Evgueni & Sacha Galperine

Evgueni (left) and Sacha Galperine are based in Paris.

The fearless sonic experimentation of composers Evgueni and Sacha Galperine is proving equally at home in mainstream and arthouse cinema — not to mention last year’s surprise hit TV series Baby Reindeer.

“It’s strange, making music for a project that comes from someone’s intimate experience,” says composer Evgueni Galperine, as he reflects on creating the soundtrack for Netflix’s breakout hit Baby Reindeer, which he considers one of his favourite music‑making experiences of 2024. The small British mini‑series, now a multiple Emmy award‑winner, came seemingly out of nowhere and became a hot topic in pop culture discourse, fuelled by the frenzy of fans taking a little too much interest in the show’s drawn‑from‑reality characters and who their real‑life counterparts may or may not have been.

His brother Sacha, with whom he composed the score, adds: “It gives us more responsibility, because we have influence over someone’s intense, real‑life experience. It was a very small project initially and we really believed in it. We met the wonderful team and [showrunner/lead actor] Richard Gadd, who was so excited and vulnerable at the same time — he needed to tell his story.”

When the Galperines were tasked with writing the score, their focus was simply on how best to infuse a disturbing and complicated story with music. Evgueni explains: “Deep wounds, hidden desires, and intense emotions are all great food for music, so it was inspiring, but it was also a challenge because the psychology in the series is so complex. It was our first experience of working with someone who is not only a showrunner, but is also the person who lived this story in real life, so it was very interesting to see how he received the music; he was always comparing his real feelings from the past, and mixing them with his opinion as a showrunner. This kind of artistic collaboration was very new for us because it was the first time we had done something as personal as Baby Reindeer. And then there was the rewarding surprise of seeing this niche project become a worldwide phenomenon.”

Marvel Calling

The Galperines ended the year with another riveting score, sharing composing duties with Benjamin Wallfisch, on Sony and Marvel’s Kraven The Hunter. Brought in two‑and‑a‑half months before the final mix of the film, the Galperines had their work cut out for them. “Our goal was to try to do something new, sound‑wise, but at the same time, because it was a Marvel film, we knew that it was meant for a very large audience. So the challenge was quite exciting: how to keep our style and our tools, while at the same time make it more epic and more direct,” says Evgueni.

The brothers once again went into the project with a vision: “to use instruments like they were the voices of some strange animals”. Evgueni elaborates, “We were looking for instruments, and ways of playing them, which [bring to mind] animal voices and cries, because the hero is very connected to nature and to the animal world.”

Sacha adds: “We used unconventional playing styles for the orchestral instruments. For instance, there’s an important theme of the father, played on a contrabassoon, with a lot of breath noise. With the cello, we had the harmonics played in a very fierce tremolo, so you don’t really know what you’re listening to, but we used it a lot because it brings a good, heavy sound.”

The electric cello, with plenty of saturation and overdrive, is another sound that features extensively, and for which they called upon musician Ilia Osokin, who, Evgueni tells us, “has a lot of pedals, just like an electric guitar”.

The score also features guitars, virtual synths like FXpansion’s Strobe2, and several Moogs. Evgueni tells us, “We were trying to make the synthesizers sound like organic instruments and the organic instruments sound like synthesizers, to create a hybrid mix.”

The siblings were not worried about introducing such a high level of experimentation to the very mainstream Marvel universe. As Evgueni explains, “We think that even a large audience can totally accept being surprised and not having to listen to the same sounds and the same colours. Most of the time, in Hollywood films, you have a very common colour — orchestral, with a little bit of synth and percussion — but you can take that from one film and put it in another and nobody will [notice] the change. Coming from European cinema, we feel that by adding epic and direct melodies, we can still keep an unexpected approach and when it’s unexpected, the audience can be moved even more. It’s less comfortable, so it surprises you and when you are surprised, you are more vulnerable and more emotionally captive.”

