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“Where ruin meets reverie,
and every music note carries a soul.”
The Ash Side
We believe music is a soul-satisfying artform, and we take meaningful steps when creating concepts surrounding music-based empathy, character backgrounds, storylines, and the many aspects of personal effect the player experiences. There are many sides to the human experience we love to learn about so we can help tell stories the way they’re meant to be felt. Adventure, beauty, elation, honor, hope, pride, serenity – and over to the opposite end: lament, perseverance, tribulation, or wistfulness.
The Aether Side
We thrive when tasked with creating music that is not just exceptionally well composed & produced, but also bold, daring,
and unapologetically creative. We’re no stranger to genre hybridizing, especially with the incredibly unique soundtrack Jesse Zuretti is composing for 2XKO. Each member of our team specializes in writing music that shakes things up when our clients need that most.
About Us
We’re an external development team focused on delivering creative, highly polished, powerful music, and precise music.
We have vast flexibility and scalability for game dev studios and productions of all sizes.
Because of our team stack and external resources, we can easily meet production timelines of any kind – we may even be able to shorten overall stretches.
Limitless Genre Capabilities: we have unparalleled genre fluency that enables our team the abilities to not only musically profile characters, emotions, narratives, and worlds, but also create the most effective and thought-provoking music that devs need to complete their productions.
Cultural Respect & Trust: The A&A team have decades of producing, writing, performing, engineering, and touring (internationally & domestically) in the music industry – which opens circles to broad talent pools for collaborations and features.
What we do
Our team can do it all. From initial concepts
to final edits, Ash & Aether can complete each step of the process within the team.
COMPOSE ORIGINAL MUSIC
ORCHESTRATE & ARRANGE
RECORD & EDIT
MIX & MASTER
Meet the team.
Jesse Zuretti
Audio Director / Composer
Colm McGuinnesss
Composer / Vocalist / Orchestrator
Nolan Markey
Composer / Orchestrator
Sydney Zuretti
Orchestrator / Arranger / Contractor
The Composers
We are composers who have paved our own way into our careers in music. While we may not have followed the same traditional path of the great composers before us, our journey has given us unconventional gigs where we had the great honor of building into fantastical worlds.
From Marvel, to Critical Role, to Riot Games, we use our art to directly serve the needs of the story rather than follow the trends of our time.
“ Wasing the Always
of Wanting of Music Making ”
Jesse Zuretti
MARVEL, RIOT GAMES, DC
Hybrid Composer & Producer, and Audio Director. Specializes in character themes and drawing upon many sources to create something unique. 25 years experience in the music industry, and a living encyclopedia of musical styles.
Colm McGuinness
CRITIAL ROLE, WARHAMMER
Composer, multi-instrumentalist/performer, and singer/songwriter. Specializes in the fantasy sound. A globally recognized regular performer who prolifically releases music every week to his YouTube audience of 800,000+ subs.
Nolan Markey
AMAZON, DISNEY, LUCASFILM
Composer, orchestrator, and conductor. Specializes in enormous, larger-than-life orchestral sounds and memorable motivic themes in fantasy, space opera, and sci-fi. With more than a decade of experience in television and video games, he is most at home where the imagination runs wild.
The Orchestrator
SYDNEY KJERSTAD ZURETTI, Ash & Aether’s Co-Owner & Controller, can orchestrate, hire musicians, manage a recording session, handle the budget, and can wrangle the boys together when necessary (which is often).
Her three loves are music, video games, and books. As the Head of Materia Editions of Materia Music Inc., she gets to create score books, piano sheet music books, and many other types of printed music that celebrates video games. She is particularly proud of her work on the Hollow Knight Piano Collections: Easy Version book and the DELTARUNE Chapters, 2, 3, 4, (and 5’s coming!) Piano Score books.
She, alongside the team:
MANAGES BUDGETS & ANY OTHER CLERICAL WORK NEEDED
ORCHESTRATES & ARRANGES THE COMPOSERS’ MUSIC
RUNS RECORDING SESSIONS WITH ORCHESTRA AND OTHER LIVE PLAYERS
SUBCONTRACTS MUSICIANS WE NEED TO MAKE THE BEST MUSIC POSSIBLE
Music highlights
The North Star to any project we work on is the
story. The music we write serves to elevate themes,
situations, and characters of the narrative.
Mistborn
Stormlight
“ The purpose of a storyteller is not
to tell you how to think, but to give you
questions to think upon. ”
OUR ETHOS: We have direct experience with creating worlds and blending genres. We know how to write motifically and thematically. Our experience with Riot, Marvel, and Critical Role have honed our sense of narrative within music.
We also love working with other musicians and artists. In most of our projects, we reach out to other artists who we know will add something to the music. Our company structure allows us to supplement and collaborate with any other musicians/composers to create a congruent experience for the franchise, while maintaining an identifiable experience for the project at hand.
Is that ALL we do?
Of course not!
The team:
RECORDS, EDITS, & MIXES TO THE HIGHEST STANDARDS
HAS A WONDERFUL ARSENAL FULL OF WONDERFUL MUSICIANS
WORKS QUICKLY, EFFICIENTLY, AND MAINTAINS INTEGRITY TO THE SOURCE MATERIAL
LIVES NEAR ONE ANOTHER, AND ARE ALSO ABLE TO TRAVEL FOR WORK
We care deeply about art and making music. So much so, that we take the time to share what we create. We don’t hide behind desks! We record, document, and share the process of our music making, because there is nothing so sacred that we can’t show how we work!
We love to record video and love to offer performances, behind the scenes, breakdown videos, or anything else that can further connect audiences with the project!
