NYC’s Anthem Facility Starts Up Following Successful Ad Score
As ad agencies and music supervisors continue to trend towards licensing pop songs for high-profile broadcast campaigns, ad music composers are challenged to take even more creative license with their work, to produce really original, outside-the-ad-music-box sounds and record-quality tracks that can compete. So many of these composers are playing/producing in bands anyway, and so the lines there are increasingly blurring.
We were sent the track below by “Anthem Facility” – the new project by NY producer Stephen Hermann – which was originally written for an ad campaign for Dell Computers. Its popularity has spawned a full release of the track, “Trace” and a debut EP of the same name.
In an extremely challenging and competitive atmosphere for producer/composers competing for ad work, it’s interesting to see what works, and how that (what works) is more universal than ever: make music you believe in. In this way, we see the Anthem Facility story as an interesting case study:
Anthem Facility: Stephen Hermann and Melati Malay
Hermann has been making music for over 20 years, first as a member of the group Sukpatch (signed back in the day to Beastie Boys’ Grand Royal label), then part of a project called Casiocore, and the album project “Explosion Robinson.” Following a small-scale CD and vinyl release, the album caught the attention of music supervisors and ad agencies, and Explosion Robinson quickly evolved into to a music and post-production audio company.
Last year, when hired by Dell to compose original music to market a new line of laptops, Hermann approached Indonesian-born NYC-based singer Melati Malay (Young Magic, Lavalier) for the vocal hooks. The team recorded a 30-second song that would eventually become “Trace.”
Inspired by the work and atmospheric, chill-wavey sound they produced, Hermann coined the name Anthem Facility as a new alias for his production work, and invited Malay back into the studio to stretch “Trace” into a full-three minute song.
When the commercials began airing on television, phone calls and e-mails reportedly poured in from hundreds who’d discovered the artist by scouring the internet, but were frustrated that they could not find the music anywhere to purchase. Inspired by this feedback, the team expedited the planned release on iTunes and the track was made available digitally as Anthem Facility’s debut single in 2010.
Trace is the first in a series of releases planned from Anthem Facility. It also marks the first full release from Hermann’s newly minted label Exro.FM, which will be releasing the EP digitally and on vinyl in late summer 2011.
For more information, visit http://www.anthemfacility.com.
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