Classical Meets Contemporary

The siblings are fluent in the language of music, having spent their early years in Ukraine and Russia, where they began formally studying classical music at a young age. In 1990, they moved to France, where Evgueni studied symphonic composition and electro‑acoustic music at the National Conservatory (CNSM), while the younger Sacha excelled at violin performance at the Conservatory of Versailles before turning to rock and electronic music.

You can hear their eclectic influences in their musical palette: minimalist arrangements, soaring vocal choirs, traditional orchestration, delicate acoustic guitar lines, evolving leitmotifs, gritty distortion, pitch‑shifting drops... the Galperines employ an acoustic and electronic toolkit with ease, making sounds from both styles work effortlessly together. It’s all sound, and it’s all fuel for experimentation.

Of their early experiments with sound, Evgueni recalls, “At around 20 years old, I got very interested in electro‑acoustic music, which is a kind of electronic music with a little bit more of a classical approach; it’s experimental, but with a lot of dramaturgy and maybe closer to modern classical music than to pop electronic music. This area was created by French composers from the ’60s, like Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, who were experimenting with the first synthesizers. I learned how to transform sounds, how to work with synthesizers, and create sounds even with the most primitive synthesizers, like the DX7, or a Roland Jupiter.”

Sacha Galperine’s studio is full of interesting musical instruments.

Sacha adds: “I started a little bit later than him, because I’m a little younger, and right away began with the computer and plug‑ins. I fell in love with all the possibilities of the electronic effects on the computer and realised that you can really transform a sound. You can just tap your phone, make a little percussive sound, and then, with well‑chosen effects, transform it into anything: a drone, a lead instrument, a synth sound, a low sound...”

Among Sacha’s favourites are FabFilter’s Timeless 3 for vintage‑sounding tape delay; distortion and filter effect Driver by Native Instruments; XLN Audio’s RC20‑Retro Color to add a warm vintage recording vibe; sound reverser Flipper by Soundhack; Decapitator (saturator), Devil Loc (limiter), Crystallizer (Eventide H3000‑inspired pitch‑shifting and reversed echo), EchoBoy (delay and echo) and Little AlterBoy (vocal transformation) from Soundtoys; room simulation and reverb effects like Sound City Studios and Lexicon 224 from UAD; AIR Spring Reverb; the Tony Visconti‑inspired Tverb from Eventide Audio; Texture by Audiothing and Shuffling by GRM Tools for granular effects; Smooth Operator by Baby Audio for resonance suppression; and the Leslie cabinet rotary simulation MVintageRotary from Melda Production.

Transformations

The brothers have used their share of unconventional sources over the years. For Palme d’Or winner Audrey Diwan’s Emmanuelle, the English‑language remake of the famous French film of the same name, “Some of the percussion was created using just the very quiet sound of the tongue,” recalls Evgueni. “Nobody really understands that it’s a tongue, but it creates a kind of weird feeling when you listen to it; somehow, even unconsciously, you understand that it comes from the human body, so it’s great to create a disturbing effect with something very quiet and very soft.”

Sacha disappears from view and returns with a mallet and a plastic bag. “Just tap on a plastic bag, transform it a little, and you have a great percussion sound.”

‘Martha Suite’, from Baby Reindeer, has a terrifying motif at its centre, employing something that sounds like a woman’s voice but isn’t. Sacha tells us, “It’s actually my whistle, run through effects to make it sound lower and vibrate like a human voice. It’s put through an Octaver, a Tremolator, and then a spring reverb, so in the end, it’s an unreal voice, kind of like a siren.”

Evgueni Galperine: Sometimes it’s interesting when the voice is not very evident but it’s there and you don’t even understand if it’s a voice or an instrument, if it’s a sample or a real singer.

On the piece ‘Donny And Teri’, the vocal lurks menacingly in the background, rather than being the principal element. Evgueni explains: “Sometimes it’s interesting when the voice is not very evident but it’s there and you don’t even understand if it’s a voice or an instrument, if it’s a sample or a real singer. For Baby Reindeer it was great because the character is so confused about what is happening around him, so not understanding even what the colours are, or what the instruments are, is part of the game.”

For Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize‑winning drama Loveless, the Galperines composed the score without reading the script, as per the director’s wishes. With just the storyline to go by, they transformed their own emotions and reactions, free of on‑screen images, into score. The piece ‘11 Cycles Of E’ builds on the sound of a prepared piano and the energy of one single note to convey the desperation of parents searching for their missing son. ‘Trouble’ makes use of the sound of a squeaking bicycle wheel to add a layer of discomfort.

The Sherman Filterbank is one of the brothers’ most valuable sound‑shaping tools.

Sources Of Inspiration

Ideas for compositions can come either from musical motifs or interesting sounds, says Evgueni: “Sometimes when you want to just find the melody, the piano is the best instrument you can dream of because you have harmony and melody and it’s neutral; so while looking for a piece, you can imagine all kinds of different instruments playing different parts because of the neutrality of the piano. A sound we find can also help us to come up with music or a melody, because sometimes the music can be inspired by the sound, or by the instrument.”

“The most important thing,” says Sacha, “is to really understand, first, what the story is about — what message does the creator want to express? — and find the musical tools that make sense very specifically in that direction. It’s like when we were talking about the whistle that sounds like a siren in ‘Martha Suite’. It made sense because it was telling the story and was like a metaphor for how she tries to lure the main character into her world.”

Evgueni adds, “Martha is a kind of siren, but [the lead character] is also always listening to the sirens from his past, because his past doesn’t let him go, so it’s also this voice from the past, dragging him back. Sacha’s right, it’s not only about the style, but also about what the music needs to express.

“For Kraven, it was very important to make the mother of the main character exist in the film because his mother — without spoiling the story — is the origin of the motivation of his acts. We don’t really see her in the film, so we wanted to use a lullaby she would sing to him, and it not only appears in the score when he’s thinking about his mother, but also at a very important moment in the film. Sometimes it is very clean, and sometimes it’s mixed with a lot of different instruments.”

The musical saw used in the brothers’ soundtrack for Radioactive.Visible amongst the more conventional instruments and equipment at Sacha’s Paris studio is a musical saw, which the brothers used in the score for the 2019 Marie Curie biopic Radioactive. “We used Theremins and Ondes Martenots as well. The film was about a woman who was ahead of her time, so we wanted to use early electronic instruments, instruments that were very progressive and new in the beginning of the 20th Century, that she could maybe even have listened to while she was alive.” Sacha adds, “It was about the idea: the first instruments of the modern era, even if it wasn’t exactly at the same time.”

Evgueni continues: “The people who created these instruments were also ahead of their time. Two or three crazy guys invented these instruments in the 1920s, 20 or 30 years before the first synthesizer, and what she did as a scientist was... the idea is the same: they were all pioneers. So you find parallels with the story, with the period in which the story is happening; you try to find as many connections as you can and the music becomes part of the whole.”

Resource Management

Some of the brothers’ favourite virtual instruments and sample libraries include Symphonic Organ and Cinematic Soft Piano by Spitfire Audio; Piano Colors by Native Instruments; Baby Audio’s physical modelling synth plug‑in Atoms; orchestral sample library Landforms by Slate+Ash; GForce’s Mellotron emulation M‑Tron Pro IV; Blisko, Nisko, and Helenko by Felt Instruments; and Salu, Amber, Arbos, and Duplex Saxophones from Orchestral Tools.

Indeed, today’s composers have access to a never‑ending supply of libraries and effects, which can lead to paralysis and indecision. Evgueni agrees emphatically: “It’s endless; you can spend days and weeks without any result. The only thing to do is to experiment when you’re not working, when you’re not composing music. Both me and Sacha sometimes spend days without trying to make music — just listening to sounds, trying them out, and making notes. Spend time getting to know your instrument. You will create connections that will help you to not try every possibility, but only those that you remember and that you connect to what you are looking for in that very moment.”

Sacha adds: “Also, like with any creation, you just have to stop when you decide that it is good enough for you. It’s never totally perfect; it’s never totally achieved. At some point, you have to decide, ‘OK, this works for me. I don’t think I will get any further.’”

