To aid in your professional merriment, here’s a complete round-up of Severance stuff, from behind-the-scenes discussion of the show’s sound design and score to an eight-hour mix of “music to refine to.”|
Photos courtesy Apple. Pictured: Adam Scott, John Turturro, Zach Cherry and Britt Lower in “Severance,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
If you haven’t already had this injected into your skull by Apple social media buys, yes, the Bellingham, Washington duo of Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight, aka Odesza, have created a Severance spin on the “chill music to work to” genre. (Wrong coast – the show’s locations are mainly around Nyack, New York, and Holmdel, New Jersey’s Bell Labs complex, but the mood is right.) That duo has seen plenty of critical acclaim since their breakout entry on Ninja Tune, and they do an excellent job of adapting composer Theodore Shapiro’s score. Shapiro’s music mixes ominous minimalism and nods to the classic US legacy of Muzak as a productivity booster; Odesza keeps that spirit intact with a 21st-century perspective.
At this point, there’s such an atmosphere in this show that it’s inspired fascinating efforts to recreate it. If the official ODESZA effort isn’t creepy enough, here’s a shorter but scarier take, complete with an occasional cough. This one somehow puts me even more into character. (The VAT declaration is mysterious and important.)
If you want to escape your actual job and do some macro data refining instead, Lumon (Apple) has hosted this interactive Web version of the Lumon terminal, which seems to be an accurate recreation of what you see on the show. (The cast says the are actually doing something on those screens.)
Let’s go into the sound design and scoring. Shapiro has spoken a bit about how he approached this:
That’s part of a longer interview, linked in their description. But it’s also important not to see an element like a score as independent from the work by the team, meaning this full interview from IndieWire (with videos) is worth a look. They talk to production designer Jeremy Hindle, composer Theodore Shapiro, and director Ben Stiller about the collaborative effort:
The Devil’s in the Details: The Complex Corporate Dread of ‘Severance’
(Missing from that one, but worth a deep dive is the cinematography – this is a rare show that actually made a single shot bone-chillingly frightening – so look up cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné.)
For lovers of the theme music, the wonderful Yan Cook has completely nailed a live cover on gear, including the Torso T-1 (which I’ll be talking about more this spring).
Even better? There’s a Commodore 64 cover.
Okay, somehow, this was at exactly 64 views and… I am incredibly sorry. I am the one who broke it. So manganoid, not sure how you keep it at sixty-four that long, but… I am forever in your debt, if you need me to link to your Patreon or … something.
This is just so good, though. The world needs this now. It could save a life, even.
Or, since I never give nearly enough love to y’all FL Studio users, here’s a complete FL remake (and proof that FL can be a serious DAW because, of course, it can). The only trick is that distorted/glitchy thing in the end and wow that’s harder to do. (I’ve been obsessed with it but actually don’t want to try to figure it out, because I’m a little too influenced by it already.)
The theme to me is fascinating. In the opening credits, it produces modal, chromatic third dissonances over a pedal point. But in the show, you could argue it becomes a truly post-tonal motive; the tones are even deconstructed to indicate the different “realities” of levels in the show.
And then there’s the Muzak element. (See especially the track “Labor of Love” from season 1, which is almost certainly a direct reference.) I wrote about my obsession with Muzak in the context of relating it to AI. (Funny enough, some people scoffed at my comparison at the time; now, it’s come out that Spotify is using AI for exactly this sort of purpose.)
Minds, machines, and centralization: AI and music
And it’s clear that the show is referencing the infamous MUZAK Stimulus Progression – intended to boost worker productivity. (It… probably did not; the joke was that during one moment in the Progression, office workers would clap along.) More on that from Mental Floss:
Muzak History: The Background Story on Background Music
And to complete this, Jennifer Walden has done a terrific interview of Severance sound designer/supervisor Jacob Ribicoff, MPSE, foley artist Marko Costanzo, foley mixer George A. Lara, and foley editor Eric Strausser for A Sound Effect:
Behind the Subtle and Disturbing Sound of Apple TV+ series ‘Severance’
MIX has done a great feature on the sound, and that creepy, isolated feeling to the mix. Bob Chefalas describes wonderful details like the use of reverbs:
“I’m constantly changing reverbs on the Foley depending on what room they are in,” he adds. ”For the big MDR room, I was using a reverb called Airless Room, or something like that. It’s for Dolby Atmos, and it’s a really big reverb, but it’s very tight. It adds dimension without having it sound like they’re in this big room. That’s for the dialog, then again for Foley so that they matched. When they went into a hallway, there’s a whole different reverb. In the elevator, coming out of the elevator, the reverbs were constantly changing.”
Tension in the Track: The Quiet, Rich Sound of ‘Severance’
If you need more Frolic, yes, Lumon is on LinkedIn.
Did I miss any behind-the-scenes content? Shout out in comments.