This work represents a commissioned work from a fellow student at Bangor University.  Night City is a short film that studies the life of a city at night.  The Musical Composition and subsequent high-quality rendering of the synthesizer-based score sympathetically elevates this extraordinary and mesmerising film.

Technical Notes - from Tim

This piece was inspired by Philip Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi.  I took features such as the harmonic stasis and repeated spiccato passages, and applied them to this piece, to add momentum and bring the city to life.

I used 8Dio’s Phenex – Modular Analog Synth to add a hybrid element to the piece, whilst also fattening the sound to match the grand scale of the city in the video.

The piece features a metric modulation at 1:28, where I go from 120 bpm to 80, I prepare for the new ‘tonic’ meter by using dotted crotchets in the bar before, which sounds out-of-place against the straight rhythm from the spiccato strings, but it then becomes settled after the change, where the dotted crotchets become straight again.

The spiccato string sounds are Performance Samples’ Fluid Shorts.

The piece is centered around D minor, but moves to the sub-dominant, or G minor, after the metric modulation.