A few notes from Jonathan:
One of the wonderful elements of working with Tom Holkenborg, a.k.a. Junkie XL, is observing his intense attention to timbre and sonic color. Tom insists on mixing his own scores, and if he wasn't a world-famous and respected composer/artist, he could easily be known as a world-class mixing engineer. This is the fourth project I've worked on with Tom, and his attention to sonic detail - at all stages of the score creation process - is impeccable. In regards to instrumentation, he made a prescient choice on this film to use a large and powerful low brass section, including eight trombones and no tubas. Of the eight trombones, four were originally intended to to be bass trombones, but we made a late orchestration choice to substitute two of them for contrabass trombones. The CbTbn. is a rarer instrument, with its own remarkable power and and almost "bright" presence at extremely low pitches. For the grittiness of the the Run All Night score, it ended up being perfect - with more edge to the sound than Tubas would have had, and more low power to supplement the higher bass trombones. (Higher bass trombones? That's not a sentence you write every day!) When combined with a french horn section twelve players strong, the depth and power of the brass as a whole was something special to both to hear and feel.
