Wired for sound

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This article was published 26/04/2021 (1670 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Some years ago, my mother called to say she’d figured out how they do that “dun-dun” sound on Law & Order, referring of course to the sonic signature of scene changes in the 1990-2010 police procedural and its many spinoffs.

“Oh yes?” I responded, making notes for the story that I am now writing.

“Yes. It’s a car door slamming.”

She and I were not alone in wondering about it. A 2017 Vice story about a 1993 Entertainment Weekly interview quoted the show’s composer, Mike Post, as saying he created the dun-dun — or chung-chung — to sound like a “jail cell locking.” Half point to mother. Full point to the acclaimed composer for the ultimate victory in scoring original music for a TV show: creating a sound effect as well as a theme song that instantly identifies the show and communicates its foreboding tone.

Manitoba’s own Mitch Dorge would agree that is a victory, although maybe with a qualification. You might know Dorge as the drummer for the Crash Test Dummies, maybe even know he has co-producing credit on the band’s 1993 megahit album, God Shuffled His Feet. But in the years between then and the band’s pandemic-interrupted 25th-anniversary world tour, Dorge has — while also workshopping in schools and working on a number of other straight-up musical projects — become a prodigious film and TV composer, including Lake Winnipeg’s answer to Discovery Channel’s hit crab-fishing show, Deadliest Catch.

Ice Vikings is about a handful of descendants of Gimli’s Icelandic settlers who are still in the fraught business of ice fishing on Lake Winnipeg. Season 2 was filmed this winter as the series debuted on Cottage Life (and on the streaming app RiverTV). The season 1 finale is set for April 27 at 9 p.m.

Dorge is something like the resident composer at Farpoint Films, the company behind Ice Vikings and other projects that have made up a good chunk of the 100 TV projects for which he’s done music.

Talking about Ice Vikings, which he is scoring from his home studio just outside of Winnipeg, he says, “The piece that I want to stick in people’s heads is the opening. So I want people to be sitting in the room next door and I want them, when it comes on, to go, ‘Hey that’s Ice Vikings!’”

But on the subject of the sound or music taking centre stage over the scene itself, as the dun-dun has done? Nope.

“I want people to feel things but I don’t want them to necessarily know why,” he says.

“When the show is over, I don’t want people going back and saying, ‘Wow that music was really good. I want them thinking, ‘Wow, that was really intense.’”

And while Ice Vikings is loaded with good characters and humour, it does indeed host an intense spectrum of grandfather-father-son friction, small-town competition and of course the weather, the ice and the cold cold lake.

Dorge says the process begins with writer/producer/director Chris Charney asking for “heavier-metal sounding music; however, we want it to move forward, we want tension, but we also want cliffhangers… tension and release.”

What follows is a back and forth that starts with maybe five or six pieces up to 90 seconds apiece and ends, for season 1, with 50 or 60 pieces.

Then the editors “will take their creative licence and run with it … put it together in their own creative way. And again that comes back to me and enhances my creative process because now I see how the editors are thinking.”

Asked how his scoring work fits with his other musical pursuits, he says, “I think that has enhanced my collaborative abilities a thousand-fold because everything that I do, all the music for Ice Vikings and stuff like that, I do probably 80 per cent of (the performing) on my own. I’ll do the guitar work, I do the keyboard work, I do the whatever.”

And if he can’t do “what I think is really going to knock the socks off, and if it’s beyond my abilities here, then I have a crew of people that I call.”

Beyond Ice Vikings, he’s currently also composer and sound designer on another Farpoint TV project called Disaster Déja Vu, about cities transformed by multiple tragedies. Outside of TV, he’s also doing drums for Winnipeg pianist and saxophonist Connor Derraugh’s next album.

The notoriously upbeat Dorge — “You can ask anybody; it’s bloody annoying” — downplays his recent diagnosis of prostate cancer. His surgery was March 13, 2020, when the pandemic officially hit.

“I am well,” the competitive squash player says, noting he was back on the court in six weeks.

“I’ve been able to excel in something that I really like so I’m doing that with music. I’m doing that with a level of sport. Life has been wonderful. When you talk about composing, the feature films and in excess of 100 TV things that I’ve done… Not ever has it ever felt like a job. How lucky am I?”

— Special to the Winnipeg Free Press

Denise Duguay writes about TV twice a week at d2tv.wordpress.com. Questions, comments to d2tvblog@gmail.com.