Peter Calandra Releases New Age And Ambient 'Lost Island'

Prolific composer and keyboard player Peter Calandra has released his new age and ambient song "Lost Island," inspired by the experimental textures created by musicians like Brian Eno and Olafur Arnalds.

Throughout most of his younger years, Peter spent most of his time playing the piano in rock and jazz ensembles. It wasn't until he started performing at the original production of Little Shop Of Horrors in 1982 that he started gaining real world experience in playing sensitive music. "Even though the show was a 'rhythm section' type of show, there were many very intimate sections where the keyboards and piano (2 different chairs in the pit, I played both) had to play exposed and very delicate music," shares Peter. "I gained more experience with this with the more orchestral shows I performed in after that: Phantom Of The Opera, Les Miserables and Miss Saigon."

What Little Shop (The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth) and Miss Saigon (The Overture and several other pieces in the show) also contained was a more hypnotic, minimalist style of music that sounded quite a bit like the systems music of Phillip Glass and Steve Reich. As he kept working this type of music became very popular with film composers such as Olafur Arnalds. You can hear echoes of these techniques in "Lost Island"

Olafur Arnalds creates music on multiple pianos with Yamaha's Disklavier system installed and triggers them with a program that creates random patterns based on rules that he inputs into the program, creating a random, unplanned soundscape that can be a very inspiring bed to improvise on. Peter simulated this technique using effects processors in his recording software.

Part of Peter's thinking about music is learning as many techniques and methods of creating melodies as possible. He experiments with sounds, textures, and different techniques like his influence, Brian Eno, one of the great musical thinkers about the creative process. One of Brian's early experiments came with an album he produced with the composer/pianist Harold Budd.

"They were in the studio and Brian had created very elaborate treatments for the piano that Harold was playing using various delays, reverbs and pitch shifting," explains Peter. "Harold listened to the sound of these treatments on his playing and improvised music to what was happening with the intersection of his piano and the treatments."

He continues, "This piece contains elements of both techniques as I am improvising a piano piece that has both the Eno style treatments and the random patterns generated by what i am playing. I just sat back and reacted to the music I was hearing."

Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/track/5yB8hyaviswMxtzGkIeT5s?si=d7e4ffd6f2014226

More About Peter Calandra

As a Film & TV composer, Peter Calandra scored over 100 films and wrote over 2000 compositions for television. He has composed music for every major television network including the FIFA World Cup Theme for FOX Sports, the Special Olympics World Games and Invictus Games Theme for ESPN, as well as writing music for the Kennedy Center Honors on CBS from 2015 thru 2020. He also garnered acclaim for composing the music to Jellysmoke, a film which won the Los Angeles Film Festival and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, and Unknown Soldier, a film which won the Los Angeles and Philadelphia Film Festivals and also was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award.

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