Graeme Revell
Biography
Graeme Revell is a New Zealand musician and composer. He came to prominence in the 1980s as the leader of the industrial music group SPK. Since the 1990s he has worked primarily as a film score composer.
Some of Revell's best known film scores include Dead Calm (1989), The Crow (1994), Street Fighter (1994), Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (1995), From Dusk till Dawn (1996), The Craft (1996), The Saint (1997), The Negotiator (1998), Bride of Chucky (1998), Titan A.E. (2000), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), Daredevil (2003), Freddy vs. Jason (2003), and Sin City (2005). He is also known for his frequent collaborations with director David Twohy, having scored Below (2002) and the Riddick franchise. He is an eight-time recipient of the BMI Film Music Award, including the Richard Kirk Career Achievement Award, and an AACTA Award winner.
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Revell is a classically trained pianist and French horn player, but also graduated from the University of Auckland with degrees in economics and political science. Revell attended Auckland Grammar School, where he finished his final year in 7A. As an orderly in an insane asylum in Australia in the late 70's, he and another psych nurse, Brett Guerin, formed one of industrial music's first bands, SPK, as an outgrowth of interest in music therapy. He spent the next decade making music that ranged from extreme to beautiful to academic and earning a reputation for wild stage stunts that included accidentally setting an audience member on fire with a flamethrower.
Revell's break came in 1989, when he scored the Australian film Dead Calm. A Hollywood agent, Richard Kraft, heard it and tracked him down. Since then, he moved to Hollywood, working with everything from 85-piece orchestras for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, to Tuvan singers and Armenian stringed instruments for The Crow, to brassy jazz and hip-hop rhythm loops for Fled, with Laurence Fishburne and Stephen Baldwin.
In 2002–03, he assisted the rock band Evanescence on their debut album, Fallen, in which he is credited for doing most of the string arrangements. He has also done string arrangements for Ludus, Stefy, Biffy Clyro and The Wombats. Revell has been assisted in sound design by Brian Williams, who creates dark ambient music under the stage name 'Lustmord'.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.