Story
An author named Iris Kayan reached out wanting a score for a scene from her book, When the Gold Weeps - a cyberpunk detective novel. She sent me the passage: a character named Lynx, desperately trying to heal his dying friend Hailey after she’s shot, his magic slipping through his fingers as he runs out of time.
I could write music that matched the feeling of the scene easily enough. What I couldn’t do was pace it. Music moves through time, and without something to anchor it to, I had no way to know where the emotional beats needed to land relative to the words.
So I had the passage narrated - ElevenLabs, an AI voice - and wrote to that instead. The second I had something to follow, everything clicked. I wrote the whole piece imagining it playing under that scene like it was already cut into a movie.
I ended up keeping both versions - one with the narration built in, one without - so you can listen either way.
It was a different way for me to work. Usually I’m chasing a story I don’t have yet; this time someone else had already written it. Getting to add another layer to a scene that already existed on the page was genuinely fulfilling.
You can find the book on Amazon, and more of Iris’s work at iriskayan.com.