The Singularity is the result of three decades of my life in the arts. It was released in May 2024 as a rock concept album, acclaimed graphic novel, and concert experience, combining my lifelong love of music, storytelling, visual art, narrative, symphonic cinematic scoring, hard rock, heavy metal, hip-hop, comic books, science fiction, fantasy, and live shows. The work allowed me to express myself creatively across mediums, flexing every muscle of my creative mind, from shaping script and story, to directing world-class actors, to narrative scoring, to album production, to learning guitar.
Though I was the project’s primary authorial voice, its purpose was to let me to collaborate with others. I was honored to collaborate on The Singularity with over fifty creatives: musicians, writers, lyricists, singers, visual artists, producers, and actors. Some are close friends and family; others I met when I invited them to this ambitious project. A few more rank amongst my musical heroes, performers I dreamed of collaborating with when I was just a high-school kid writing music on a synthesizer after school and on weekends. Assembling them to create a musical and narrative world was one of the most inspiring, exhilarating, and occasionally exhausting experiences of my life.
In this new series of blogs, I will chronicle my path bringing The Singularity to life.
PROLOGUE
In August 1996, I stepped onto a cramped, blazing hot outdoor stage with three bandmates, and took my place behind my synthesizer. At just sixteen, I was about to live out my rock and roll dreams by performing live, for the first time, my original instrumental metal composition “Escape from the Machines.” I squinted in the bright August sunshine, looking out at the audience, and beheld my immediate family amid a smattering of cowboys, women wearing their Sunday best, and bored children holding animal balloons shifting impatiently beside the llamas in the petting zoo. Scents of hay and cow shit wafted through the heat, punctuated by the relentless rattle of a nearby roller coaster. My band was about to debut at the 1996 Northwest Washington State Fair Talent Competition. In my mind, however, I was embarking on an epic rock journey. We launched into the song’s searing barrage of mixed-meter progressive instrumental rock.
I had written the song a year prior, built around a bluesy guitar riff inspired in part by the attitude I heard in Slash’s playing in my favorite Guns N’ Roses songs. I was enamored with guitar riffs, even though I had never even held a guitar, having spent the my youth honing my skills as a pianist, keyboardist, and composer. Now, my keyboard wobbled on its flimsy stand while I thrashed against it while the members of my band valiantly managed the complex parts of “Escape from the Machines.”
After the song’s climactic crescendo, my mother’s exuberant applause easily overpowered the tepid response from a confused crowd. Our act was followed by an awkward ventriloquist, and a young gospel singer who fell reverently to her knees, arms upraised for the Lord. She won the grand prize, but my band nabbed second place. My $25 cut of our $100 prize money marked the first money I ever made as a professional musician. Off to a great start!
Nearly three decades later, I found myself once again onstage playing “Escape from the Machines.” This time, the stage rumbled with every note beneath the feet of the packed house at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles. No longer trapped behind the keyboard stand, I ran my hands across the neck of an ebony Gibson Custom 1968 Les Paul Reissue electric guitar, surrounded by a band of accomplished rock and metal instrumentalists. At the center of the stage, the song’s main riff was shredded by the guitarist who originally inspired it, Slash.
OK, let me back up.
EARLY DAYS
I grew up, with my younger brother, Brendan, in Bellingham, Washington, a peaceful harbor town on the coast of the Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest. I discovered my favorite movies had accompanying soundtrack albums and I became an avid collector. Film composers were my rock stars: John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Danny Elfman, Elmer Bernstein, Basil Poledouris, Alan Silvestri, Bernard Herrmann, Ennio Morricone, Nino Rota, and Shirley Walker, among others. Throughout my youth in the 1980s and 1990s, I was obsessed with the intersection of music and storytelling. I loved film music’s inherent narrative impact, from explosive action cues to lyrical heartfelt melodies.
