The one with the mad looking rabbit...

Tune in to SoundScape on YVFM 99.1 this Thursday (Dec 1) from 9 pm to catch the best ambient music. You can also get the show streamed live from the website.

This week we will feature the music of Michael Andrews from that seminal film Donnie Darko.

Michael Andrews (born 17 November 1967) is an American musician and film score composer. Andrews fell into film score composition by chance when The Greyboy Allstars were asked to score Jake Kasdan's first feature Zero Effect and worked on the music for the highly regarded (though short-lived) TV series, Freaks and Geeks. In 2000, Richard Kelly commissioned him to do the soundtrack for the film Donnie Darko. Its original score album went on to sell over 100,000 copies.

Michael Andrews has since gone on to compose scores for the movies Out Cold, Nothing, Cypher, Orange County, My Suicidal Sweetheart, Me and You and Everyone We Know, The TV Set, Unaccompanied Minors, and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

In early 2000, Nancy Juvonen's brother Jim Juvonen gave Andrews a copy of the script for the as-yet-unmade feature film Donnie Darko. He recalled "everyone knew Donnie Darko was going to be a cool movie. Everyone knew it was interesting."

Kelly was confident that Michael Andrews could do the job: "I met with Michael and I just knew right away that he was really, really talented and that he could come up with a really original score."

Andrews considers himself primarily a guitar player, but Kelly told him he didn't want any guitar in the movie. So, Andrews taught himself to play piano. It's part of the reason that the score is, as Andrews describes, so simple. "The film was pretty low budget so my portion of the money was pretty thin. I couldn't hire anyone, it was just me. I played everything; piano, mellotron, mini marimba, xylophone, ukulele, organ. I also brought in two female vocalists Sam Shelton and Tori Haberman."

As Donnie Darko was not a hit at first, there was little interest in the soundtrack in the US. However, the film enjoyed more popularity in Europe especially in the UK where its total box office was greater than for the whole of the US.

This week the Goon Show will be 'The Mummified Priest'.