Well-known film and video game composer and engineer Megan McDuffee is set to release her second album, Crimson Legacy this October. After working in the film and gaming industries for over 15 years, winning multiple awards for her scores, including 'River City Girls', and making tutorials about gaming and film production, fans are curious to find out what McDuffee's style will be outside of those industries. The answer is as complex as McDuffee's style itself.
I was inspired by a wide range of artists in crafting this album such as Puscifer, Massive Attack, Nine Inch Nails, Deftones, The Cure, IAMX, Infected Mushroom, and Zeromancer.
With that diverse list of influences alone, audiences will know that Crimson Legacy will have a lot of component parts, but, in McDuffee's own tradition, they will be expertly blended into something entirely different and wholly her own. With her trademark heavy retro synths, McDuffee incorporates a number of modern genres into her passion project: industrial techno for "Your Demise," progressive metal for "Forgive Me" with RichardEB, an off-syncopated form of trap/wave for "Entity," conventional trap for "Twisted." Fans shouldn't get it actually twisted, however; while the beat structures in McDuffee's tracks may be recognisable rave standards, there's nothing standard about them. Dark, heavy and goth in nature, McDuffee produces far outside of the genre box, and for good reason.
With 'Crimson Legacy,' I wanted to capture the surrealness and essential weirdness of the 1970’s - 1990’s movies I grew up with. Films like Labyrinth, Dark City, Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, Legend, A Clockwork Orange, and Rocky Horror Picture Show. They all had a quintessential darkness, griminess, and strangeness to them that transported me to a realm of dreams and nightmares. That’s what I aim to do with my album - to take the listener into an edgy, disturbing-yet-alluring fever dream filled with lust, revenge and whimsy. 'Crimson Legacy' is for all my fellow weirdos, witches, warlocks, and creatures of the dark corners of the earth.
Sounds like you can take the artist out of the movies but you can't take those movies out of the girl. Add to all that McDuffee's stunning and heretofore criminally underused voice, her expert sound design and composition and a clear passion for expressing her own dark feelings, Crimson Legacy will make her just as celebrated in the music world as in the film and gaming worlds.
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Megan McDuffee is a Seattle-based award-winning music producer, composer, and recording artist. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, and always had something musical going on, from taking private lessons to 11 years of participating in world-traveling choirs. Megan graduated from the University of California Santa Cruz with a Bachelor of Arts in Film Scoring and a minor in Electronic Music. With a desire to further her education, she went on to the Berklee College of Music, earning a Master's Certificate in Orchestration for Film and TV.
By day Megan scores video games, TV shows, and movie trailers, and by night she produces dark, moody, edgy electronica and metal that rides the line between dreams and nightmares. Her melodies are infectious, her vocals haunting, and her production punchy and crisp. IGN recently lauded her work as “killer” and Roland featured her in an article about her production.
Megan’s music is a unique velvety and edgy cocktail of Massive Attack, IAMX, Depeche Mode, and Kidneythieves. She is a true powerhouse composing, producing, writing, singing, and engineering all of her own work.
Megan has collaborated with more than 40 other artists such as Scandroid (Celldweller), Emmy-winning James Dooley, DEMONDICE, ALEX, and Mitch Murder to name a few. Megan won two awards from the Annual Game Music Awards, for her lauded synthpop score to WayForward's River City Girls in the categories of 'Best Independent Composer' and 'Best Retro Soundtrack' (2019). She has been featured on the front page of Bandcamp, received a nomination for a Music+Sound Award for her trailer work, and amassed over 3.1 million streams in 2023 alone.
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