In early 2025, listen closely to the soundtrack of Lady of the Dunes, the new true crime series airing on the Oxygen Network. The series looks at a recently solved 50 year old cold case.
The director wanted the music to have a haunting quality to tie into the mystery and brutality of the case. That’s when they called on composer/editor John Balcom.
Balcom started out by recording plaintive, mysterious sounds, like wine glasses and a waterphone. Then he took sections from those recordings and treated them using Kyma’s Multigrid. There was a performative aspect to all of this; he would manipulate the sounds going into Kyma, as well as adjusting sounds in real time in the Multigrid, resulting in some disturbingly haunting sounds. Balcom then incorporated those sounds to build out full compositions.
Here are some audio examples of the textures he created using Kyma, along with a couple of tracks that incorporate those textures (Warning: the following clips contain haunting sounds and may be disturbing for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised! ⚠️ ):
Here’s a screen shot of one of Balcom’s Multigrids:
Balcolm concludes by saying: “The music would not have been the same without Kyma!”