If you are looking for something wholly original to watch, you need to check out In From the Cold. This is an espionage thriller that throws so many twists and turns at you that you will have some serious whiplash by the end of the season. Composer Tori Letzler doesn’t just give us a pulse-pounding score, but she grounds it so distinctly that the action and music feel like they are listening to one another.
Jenny Franklin is escorting her daughter to her figure skating competition in Madrid. When the divorced mother is confronted by CIA agents who claim she is a former Russian spy who skillfully took out five prominent targets when she was a young woman. If Jenny (or rather, Anya) doesn’t cooperate with the CIA’s demands, her family’s life will be destroyed.
A lot of composers don’t always get the chance to browse scripts or the entire season of a show, but Letzler was brought on very early in the process. Unfortunately, the pandemic had other plans, and production shut down for a year. In that time, however, she was able to peruse all of the scripts in order for the story to dance around in her head.
“I got brought on to this project really early on in March 2020. They were three days away from filming when I was hired, and then they had to bring everything back to the States. It was another year before they resumed production, but in that time, I had all eight scripts. The scripts changed, obviously, but the general story was all there. I had read the whole story front to back far before there were even boots on the ground. Our show showrunner, Adam Glass, and I knew that vocal theme hums throughout the show. We knew that that was going to be a big story point. That was being written before I’d even seen any footage, and then it actually got played on set. A lot of the music I was writing was being played on set for the actors. We call them theme suites, these three minute long pieces with moods or themes for characters that are written approximately to the script in the story. And later, editorial was taking some of those pieces and using them instead of temp score. They were using the score that was written into the script. I was writing from day one music on this, and then I was going back in as we thought of episode cuts. One of the actors even told me he had a playlist that our show creator had given to him. And he would go running to it in the morning before he would shoot his scene.”
When we think of legendary, big-screen action sequences, the music tends to be at a considerable difference than the bone0crunching on screen. It’s clearly done in post, but Letzler’s score doesn’t feel like that at all. Letzler leaned into synthesizers instead of drums, and the sound is inherently linked with our Russian spy thriller. It makes all of the punches land harder.
“One of my favorite scenes is the fight in the bathhouse in episode four between Anya or Jenny and and that assassin. It’s a very brutal, almost four minute long scene. In a lot of female action scenes, they try to be sexy and cool. All of our action scenes are gritty, brutal, l and violent, which I really liked. Because it wasn’t just like, ‘Let’s have female characters that are strong. When I was scoring those action scenes, that was the first fight sequence that I got in. And I did have a version of it that was much more traditional. I say, traditional as in a sense that it had some organic drums in it. It was very much along the lines of Tenant here it had some synths, but it had organic elements. Adam thought it was industrial and cool like our show. We all love electronic music, so why are we doing this action-y stuff? Adam told us to keep on the synths with analog synths with no organic drums. I wanted it to feel like it wasn’t an afterthought. They were cutting those scenes to the action and vice versa. It’s not like I was brought in six months after everyone was off of it.”
There is a running theme of duality throughout In From the Cold, and that is most deeply felt in the track titled, “Jenny and Anya.” These are two personalities (and lives) sharing one body and one mind. I couldn’t help but wonder how much Jenny had to suppress the thoughts of the younger version of her? Does she think about it at all. Letzler’s track is pulses with mystery and a little bit of fear. Can Jenny handle is Anya fully breaks through?
“That was an early piece that I wrote. Duality is a huge theme in the show. It’s about Jenny fighting against herself as well as the mother and daughter relationship. Jenny faces that in motherhood. It’s who you are versus who you want to be versus who you were. I wanted the score to reflect that since it happens with so many characters in the show. The way we accomplished that was by doing these heavy synths with very soft vocals. The vocals aren’t always soft–they can be affected and weird. It was about two things that don’t go together, and, musically, that represented two halves of a person themselves. With “Jenny and Anya,” it starts with a haunting vocal theme, and it gets heavier as it builds. It’s a representation of Jenny finding Anya again. Adam kept asking, “What is our Bond theme?” and James Bond doesn’t sound anything like our show. When I asked what he meant by that, he meant that big, ballad-y theme, so then my challenge was to take that but put it in a big, industrial format. How do I make it raw and cool? I listened to Nine Inch Nails’ “Every Day Is Exactly the Same,” and I thought that it sounded like the band but a Bond song. How do I take our score and turn it into something for our leading lady.”
“Notorious Chauncey” features some piano and is darker than some of the other tracks. It feels hyper-masculine to represent a character that continually pulls Jenny/Anya into every fight. There is a circular motion to the track that supports how she might never be away from his clutches. The lighter piano notes almost sound like her fighting back against his restraints.
“We wanted our characters to have themes, and since I was brought in so early into the show, I could do that. Normally, you don’t have that time. Chauncey starts as one character, we find our that he is much deeper than he appears. I wanted his theme to be about a guy who is trying to come off as cool. He’s a little bit sexy but he’s nerdy and calculated, so how do we put all of that into one track. That comes in the scene where he is fighting all of the female agents. It’s so cocky and smug, but when you really know what’s going on at the end of the show, you know he’s a fake. How do I put those together?”
Letzler is a kid of the 90’s, and she’s not going to stop listening to the industrial sound any time soon. In addition to Nine Inch Nails, another musician has been enjoying a rather awards-heavy run in the last decade.
“I still listen to 90’s alternative and grunge probably more than anything. Nine Inch Nails was a huge reference as was Destroy Angels. That’s Trent Reznor’s band with his wife. I listen to a lot of Tori Amos and Portishead. The thing about 90’s industrial is that it is simple and edgy. It doesn’t have to try too hard. You can take a few really cool elements and combine them and not overproduce it. That was very appealing to me. The only theme that isn’t kind of in that industrial space is the love theme between Anya and Faina. That exists in the past timeline, and I wanted that to be late 80’s and early 90’s synth wavy neon feel. It’s the kind of feeling that you’d hear on a 90’s television drama. I wanted it to feel like that relationship was so innocent and of the time. That feels so different than anything else in the show.”
In From the Cold is streaming now on Netflix.
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