Composer Laura Karpman Announces Two Film Openings

The coming weeks offer the opportunity to hear two stunning film scores by Laura Karpman, a composer who brings to her music feverish imagination, impeccable musicianship, complexity, unbridled joy, and fearlessness.

The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, a documentary based on a 1930s story charged with melodrama, sexual intrigue and maybe murder, looks at a handful of Europeans who couldn't get along when they separately settled on one of the tiny uninhabited islands in the Pacific west of South America. Combining symphonic music with newly rendered electronic soundscapes, the score unfolds as the mystery, strange and alluring as the famous archipelago itself. The movie opens in New York City on April 4, in San Francisco on April 11, and in Los Angeles on April 18.

For Regarding Susan Sontag, a feature-length documentary on the brilliant critic, novelist, director, and activist, Karpman and collaborator composer Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum have created a score that is insistent, lusty, experimental, bursting with energy and ideas, underscoring the rich, provocative, outspoken life and legacy of the great American author. The film premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 19th.

Perfectly timed to these openings is the launch of Art Farm West Records, Karpman and Kroll-Rosenbaum's new label which will offer concert music, and film, TV and videogame scores, starting with the release of the score for Regarding Susan Sontag in mid-April and the music from The Galapagos Affair is on itunes now.

Four-time Emmy award-winning Laura Karpman's highly distinguished and stunningly versatile career spans the worlds of film, television, videogame, concert and theater music. Her genre-bending scores--ranging from sci-fi Americana to neo-noir, racing action adventure to ambient sound design, world fusion to modernist orchestral colors--have garnered her numerous awards, including being called by Variety magazine "one of the most important women in Hollywood."

Recent and upcoming premieres include Now All Set, honoring her teacher Milton Babbitt; the Hidden World of Girls with NPR's The Kitchen Sisters for the Cabrillo Festival; a collaboration with New York Times columnist Gail Collins in Balls, the Tennis Opera; Different Lanes for string quartet and two ipads; the 110 Project for the LA Opera, and a recording of her critically acclaimed Ask Your Mama. Karpman has received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Ives Fellowship and several ASCAP and Meet the Composer awards. She has had residencies at Tanglewood and the MacDowell Colony. She received her doctorate from The Juilliard School, is on the UCLA faculty and was recently a guest composer of The Juilliard Composition Forum and served as the Program Director for the inaugural year of Berklee College of Music's graduate programs in Film, Television, and Video Games in Valencia, Spain.

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