Netflix’s documentary series Chef’s Table: Legends celebrates four culinary giants — Jamie Oliver, José Andrés, Alice Waters and Thomas Keller — who are recognized for shaping the modern world of food. Composer Duncan Thum created original music for the series and says its job was to extend the creative spirit of the chefs into sound.
“To score not just what things feel like, but what they might taste like,” he shares. “That ended up being a great challenge!”
Thum points to chefs José Andres and Thomas Keller, who are known for approaching food in a somewhat mischievous way.
“They take the diner on a journey by subverting our expectations of classic American cuisine,” he explains. “To tell the story of chef Andres learning these experimental techniques, I tried to work with as many quality ingredients – analog sound sources – as possible. Everything was recorded with lots of character by using ribbon mics (Coles 4038) into vintage pre’s (UA 610). I avoided leaning on samples whenever I could, favoring the moving air of live performance blended with one-off sonic experiments.”
According to Thum, modular synths were central to his work.
“I built patches that generated unpredictable timbres using modules from Schlappi Engineering and Make Noise. I then used Oeksound Soothe2 and Spiff to isolate and extract the most unusual fragments and resampled them into Kontakt. My idea was to create an instrument that could be played traditionally but sound like nothing that existed previously. It was a bit of scientist in the lab and a bit of pencil & paper composing – all at once familiar and joyfully weird.”
