Endless Noise, the Santa Monica-based music and sound design company led by Grammy Award-winning composer, orchestrator, conductor and musician Jeff Elmassian, has named Dave Chapman as its creative director and partner.
Chapman is a longtime music and audio producer, engineer and mixer who co-founded (along with Samuel Creager) Ugly Duck Studios in Boston in 2013. Chapman and Creager, both of whom relocated to LA in 2019, remain actively involved with Ugly Duck, which is currently being managed day-to-day by Dan Babai. Among Ugly Duck’s clients have been such high- profile companies as Walt Disney Studios, LucasArts, NPR, the New York Times, the BBC, Comcast, MTV, AT&T, Buick, and the History Channel.
Elmassian said of Chapman, “Dave is an incomparable musician and producer with a multi-faceted command of both the creative and business needs of our clients. He’s worked in Boston for over a decade, where he built his own studio and developed both the knowledge of our field and the entrepreneurial spirit needed to help run Endless Noise.”
Elmassian added, “Dave’s already played an instrumental role in the development of our exciting and soon-to-be-announced new music library! I’ve been waiting a long time for someone with the right mix of experimental ingenuity and grounded strategic thinking to come along and help me move Endless Noise boldly into the future.”
Said Chapman, “I was a composer by training, and sort of fell into becoming an audio engineer as well in the early stages of my career. I met Jeff through a member of my family, and I began writing commercial music for him. After about five years of working with each other long distance, I had reached a point in my life where I was looking to move out of Boston, so I contacted Jeff about joining him at Endless Noise. We were determined to figure out a way to work together. That was a pivotal moment for both of us.”
From 2012-2014, Chapman was a much in-demand freelance audio tracking engineer and producer across the Greater Boston area. He worked within Cybersound Studios, a hip-hop studio where he recorded, mixed and mastered audio and music for countless projects, ranging from local artist releases to prominent national and regional TV and radio commercials. During this time frame he also produced music as head engineer with Earth Sea Studios, with studio founder John Wigneswaran. The music the two produced can be heard in such TV shows as Atlanta, Late Show with James Corden, E! News Live, and Saturday Night Live.
Chapman is also the guitarist in Ed Balloon, a band that employs experimental production to draw listeners into a world balancing pop and soul with a “desire for the strange.” The three-piece band includes lead singer and lyricist Edmund Oribhabor, and co-producer Creager.
A native of Scotch Plains, New Jersey, Chapman is a graduate of Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where he earned a BFA degree in the dual major of Film Scoring & Contemporary Writing, and Production in 2013.
Rom-Com Mainstay Hugh Grant Shifts To The Dark Side and He’s Never Been Happier
After some difficulties connecting to a Zoom, Hugh Grant eventually opts to just phone instead.
"Sorry about that," he apologizes. "Tech hell." Grant is no lover of technology. Smart phones, for example, he calls the "devil's tinderbox."
"I think they're killing us. I hate them," he says. "I go on long holidays from them, three or four days at at time. Marvelous."
Hell, and our proximity to it, is a not unrelated topic to Grant's new film, "Heretic." In it, two young Mormon missionaries (Chloe East, Sophie Thatcher) come knocking on a door they'll soon regret visiting. They're welcomed in by Mr. Reed (Grant), an initially charming man who tests their faith in theological debate, and then, in much worse things.
After decades in romantic comedies, Grant has spent the last few years playing narcissists, weirdos and murders, often to the greatest acclaim of his career. But in "Heretic," a horror thriller from A24, Grant's turn to the dark side reaches a new extreme. The actor who once charmingly stammered in "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and who danced to the Pointer Sisters in "Love Actually" is now doing heinous things to young people in a basement.
"It was a challenge," Grant says. "I think human beings need challenges. It makes your beer taste better in the evening if you've climbed a mountain. He was just so wonderfully (expletive)-up."
"Heretic," which opens in theaters Friday, is directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, co-writers of "A Quiet Place." In Grant's hands, Mr. Reed is a divinely good baddie — a scholarly creep whose wry monologues pull from a wide range of references, including, fittingly, Radiohead's "Creep."
In an interview, Grant spoke about these and other facets of his character, his journey... Read More