For our third episode, Charles Steinberg sits down with composer Nathan Micay to discuss the sounds of Season 2 of HBO's Industry.
Following a bunch of ruthlessly ambitious young bankers, as they try and climb to the top, Industry depicts the world of finance - warts and all. With a no-holds-barred emphasis on accurate jargon, the show requires a score expressive enough to convey information that might not reach the audience through dialogue alone.
Nathan and Charles discuss the responsibility of composing such a score, the innately sinister sounds of synths, and how scoring one of the most talked about television shows has impacted Nathan's solo musical career.
This is pretty jargony, this is pretty heavy stuff. We need the score to really portray how the characters are feeling.
Charles: There’s a certain kind of neurochemical response to synth music, when it rises and builds, that could be equated to a drug high. What is it about synth tones and arrangements which make it so immediate and powerful in that way?
Nathan: I guess it's just because it's a sound the brain doesn’t hear otherwise. When you hear a violin or a guitar or a drum set, the brain can pick up on percussion sounds throughout the day, like someone hitting a tree with a brick; you hear things all day that could easily be turned into a drum kit. But the first time you hear a Vangelis score you’re like, ‘What’s this?'
I remember having a very visceral reaction when I first listened to Dark Side of the Moon when I was twelve. There was the second track, ‘On The Run’, where it was the first time I noticed this weird instrument among an otherwise typical rock ensemble album. I didn’t realise it was a synth - I thought David Gilmour was shredding his guitar in a crazy way. Once I realised it was a synth I was like 'That’s kinda lame, that’s like cheating!' But I couldn’t help but love it… That was like my first self-aware moment of synthesiser.
Charles: How does this score-writing and absorbing of score-technique circle and filter back to what you record in your own music?
Nathan: My music has always been quite cinematic - when I try to escape that, I just can’t quite seem to. My mom for years has been saying “You should be scoring”, but you can’t just walk into Hollywood and be like, “Hire me.” My album Blue Spring was quite cinematic, but the new album is probably less so. I think I out cinematic-ed myself by scoring, and needed to return to something kind of odd. So the new album has a bunch of sounds that I never would have tried on the last album, because I now have access to the software to do that, and the confidence to like… try to do that. There’s a lot of weird strings and guitars, and now that my collection of sounds that are available to me has grown, they’re on that stuff as well. But I still know that, at the end of the day, my solo Nathan Micay music definitely falls into a very certain genre. It’s one thing to just throw a complete curveball to an audience you’ve built up over years, but I’m not trying to do that right now. I guess some of my scores might do that, but with this next album it’s just building on that foundation I’ve been trying to build - they still ultimately sound like they’re in a lineage.
Track list:
1. Where It Happens – Season 2
2. Birth of A World Killer – Season 1
3. I Have a Better Idea – Season 2
4. Don't Speak To The Press (For My Love) – Season 1
5. Why Fuck Maxim – Season 2
6. Industry (Main Theme) – Season 1
(Mixed w/)
7. Lonely Americans – Season 2
8. Eric In NYC – Season 2
9. Severance – The World I'm Going To Hell For – Nathan Micay
10. Bitch Just The Reality – Season 2
Out now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify & all other leading platforms.