Artist Talk: Deconstructing the Soundtrack with Blake Leyh
With exclusive film clips from his forty-year career in film sound and music, Blake Leyh shows how techniques from experimental music can be applied to film soundtracks, creating unique sound-music fusions. Excerpts from films as varied as STATE OF GRACE (1990), SICK (1997), SHADOW (2018), and NEPTUNE FROST (2021) demonstrate applications of subjective musical sound design practice. Practical examples of time distortion, reality splicing, and culture jamming with electric cello, underwater field recordings, and extended audio processing of The Real.
Blake Leyh is an Emmy-winning, Grammy-nominated composer, music supervisor, music producer, and sound designer who lives in New York City. Born in New York but raised in England until age fifteen, Leyh has worked in film post-production sound and music for forty years. His credits include films by James Cameron, The Coen Brothers, Spike Lee, Ang Lee, John Waters, Alfonso Cuaron, Jonathan Demme, Julie Taymor, Mira Nair, Kasi Lemmons, Zhang Yimou, and Saul Williams. Leyh was the music supervisor and composer for all five seasons of HBO’s acclaimed series The Wire, for which he also composed the end theme music, and has been the music supervisor for all of David Simon’s subsequent television shows. Leyh has written film scores for over twenty feature films and contributed memorable sound work to over fifty movies. He has produced albums by 1980s punk band The Holy Sisters of The Gaga Dada, “the voice of New Orleans” John Boutté, and Afropunk poet Saul Williams. In 2013 Leyh performed sound design and guitar live on stage during a twenty-city US tour with Thomas Dolby, with whom he first collaborated to create a sound installation for Steven Spielberg’s underwater-themed restaurant DIVE. Since 2016 with Tony Jarvis Leyh has led the experimental Harlem-based band N to The Power. He has released five albums of solo music, plus film scores, soundtrack albums for David Simon’s HBO shows, and in 2021 a compilation album ENDLESS: 40 Years of Ambient Music by Blake Leyh 1980 – 2020.