As I entered high school, I discovered symphonic and rock music were not as isolated as I thought. I learned that Danny Elfman had a rock band called Oingo Boingo and it was not at all like his film music. I adored Elmer Bernstein’s sweeping score for Heavy Metal, a film bursting with contemporary rock songs that also caught my ear, especially the Blue Öyster Cult anthem “Veterans of the Psychic Wars.” I was captivated by how deftly Michael Kamen’s orchestral score for Highlander intertwined with brilliant songs by Queen, a band whose operatic catalogue I quickly fell in love with. Hearing the Guns N’ Roses banger “You Could Be Mine” in Terminator 2 led me to the band’s hit “November Rain,” which artfully combined orchestral grandeur with a muscular rock backbone, held together by Slash’s timeless guitar solo in its astonishing coda—this rock song was as epic as film music! I yearned to one day write music worthy of a guitar solo like that.
ESCAPE FROM THE MACHINES
I wrote music nearly every moment of my free time, producing a variety of songs and cinematic cues styled after film music I adored. During the halcyon summer days of 1995, while my friends hiked trails and swam the crystalline waters of the Puget Sound, I hunkered in my room and wrote “Escape from the Machines,” an intense guitar riff in the style of my favorite sci-fi action movies. The odd music was built around a searing electric guitar riff adorned with orchestral flourishes. However, the synthesizer guitar sound fell short of my ambitions, and begged to be replaced by a real performance. Thankfully, my parents got me a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder and an SM58 microphone, which meant I could at last collaborate with other musicians and record live instruments! My life would never be the same.
Having never even picked up a guitar, I turned to a kid in the grade ahead of me, Ryan Ho. He was an accomplished athlete, wrestler, martial artist, and guitar player. We had first worked together the previous spring, when he starred in an outrageous parody martial arts film I co-directed and co-wrote, called Blood Angel Dirty Death Rage Fist III. (That silly short was the first film I ever scored. Every career has to start somewhere!) On a hot August afternoon in 1995, I tucked my Tascam 4-track under my arm as I followed Ryan into his room and plugged it into his amp. For the first time, I heard one of my musical ideas brought to life by another musician. Beneath Ryan’s fingers, my riff took on dimensions beyond what I thought possible. When I got home, I excitedly bounced the mix down to a single cassette, riding faders with my fingers. “Escape from the Machines” was complete! Or so I thought at the time. The song would become an experiment I would return to, time and time again, for decades.
After working on “Escape from the Machines” in 1995, guitarist Ryan Ho played on a couple more of my songs, and I joined his rock band in my junior year to play a Pink Floyd tribute concert, marking the first time I ever played keyboards in a rock band. However, after high school graduation, he and I drifted apart, only to reconnect again in Los Angeles two decades later, after I had established myself as a composer for media and he had, unsurprisingly, launched a successful career as a music producer, working under the name Malay. (He can be heard on The Singularity—the first fifteen seconds of “Escape from the Machines” opens with my original 1995 4-track demo recording!)
TO THE CITY OF ANGELS
In October of 1995, I was shocked to learn my favorite rock band, Oingo Boingo, would break up after their next tour. I begged my mom to fly me and my brother to California to see one of their final shows. This would mean missing the PSAT scholarship qualifying test, despite knowing full well I needed a major scholarship to ever attend a major university. Fully grasping her son’s life priorities, my mom did what all good parents would do: she risked her son’s academic future to take him to a rock concert! After the concert, I sat, dazed, in the packed parking lot as my mom struggled to navigate our rental car to the highway. I turned to her and said, “Next to life itself, this is the best thing you have ever done for me.” In that moment, the idea of producing a rock album, as wild and varied as the kinds of music I was listening to, entered my mind. (Three decades later, that dream would become a reality and include three of the Oingo Boingo members I had just witnessed!)
In the spring of 1996, thanks to a chance encounter with a kind soul, I met Elmer Bernstein, the film-music legend responsible for dozens of iconic scores including The Ten Commandments, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Magnificent Seven,and Ghostbusters. Elmer wrote me a letter of recommendation to attend the USC School of Music (it turns out my academic career could survive missing that PSAT test) and eventually took me on as a protégé after I moved to Los Angeles to pursue my dreams of becoming a film composer.