Evgueni underscores why this is a good attitude to adopt: “Accept finding something close to what you are looking for, and then be focused on the music and not on the sound, because the most important thing is what you have to say with the music. Once that becomes most important, you accept more easily the fact that maybe you didn’t find exactly the sound you wanted, perhaps because of the lack of time, but also because you want to create music — you don’t want to spend half of your life looking for sounds.”

Fitting Together

Although the Galperine brothers work on shared projects, each has their own studio where individual pieces are crafted. Evgueni’s DAW of choice is Logic Pro, while Sacha prefers Pro Tools. Does this cause problems? Thankfully not, Sacha explains: “We will either compose together in the same room, or compose separately. We don’t often do some instruments here and some instruments in Evgueni’s studio.”

Evgueni elaborates: “Even when we’re working together, we’re working with one station. If we work in my studio, I will be the one who is taking commands and if we’re working in Sacha’s studio, he will be the one taking care of the computer controls. Each time, we discuss music ideas and try things, but depending on which studio it is, one of us becomes a computer operator as well.”

If they do feel the need to transfer elements of a composition to each other, they can, because the process has become significantly less complicated, says Evgueni. “With audio files, it was always super simple, but now you can also transfer MIDI files from Logic to Pro Tools easily. Earlier, it was totally separate and difficult to transfer something from one to the other so we preferred to just not do it: if you started in Logic, you continued in Logic, and if you wanted to use Pro Tools, you transferred it as an audio file, because otherwise it was complicated.

“Now, the same virtual instruments are available for both software, so when you choose to work with one, it’s mostly a question of doing so because you’re used to it. Of course, each software has its own things that make it work for you, so you choose one or the other, but they’re quite similar. If you are used to one, it’s difficult to change because you’ve worked with it for years; it’s kind of an old friend and it’s not very easy to make new friends.”

Sacha’s small but mighty equipment rack is home to (from top) an Apogee Rosetta 200 converter, Chandler Germanium Preamp and Summit Audio TPA‑200B valve preamp.

Mixing It Up

Once the pieces are ready, the brothers move from their home studios to an external studio and focus their attention on the mixing process, in which they are very involved. Evgueni tells us: “We don’t stay in our home studios, because we want to listen with different speakers, in different rooms, rediscover the music a bit, and also give the possibility to our sound engineer to add something. It’s a little bit less personal, in the sense that he didn’t make this music, so he has a more distant and more objective opinion.”

They both emphasise that you can’t mix your way out of a bad arrangement: “It is the arrangement that defines the mix and the role of each instrument,” insists Evgueni. “If you make the decision to place an element lower or louder, it changes the music.”

Sacha adds: “I think the role of the mix is mostly to make the musical ideas and the ideas of the arrangement clear. So the ideas come first, but once we get in the studio with the sound engineer, his job is to make sure that all these ideas are clearly adjusted and that the audience will hear them as they were intended.”

Looking Forward

As the duo look to add more projects to their incredibly diverse filmography in 2025, both brothers agree that a common thread runs through their work: collaborating with people who have their own vision. Says Evgueni: “Through this work, we love to discover new worlds, new stories and new ways of storytelling; otherwise it’s boring. Even if we are talking about commercial projects, there is always room to do something fresh and unexpected, because we love art cinema and we love wide‑audience films. It’s not about the style, or if it’s niche or not niche. Take, for example, Mad Max: Fury Road, which we didn’t work on, but it’s a good example of a super‑commercial, wide‑audience film that is, at the same time, an arthouse movie. It doesn’t happen that often, but it does happen, so I think that the common thread is the particularity of the vision of the world of each director, which can also help us to explore ours.

“With each film, it’s great to feel the challenge and to again be able to find a particular key which will open only this door and not others. It’s about the connection between music and cinema and how we can approach it, and the more you work with inspiring people, the more you get inspired as a composer as well, because we work for the film.”

Sacha concludes: “Each new project is also the occasion to be inspired in a new way and create something you didn’t even want to create before because you didn’t think of it. Now the occasion is here, and that gives way to new ideas; it’s like a new adventure each time. We discover a new film, but we also discover a new facet of ourselves.”