New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Lakeshore Records will release the soundtrack for the Netflix original series NARCOS digitally on August 21st and on CD later this year. The album features the film's original score by Pedro Bromfman (ROBOCOP, ELITE SQUAD) and the main title theme song "Tuyo" by Brazilian artist Rodrigo Amarante.
"Conceptually speaking, I had this idea that the music for NARCOS could be somewhat inspired by
Sergio Leone's westerns," said Bromfman. "Colombia in the late 80's and early 90's reminded me of those towns you see in Westerns, dominated by a gang of outlaws. In those films, someone from out of town will usually come and help the locals defeat the bad guys. As people watch Narcos they'll be able to see the parallels I drew, however in Colombia they had a much bigger and more complicated situation."
Narcos chronicles the gripping real-life stories of the drug kingpins of the late 1980s and the corroborative efforts of law enforcement to meet them head on in brutal, bloody conflict. It details the conflicting forces - legal, political, police, military and civilian - that clash in an effort to control the world's most powerful commodity: cocaine.
"We probably had 10 or more character themes in Narcos," Bromfman described. "It was my first TV show with several episodes, where I could really develop thematic material over almost 10 hours of storytelling. In movies it is very difficult to have that many character themes but in a show, where characters have longer arcs, you are able to work thematically without confusing yourself or the audience. It was fascinating to be able to associate some of the smaller characters to a piece of music and adapt that piece as they evolved and sometimes became a lead player on an episode."
Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, film composer Pedro Bromfman is a Cum Laude graduate from Berklee College of Music, he has worked as a session musician, music producer and arranger before his passion for film scores brought him to Los Angeles to study film scoring at UCLA. His credits include Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad), winner of the Golden Bear at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival; They Killed Sister Dorothy, directed by Academy Award winner
Daniel Junge and narrated by
Martin Sheen; March of the Living, directed by Oscar nominated and Sundance winner
Jessica Sanders; Tropa de Elite 2 (Elite Squad: The
Enemy Within), the most successful Latin-American film to date; the romantic comedy and Brazilian blockbuster Qualquer Gato Vira-Lata and G-Dog, directed by Academy Award winner Freida Mock.
Pedro has earned an ASCAP Award, two Gold Medals for
Excellence in Film
Music at the Park City Film
Music Festival, was nominated for two Cinema Brazil Grand Prizes (Brazilian Oscars), received an ACIE Award, and a Premio Contigo! De Cinema. He has recently worked on the music for the video game Max Payne 3, the international co-production Blue Lips and the score for the MGM reboot of RoboCop, starring Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman and Michael Keaton. In 2015 Pedro Bromfman has completed the score for Deep Web, directed by Alex Winter and narrated by Keanu Reeves.
Bromfman is also a multi-instrumentalist. He performed 90% of the instruments for the score. "We used a lot of South American instruments as well as guitars, harmonicas, accordion and a lot of percussion played primarily by my friend and very talented percussionist Cassio Duarte," Bromfman explained. "We also had a long recording session in the beginning of the process where I played several flutes, different harmonicas, bowed guitars of all sorts, upright bass, hang, violin, etc." Bromfman and programmer Juan
Carlos Enriquez edited these sounds to create "dozens of original software instruments that were featured throughout the entire show."
All 10 episodes of the Netflix original series NARCOS will launch on August 28, 2015, exclusively on Netflix. The soundtrack for NARCOS will be available digitally on August 21 and on CD later this year.