While completing degrees in Music Composition and Music Recording at USC, I composed experimental 12-tone heavy metal music, epic guitar-driven symphonic rock works, and played in several rock bands. I recorded “Escape from the Machines” twice again in college, with new players. With access to increasingly skilled musicians, I was confused as to why the song still failed to reach what I dreamed for it. The song gnawed at my mind.
Despite my focus on film scoring and symphonic writing during my USC career, my musical tastes broadened. My love for Oingo Boingo, Pink Floyd, Queen, and Gun N’ Roses led me to become absorbed in the music of artists as diverse as System of a Down, Muse, Blue Öyster Cult, Rufus Wainwright, Fiona Apple, Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, Ozomatli, Public Enemy, Velvet Revolver, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, Aerosmith, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Garbage, Supertramp, Sinéad O’Connor, and Michael Jackson.
MEETING MUSICIANS
Through a series of cosmic coincidences, I met most of the members of Oingo Boingo shortly after graduating USC, and began what would become decades of close collaboration. Throughout recording sessions, backyard jams, and live concerts with them, I learned the craft of songwriting and got a firsthand glimpse into the inner workings of a real rock band. They were the first of many close friends I would make from the tightly knit rock and metal community in Los Angeles.
After college, my career scoring media began when I became composer for the beloved science-fiction series Battlestar Galactica. That score featured a combination of Japanese taiko drums, Middle Eastern soloists, and, yes, rock and metal influences, culminating in my Indian-folk-metal-taiko hybrid arrangement of the Bob Dylan classic “All Along the Watchtower” for the third season. To represent my own cultural heritage, I infused the score with Scottish and Irish instruments, bagpipes and penny whistle, and Armenian influences, including my original lyrics translated into Armenian and the culture’s iconic woodwind instrument, the duduk.
The inclusion of Armenian colors in Battlestar Galactica eventually led me to cross paths with arguably the most famous Armenian musician ever, Serj Tankian, lead singer of the legendary metal band System of a Down. Meeting for coffee at his house, Serj and I became fast friends. I was struck by his creativity, thoughtfulness, political beliefs, and his staggering creative output. Even though our musical careers began in opposite genres, we found we had much in common. He joined my family for dinners at our house, and invited us to System of a Down shows where he would wave to us from the stage when he spotted us in the crowd. Getting to know Serj had a profound impact on me creatively and personally and helped set me on the path that would lead to The Singularity.
In 2006, I discovered an Adult Swim animated comedy called Metalocalypse and became obsessed with its deft blend of horror, humor, and music. The show, about a fictional death metal band called Dethklok, featured incredible metal songs that showcased brutal guitar riffs, screaming vocals, and sardonic lyrics, and yet remained cinematic and expressive. I became obsessed with the show’s music and was further fascinated to learn that Brendon Small not only wrote and sang all the songs, but also created, wrote, directed, and starred in the show as the voice actor for multiple characters. I had to meet him! We met up through a mutual friend and became close friends. Beyond simply collaborating frequently on each other’s projects over the years, we’ve also hung out at concerts and invested hours nerding out about life, music, and science fiction on lengthy rambling phone calls. In 2016, Brendon and I took our ladies to San Diego to witness one of the first Guns N’ Roses concerts after the shocking announcement that founding members, including Slash, had rejoined the band; our throats grew hoarse singing along to “Paradise City.”
One evening, in late 2009, Brendon Small invited me out to dinner with his friend Scott Ian, the energetic rhythm guitarist for legendary thrash metal band Anthrax. Scott, jovial and curious, revealed himself to be a huge Battlestar Galactica fan. He proclaimed that after listening to the pounding taiko drums in my score he knew I was a fan of heavy metal, especially a band called Sepultura. I sipped my wine, too bashful to admit I had never heard that band. That night, I downloaded Sepultura’s 1996 album Roots and my ears were bombarded by glorious metal infused with traditional Brazilian caixa snare drums, syncopated berimbau rhythms, and Max Calvera’s distinctly South American vocal growl. Scott was right—I loved Sepultura! He apparently knew me better than I knew myself.
