‘Arcane’ Composer Alex Seaver Says Music “Woven Deeply” Into Emmy-Winning Animated Series – Sound & Screen TV

For Alex Seaver, better known as the DJ Mako, strapping in and joining the thrill ride that is Arcane was a chance-in-a-lifetime adventure.

Before he joined the music team for Netflix‘s record-breaking animated series, Seaver says he was churning out music for video game developer Riot Games when writer Christian Linke “invited me to a corner of the campus that I had never been to.”

“He started playing me a little bit of Arcaneand telling me that he had been kind of cracking away for, like, three years, unbeknownst to many of us,” Seaver said on a panel for the show at Deadline’s Sound & Screen Television about the evolution of the action-adventure series inspired by Riot Games’ League of Legends multiplayer online game.

“When he asked us to get involved, we just kind of thought like, this is a dream. He loves music. And music was a big thing for him from the very beginning. And honestly, the animation that [French animation studio] Fortiche does is a real treat. It was just a joy to kind of get lost in that adventure that we didn’t see coming.”

One of the most appealing aspects about the gig has been working with big artists like Sting, Imagine Dragons and Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park to create the soundtrack for the series that follows League champions Vi and Jinx as they become caught in a power struggle between the utopian city of Piltover and the oppressed underground city of Zaun.

“Our team wanted to make a big, bespoke, original soundtrack of pop songs with big pop artists. And unlike other projects that I’ve worked on, where you’re writing things in advance and you’re kind of editing it, they wanted us to film score these songs to picture,” explained Seaver, who serves as the series’ executive music producer. “They wanted every lyric to be either from the voice of that character or like an observer looking at the scene. They wanted it to be woven deeply into it.”

Arcane first dropped on Netflix in 2021. It earned four Primetime Emmy Awards in 2022 including Outstanding Animated Program – the first streaming series to win in that category. The Arcane album was nominated for a 2022 Billboard Music Award for Top Soundtrack.

In the final chapter of the series that dropped in November, Jinx’s attack on the Council sets the stage for a dire escalation of the conflict between Piltover and Zaun.

The series is executive produced by Linke, Marc Merrill and Brandon Beck. Fortiche directed and produced the animation under the direction of the founders Pascal Charrue and Arnaud Delord.

Check back Monday for the panel video.