of analogue synth pads and piano melodies. That was the job of the score. We’ve just finished season three, which is the final season. I did get to do some retro dance tracks that are sort of source music but also score. A dance track playing within the context of the scene, but which would also turn with the scene, rather than just going straight. 

It was a really great experience. Each season progresses and gets later and later, so when the show winds up, I think it’s 10 years later. I think it ends up in the late ‘90s. In one of the ballroom scenes, there’s a dance track that I actually worked on during that 1990s period. So I was like, ‘Oh, this show’s caught up to me!’ [laughs] My dance music is now being used for a show set in New York. They’d obviously planned it for the scene and it worked. 

There must be a nice sense of tactility in using all of that analogue synth equipment?

It’s true! You’re just grabbing knobs and sliders and doing things. It’s slower. Once I got it all hooked up and working correctly, that part was pretty good. But you make a sound, and you’ve then got to store it and keep track of it. Then you’ve got to record the audio in. When you’re working with a plug-in, you pull up a sound, and then you’re done. I was tempted a few times to go for a plug-in. Nope – the rules are hardware synths only. I’m glad I stuck with that. 

Mr. Robot which has been such a huge, zeitgeist-defining success, in large part thanks to your music. That blurring of the lines between human and inhuman is fascinating. What textures did you use to accomplish that? Did you give characters specific themes?

There were a handful of themes. It wasn’t overly thematic. The brilliant creator, Sam Esmail, right from our first meeting, wanted an electronic score. It could have a retro sound with one foot in the past, but it also had to be futuristic. That was really exciting for me. That first season was very electronic. The main theme was what we called ‘Elliot’s Theme,’ as in the main character, and that got used in so many different ways. It would be fun to see how many variations of that theme existed across the four seasons. 

As the show progressed, we made the choice to bring in more organic instruments. Even in season two, we started to bring in orchestral elements like strings and woodwinds. That continued with this blend of things. Season Four even had an episode dedicated to that Bernard Herrmann vibe. We really experimented with different flavours.

When you’re recording a score, ambience and wet versus dry mixtures are clearly very important. Do you seek out a certain kind of recording space that will lend a sense of reverb or residual character to a score?

I do. I love reverb, especially when I’m doing a score that’s intended to be an organic score, whether it’s real instruments or samples. If it’s supposed to sound like an orchestra or an acoustic ensemble, then I will make an effort to find a space that everyone is in. All the players are in the same space. I will have one reverb across the board, maybe adjusted for different instruments. But everyone is in the same room together.

That’s how I will approach those types of scores. On my other scores, I just go with what sounds right on different instruments. On those types of scores, I’m dropping reverbs on instruments rather than using sends. I’m not putting everybody through one reverb on a send. I’m dropping reverbs right on channels. I may use the same reverb on a lot of different things, and then there will be this one specific sound that I feel needs its own space. I like to get crazy and creative with it. 

I’m very fond, maybe a little too fond, of these big, shimmery reverb sounds. The ‘Valhalla Shimmer.’ The one that I used to use all the time was ‘The Black Hole’ by Eventide. When you put a lot of that on a sound, it transforms it into something else. It can take some little pad sound and all of a sudden it becomes this big, swirling, ambient texture. I might be a little too fond of that [laughs] I may well look back on this period and say, ‘Oh, I used that a lot!’

You won an Emmy for Mr. Robot, so what did that do for you? It must have felt amazing to get that kind of recognition from such a prestigious awards body.

My mind was blown. The previous year, I had received my first-ever nomination for American Horror Story: Freak Show. I didn’t win that time, but it was still super exciting. So the next year to get the nomination, and subsequent win, for Mr. Robot was awesome. The year after that, I got two nominations, both for Feud: Betty and Joan. I didn’t win, so it wasn’t as exciting [laughs] It was a little hard to believe, all of it. I had gone from doing work that wasn’t of note to winning an Emmy. It was kind of surreal.

I’ve just scored something for the BBC. It’s a Welsh production for BBC Wales called The Pact. It’s not eligible for the Emmys this year, but maybe next year. It was shot in Wales. All the creators and actors are Welsh. It’s a six-part limited series. We got to use the BBC National Orchestra of Wales via remote recording. 

So it’s a symphonic score?

It’s a hybrid, leaning more towards the electronic. But there is a strong string component. 

On The Pact, how did it work with the recording during the pandemic? Did you have to close-mic the players? Did they have to social distance?

No, they were able to record in Cardiff. They had restrictions, a certain number of musicians in at one time. It was good that we were only doing strings because we had the maximum number of musicians in there. It was a decent-sized string section, not huge, but we wouldn’t have been able to have a full-sized orchestra, owing to the limitations. 

They also changed the session length so that the musicians would require fewer breaks. During those breaks, people may potentially be exposed to one another. Instead of a three-hour session with a break, and then lunch, and then another three-hour session, it would just be two two-hour sessions. No break in-between, just straight. They’d record two hours, have an hour off, come back for another two hours, and then they’d be done. Other than that, it was business as usual with an orchestra in a room. I was watching over Zoom, and listening through this platform called Audiomovers. Zero-latency, full-quality audio. I’m sitting in my room at six in the morning and watching the orchestra. I could talk to the producer in the booth via Zoom. He would do most of the talking to the conductor who would then talk to the musicians. Every now and then the producer would patch me through, so I’d be talking to the musicians from 6,000 miles away. It was cool to be able to do it that way. Then they would send me the Pro-Tools sessions once it was done.

That stuff’s been going on for a while, the idea of remote recording. But the tools with which to do it are getting cheaper. Audiomovers is amazing. Zoom is pretty great. There are other things coming online. I think these tools are going to become part of my workflow moving forward, even when we’re allowed to be in the same room together.