I dove deep into metal, jumping off from Dethklok, Anthrax, and Sepultura to Strapping Young Lad, Gojira, Meshuggah, Slipknot, Dimmu Borgir, Amon Amarth, and many more. I heard layers emotional of expression I never knew possible in the genre. Perhaps my bombastic taiko-drum writing was a symptom of my yearning for new ways to express tight, heavy rhythms in massive, emotional music. Clearly, double kick drums and drop-tuned guitars would be the next step in my musical evolution. Eager to explore these sounds, I was honored to record guitars with Scott Ian on my score for the 2009 Battlestar Galactica spin-off film, The Plan. He was right—those taiko drums could sound like metal! Yet I still had much to learn.
GO GO GODZILLA
My career as a composer for film, television, and video games rocketed in the wake of Battlestar Galactica. With every new job, I searched for excuses to hone my heavy metal, rock, and songwriting craft. In 2012, Brendon Small played guitars on my metal-infused score to director Joe Lynch’s film Knights of Badassdom (alongside Whitesnake’s Doug Aldrich!) and again on my 1980s electro-rock-influenced The Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie. In 2013, Brendon invited me to be a part of Metalocalypse, arranging and conducting orchestral parts for his ambitious rock opera The Doomstar Requiem, as well as co-producing his score for the recent Metalocalypse: Army of the Doomstar. Brendon even sang with me on my Emmy-nominated main title theme for Black Sails, itself a secret metal track where wheezy hurdy gurdy lines slither atop drop-tuned electric guitars, bass, and drum kit. I wrote rock anthems for the Ron Perlman feature film This Game’s Called Murder, the historical drama The Serpent Queen, the Salma Hayek action flick Everly, and more.
Over the years, I learned the value of collaborating with other artists. I was fortunate to produce songs with Hozier, Rufus Wainwright, Fiona Apple, Shirley Manson (Garbage), and Jens Kidman (Meshuggah), among others. For Outlander, I was honored to collaborate closely with legendary vocalist Sinéad O’Connor, resulting in what would tragically become her final recording. These songs, and more, helped alter and expand the creative course of my life. I could tell I needed to be involved in music beyond that which sits behind drama.
In 2018, while scoring the film Godzilla: King of the Monsters, I took the opportunity to produce a cover of Blue Öyster Cult’s 1977 anthem “Godzilla” with a modern blend of rock, orchestral, and traditional Japanese music. I found myself in Capitol Records’ Studio B, with Serj Tankian, the lead singer of System of a Down, and the rhythm section of Dethklok, including legendary drummer Gene Hoglan. Raya brought our four-year-old daughter, Sonatine. Behind the mixing board, I held Sonatine while she stood on a chair so she could see through the glass to the band in the live room and bounced enthusiastically with every note of the iconic rock riff. I was overcome with exhilaration! I had toiled fifteen years to land a job that allowed me to record with these musicians, and here we all were, making music together.
Driving home alone that night, however, my excitement gradually diminished. Must another fifteen years pass before this kind of collaboration could happen again? I killed the engine in my driveway and sat. Perhaps I had lost sight of a fundamental truth I had discovered when I asked Ryan Ho to record guitars on “Escape from the Machines” back in 1995. Perhaps I didn’t need to wait for a movie to create the music I wanted to write. Perhaps I shouldn’t wait.
Within a year, I returned to the kind of musical explorations I had enjoyed as teenager, free from the constraints of deadlines and external authorial voices. I hoped this new project would allow me to find a uniquely personal way to combine rock and symphonic orchestra, and to collaborate with the musicians I had met during my nearly two decades as a musician in Los Angeles.
I would call it The Singularity.
—Bear
