This Week’s ‘Radiant Black’ #3 Comes With Its Own Orchestral Score
by Olly MacNamee
This week’s Radiant Black #3 by Kyle Higgins and Marcelo Costa have a little something extra, and different, to treat fans of their sell-out series. That’s because Sam Ewing (co-composer on The Walking Dead) composed and recorded a live orchestra track to tie-in with the recent issue’s story. And this track will be one of the six planned to accompany each issue of the first story arc in the series.
We have a clip of the creative process behind the track coming together, but if you like what you hear, you can visit http://radiant.black/music and listen to the full track and keep up to date with additional tunes as they drop.
Here’s Ewing with his take on this exciting and different new collaboration:
“In Radiant Black issue 3, Kyle, Marcelo, Becca and Michael embarked on an incredibly ambitious journey—building a story that explores and chronicles the creative process. Kyle and I immediately thought that a ‘theme and variation’ based musical piece would be the perfect accompaniment, a fun way to represent ideas bouncing around in a writer’s mind, dancing around a theme that is struggling to find its legs, exploring colors of the orchestra, from strings to winds to brass, developing bit by bit, until the full thematic idea finally finds its footing and comes to life, triumphantly stated by the entire orchestra. We felt the liveliness and dexterity that a real orchestra brings was necessary to fully represent these fast moving ideas, and thus, high strings and flutes are constantly percolating and fragmenting with excited energy, much like Nathan’s thoughts in his pursuit to crack his novel.”
Higgins added: “With Radiant Black #3, I wanted to attempt something a bit different—I wanted to tell a story that explores, fights with and ultimately celebrates the creative process. To explore and showcase how an idea sometimes forms. Even amidst chaos. And so, in the spirit of exploring the creative process, I asked Sam to do the same thing musically.”
Radiant Black #3 will be available Wednesday, April 21 from Image Comics
