Written by Randall Roberts
Award-Winning film composer Tyler Durham announces the release of his debut album as LIMINA, the luminous new Coming Home
When the film composer Tyler Durham, who performs as LIMINA, stepped into the storied AIR Studios in London last year to record his album, Coming Home, he brought with him music born from regular rides on the city’s tube system. Among the mass of commuters, he says, “you get the faintest glimpse of their experience through a laugh, a clenched fist, or just silent contemplation.” As he internalized the hums and rhythms of trains rolling from station to station, Durham watched riders in the midst of their daily routines and wondered what they might be silently awaiting, or confronting.
The result of these travels is the breathtaking, dynamic Coming Home, which presents what Durham describes as “a story of someone estranged from their family but wanting to make amends, and what that emotional journey would look like.” Coming Home is LIMINA’s debut album for Los Angeles label Sonic Ritual and will be released to all major streaming services on April 23, 2024.
“As a film composer, I am addicted to storytelling, and that has always come out in my music,” Durham says, adding that his new album as LIMINA was a means of challenging and pushing his own creative instincts.
The tube-born narrative arc ultimately led to Durham entering AIR Studios – “one of my favorite places on the planet,” he says – to tell a story “that would allow me to be as creative as I wanted while also giving the album shape and progression.”
The composer’s palette – featuring neoclassical elements and atmospheric electronics akin to the work of Sigur Ros and layers of delicately arranged textures that suggest another Icelandic icon, the late Jóhann Jóhannsson – blossomed within AIR’s famed Lyndhurst Hall. Tones ranging from piano plucks, synth dots and bowed guitar pads to pipe organ and distorted, gated and repitched drums activated the sacred space.
Born between film projects, Coming Home reveals the skills Durham has mastered while working on films including Terrence Mallick’s News of the World and A Hidden Life; big-ticket adventure Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald; and Netflix series including Biohackers and Outer Banks. A frequent collaborator with composer Pinar Toprak, Durham has worked with her on projects such as The Lost City, Slumberland and Disney World’s EPCOT theme park. In 2020, he was nominated for a Critics Choice Documentary Award for Best Score for the film The Last Ice. Through these stylistically broad experiences, the composer has absorbed the many ways in which unuttered expressions can serve as portals into dramatic musical realms.
“Music has tremendous storytelling power, and I’ll never stop exploring it,” Durham says of his creative life. He refers to LIMINA as a means of “creating work away from picture,” a form of freedom that allows him to channel his expertise minus visual cues and edits. “My music is often commenting and supporting someone else’s story,” Durham explains, “and while I absolutely love to collaborate in that way, Coming Home became a chance to create and explore a story of my own.”
To capture the sonic ideas for Coming Home, the composer had his antenna attuned for patterns within the static, whether it be a new idea, technique, or tone. Some arrived as found sounds – tube cars, falling rocks and church bells, for example. Others washed in via VSS-30, Cycle and Serum synth tones.
Durham wrote the title track, “Coming Home” first. Opening with the sound of a distant tube station before beaming in on a woman’s voice humming a three-note melody meant to suggest the three syllables of the title. “Everything branched out from there,” Durham says.
“Sanctum,” which the composer calls “a piece about self-reflection and unearthing a place in ourselves where doubt, love, joy, and anger are all welcome,” features mesmerizing layers of siren-esque voices, a hypnotic melodic theme, midrange pump organ and the heavy clang of pitch-shifted bells.
Durham characterizes “Dissolved” as “a great playground for experimentation and texture.” The result features eerie, bent notes that sway across the measures, a skittery snare rhythm, rolling bass kicks and the occasional cavernous stomp. Heard at proper volume, it’s captivating. Heard while only halfway aware of it while multitasking a dozen other things, and the song will, like a power outage during a heat wave, cast all other concerns aside until you’re glued to LIMINA’s spine-tingling here and now.
Coming Home is set for release on April 23, 2024 and will be available on all major streaming platforms.
