Before the film scores and the 1.6 million views, the British composer was improvising with house bands under South London and writing for dancers at Tate Modern. Los Angeles is where that language went, not where it started.
The Matchstick Pie House sat in Deptford, in the arches under the railway, which is where a lot of London music has always happened for the simple reason that nobody can hear you. Caitlin Perry played there weekly with The Fold, a rotating set of house bands built around jam sessions. Nothing written in advance. Musicians arriving, listening, responding, building something in the room and then losing it when everyone went home.
That is where she learned to compose, and it explains a great deal about how her music sounds now.
Composing in real time
Most film composers describe their formation through study. Perry’s actually happened in performance. The Fold sessions were improvisational, which meant composing under conditions where you cannot revise: you decide harmonically in the moment, you respond to what a drummer just did, you find the shape of a piece by playing it rather than notating it.
The habit stuck. Listen to her ambient work and the texture is being explored rather than deployed. Long decays, harmonic movement that arrives late, an ear for what happens when a sound is allowed to sit. That is the vocabulary of someone who spent years finding music live rather than assembling it.
She was also training formally at the time, in classical piano and composition at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, which put a second language underneath the first.
Tate Modern, with dancers
In February 2020, Perry’s original contemporary classical composition was performed with dancers in the Museum Gallery of the Blavatnik Building at Tate Modern, a piece made through Trinity Laban that put her writing directly alongside movement. Composing for bodies in a gallery rather than for a recording is a specific discipline. Tempo becomes physical. Silence becomes something an audience watches somebody stand inside.
The following year, in December 2021, an original Perry composition for big band and orchestra was performed at Woolwich Works by Trinity Laban’s Composers Ensemble. Large ensemble writing, contemporary idiom, live players.
Between the arches and the gallery, she had already done the two things that most define a composer: written for scale and written for a room. Berklee came after, where she took a degree in screen scoring and jazz composition, and where she spent two years as a session pianist in the Studio Film Orchestra. But by the time Perry reached Los Angeles she had been performing, composing and building a musical language for years.
Enya, Eno and a piano with things inside it
Her sound leans atmospheric rather than heroic. Prepared piano, meaning objects placed on and between the strings until the instrument stops sounding like itself. Orchestral writing folded into electronics. Modular and analogue synthesis, processed voice, field texture. She names Enya and Brian Eno alongside Hildur Gudnadottir, Max Richter, Aphex Twin and Danny Elfman.
None of that arrived at once. The classical training is why the ambient material still moves harmonically instead of hovering. The improvisation is why the experimental material has direction. The ensemble writing is why the orchestral material never sounds like a preset. Her interest in horror, dark fantasy and magical realism follows from all three, since those are the genres that reward sound over melody and let the relationship between silence and orchestration do the work.
What the animation gave her
Film scoring became the place where the separate parts could operate at once. Over the past year Perry has scored four animated shorts for Spanish animator Isabella Ferreiro, who publishes as be3el. “Little Ballerina” has passed 856,000 views, “Hidden Words” 447,000, “Pixie Hollow” 319,000, with this year’s “Beltane” adding 45,000 more. Beyond that partnership sit “A Woman with Webbed Feet” for director Rose Mollet, the Bristol stop motion short “Heirlooms,” and “How 2 Live Organically,” a claymation film screened at the MFA Film Festival in Boston.
Across her independent work the count is past 1.6 million, none of it with studio distribution behind it. What the animation actually gave her was a form where orchestration, contemporary composition, ambient electronics and experimental sound design all belong in the same piece.
Santa Monica, in the background
The professional side is real and comparatively quiet. Perry works as a studio technical assistant at Arata Music Inc., the scoring company associated with composer Steve Jablonsky, following a period at Remote Control Productions. Orchestral scoring, live sessions, studio projects. It is the environment in which the language she brought from London now gets applied.
Going long
The Perry and Ferreiro partnership is expanding. A feature length animated film scored by Perry arrives at the end of this year, their first at that length.
That is a different proposition from a five minute short. A recurring relationship between a composer and a visual artist develops its own shorthand, a shared sense of what a colour wants to sound like, and long form is where that shorthand gets tested. Ninety minutes of a world means the atmosphere has to sustain rather than arrive, and both of them have to find out what their vocabulary can hold.
Perry has been building toward that since the arches. It just took a while for anyone to be watching.
