Darren Solomon
COMPOSER / BASS / KEYS
- Darren Solomon is a Brooklyn-based composer, producer, bassist and keyboard player. His music career began auspiciously, when at the age of 19 he joined the touring band of music legend Ray Charles as his bassist. After two years on the road, completing a music degree from NYU, and another four years of touring with Barry Manilow, he began working as a composer. He's earned a Best Music Clio and a Cannes Gold Lion, scoring over 500 ads for clients like Google, AMEX, Pepsi, L'Oreal, Honda and MnM's.Darren and co-composer Chris Jordão wrote the score for the Netflix series Invisible City, which premiered in the top 10 Netflix shows internationally in Feb 2021.He is Creative Director and Partner at Quiet City Music + Sound, a music production house with studios in New York and San Paulo, Brazil.Maintaining an avid interest in the intersection of art and technology, Darren created the crowdsourced web-based music project In Bb 2.0, which became a viral hit, featured on NPR, CNN, and the Evolution of The Music Video series at BFI, London.As a venue for his songwriting and production, he created the project Science for Girls, which was featured in Electronic Musician and KCRW's Song of The Day.Other highlights in a unique career include producing and DJ'ing the music for the H&M x Balmain runway show, composing the theme to A&E's Parking Wars and curating for the inaugural season at the innovative Brooklyn venue National Sawdust. As a visiting artist at SUNY Purchase, Darren enjoys working with the next generation of musicians and producers, teaching masterclasses in music production and composition.Darren enjoys maintaining a multi-faceted career in music, including performing, exploring applications for music in new media, composing for dance companies, and curating and producing live shows.
- web projects
I created a collaborative music project called In B Flat 2.0
The videos for the site were created by me and people from all over the world. The project was featured on NPR, CNN, and Google Creative Lab's 87 Cool Things On The Web. Hear my interview on NPR's Weekend Edition.
As a visiting artist at Northern State University, I worked with the students to create marker/music, a music and Google map mashup.Covid Jamz. A few projects and collabs, to stay creative and connected during quarantine.
I wrote Everything Bad But Forever, a program written in p5.js that generates an infinitely long drug commercial. Using a data set of the text from 75 actual drug ads, it algorithmically creates weird and horrifying side effects and recites them over a random selection of stock footage. The drug names are generated from a data set of 100 actual product names. Here's some footage of its output.
