Composed and produced the original electronic track and sound design for Julio Torres's HBO comedy special, recorded on analog synths through a vintage mixer. The music carried through to the show's teaser trailer.

Original Track & Sound Design: Sal Vanegas & Mike Etten Recorded at: Band Spaced, NYC Mastered by: Justin Frye Tools: Ableton Live

Julio came to me for an original electronic track — abstract and whimsical, light enough to carry his particular strain of absurdist comedy without ever winking at it.

The special is built as adult show-and-tell. He has a lot of shapes and not much time, so it begins immediately, with no framing device beyond that. As Salon put it, he's there to explore the who behind the what: the personalities and interior lives he assigns to a plexiglass square, an oval that wishes it were a circle, a self-conscious cactus, a Ferrero Rocher. The comedy depends entirely on sincerity. Nothing on stage acknowledges the absurdity.

HBO built that premise into a full multimedia world — an iridescent, futuristic set, Julio in a silver suit as a kind of intergalactic television host, an industrial conveyor belt delivering everyday objects one at a time. High-end production at scale, with every element pointed at the same deadpan register.

My job was to translate that world into sound. The music had to belong to the same universe as the set and the suit and the conveyor belt — futuristic, playful, slightly synthetic — while keeping the straight face the comedy runs on. Score it as funny and the joke collapses. Score it as sentimental and it curdles.

Wrote and produced the original theme with Mike Etten in Brooklyn NYC mastered by Justin Frye. The palette is analog synthesis run through a vintage mixer and captured in Ableton Live — warm, slightly unstable, with the kind of drift a clean digital production would have flattened out. That instability is what keeps the track from sounding like stock futurism.

Also handled sound design across the special. HBO carried the music into the teaser trailer, so the same material had to function as a title theme and as a thirty-second promotional hook.

Production: Ableton Live Instrumentation: Analog synthesizers, vintage mixer Studio: Band Spaced, NYC Deliverables: Original theme, sound design, teaser trailer music Network: HBO