Netflix's Black Rabbit is set against the backdrop of New York City’s high-pressure nightlife, where two brothers are pushed to the brink by their duty to family and their pursuit of success. Jake Friedken (Jude Law) is the charismatic owner of Black Rabbit, a restaurant and VIP lounge that's poised to become the hottest spot in New York City. But when his brother Vince (Jason Bateman) returns to the business unexpectedly, trouble soon follows.
Composers Danny Bensi & Saunder Jurriaans (pictured L-R) are Emmy nominated for their work in the Outstanding Music Composition for a Limited or Anthology Series, Movie or Special (Original Dramatic Score) category and recall Jason Bateman - an EP on the show - coming to them and asking for something "dark and disheveled."
"Danny and I both spent 20-plus years living in New York," notes Jurriaans. "We were so familiar with the chaos and relentless pace. We immediately felt like we knew what to do."
Some of the direction they received included "distorted," "lived-in" and "not polished."
The two had already established a working replationship with Bateman that dates back to their collaboration on Ozark, so there was existing trust and a shorthand.
In the case of Black Rabbit, the composers incorporated a lot of what they call “found-ish” sounds, such as a subway screech they had recorded years ago, garbage cans and random metal objects they banged on. They also brought in elements of what might be New York City music, including guitars, a drum kit, a horn, a sax ensemble, and a lot of synth & drum machine sounds.
For synths, they employed Soma gear, including Pulsar 23 and the Lyra 8 - tools that they love, even if they don't entirely understand them.
"They never give you the same sound twice," they share. "The Pulsar, you can patch with your fingers before committing to a cable, so it's built for the kind of 'what happens if' experimentation we wanted."
They ran their sequencer, the Ornament, a lot, and threw in randomizing modules, like the Wogglebug to kill any sense of stable time signature or tempo. Everything got routed through the Overstayer Modular Channel — synths, horns, strings, percussion, all of it — sometimes as a hardware insert, sometimes patched straight into Pro Tools.
"Sidechaining a kick into a brass drone through that box gave us this heaving, physical-pressure feeling that became a real signature of the score," the composers reveal. "And the Soma Cosmos handled a lot of the looping and glitching. We'd run strings, drum kits, piano through it and let it warp them into something unrecognizable."
The duo point to Episodes 7 and 8 as highlights of their work, as the chapters represent a culmination of the palette they had been building.
"The heaving, electronic pulses become almost overwhelming, and then at the end of 8 there’s this emotional release - probably the first of the whole series. The ensemble of saxophones and brass instruments becomes an orchestral texture especially in the last few scenes of the show."