Music Sales signs ‘Snowtown’ film composer

Global music publisher Music Sales has signed Australian singer-songwriter and film composer Jed Kurzel. He will be represented in Australia through its G.Schirmer catalogue, and in the UK by its Chester imprint.

The deal covers his publishing rights for prior and upcoming projects.

Adelaide-born Kurzel co-founded Sydney blues rock duo The Mess Hall, which won the 2008 Australian Music Prize for the album Devil’s Elbow.

Inspired by the master Ennio Morricone in his late teens to delve into the mystique of scores (“curiosity is the driving force of what I do”, he once said), he began in 2000 doing the scores for short films and documentaries as Sammy Blue, Naked On The Inside and Castor & Pollux.

But major recognition came five years ago when he did the soundtracks for his brother Justin’s debut feature Snowtown, following it up with Scottish director John Maclean’s Slow West. Both took out Feature Film Score of the Year at the APRA-AGSC Screen Music Awards.

Now aged 40, he went on to do the scores for Dead Europe, The Babadook, Son of A Gun, All This Mayhem and Benedict Andrews’ upcoming Una, starring Ben Mendelsohn and set to premiere next month at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Currently based in London where he worked on the score for Justin’s Macbeth, Jed is scoring his first studio film, Assassin’s Creed: Time Out Of Mind, the film adaptation of the multi-million selling video game franchise for New Regency/20th Century Fox. He will follow this with a Hungarian independent film.

Music Sales’ Lucy Bright says, “We first met Jed when he was scoring the film Slow West and he not only wrote a beautiful score, but was a joy to work with. He comes from a band background and has a very fresh approach to composing for picture, each project quite distinct and with a voice which sets him apart from many in the field.”

Music Sales Group is headquarters in the UK, with offices in USA, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, Hong Kong and Australia. Its roster includes film and TV composers as Ludovico Einaudi, Michael Nyman, Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire), Stuart Copeland (The Police), Bryce Dessner (The National), Solomon Grey, Philip Glass, Dustin O’Halloran and Alberto Iglesias.