EGO PLUM

When it comes to The Cartoon Composer – aka Ego Plum – the weirder the cartoon, the better. Just as well, as for a musician with credits including zany projects set in the Spongebob Squarepants universe, The Cuphead Show! might just be the most off-the-wall yet…

Set in the 1930s-style world of the Inkwell Isles, Netflix’s The Cuphead Show! follows the misadventures of Cuphead and Mugman, a pair of cup brothers (stay with us now) that are hunted by the Devil, who seeks Cuphead’s soul – believing it to be rightfully his after Cuphead lost a soulharvesting game. So far, so weird…

“I gravitate towards surrealism and absurdity,” smiles Plum from his home studio in Silver Lake, L.A. “I specifically seek out projects that are completely off the wall, and they in turn, find me.”

Born and raised in East Los Angeles by immigrant parents, Plum rushed home from school to watch Looney

Tunes reruns, immersed in the worlds of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and later, the more gross-out Ren & Stimpy. The worlds were absurd; the music for a young Plum, mesmerising. “I was making cartoon music before I ever worked on cartoons,” he shares. “In my teens and early 20s I put out a CD of instrumental music for non-existent cartoons. That’s how I essentially got my first job in animation, because I was just wired for that. I was meant to do this. It’s really weird,” he shrugs.

Plum was finally able to put his music to a cartoon that did exist in 2008 with his unabashedly original score for Amy Winfrey’s series Making Fiends, going on to score SpongeBob Squarepants’ prequel/spinoff show, Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years and The Patrick Star Show, and later, Disney’s Star Vs. The Forces Of Evil and Nickelodeon’s Welcome To The Wayne and Harvey Beaks. All this, and with no formal training.

“I describe what I do as punkjazz because, frankly, I don’t have any proper musical training in jazz, or anything really! I have my own version of what jazz is: it’s unschooled, unlearned, a bit more raw – even in the way I write or record,” he points out. “I welcome mistakes and accidents.”

As well as absorbing the styles of Raymond Scott’s ‘descriptive jazz’ and Looney Tunes ’ musical director Carl Stalling, Plum’s more fluid interpretation of jazz weaves in the chaotic styles of punk rock.

“I admire people that don’t know how to play as well,” he clarifies, dead serious. “A lot of the groups that I admired were guys that picked up an instrument the week before and formed bands. One of my personal favourite albums is the first EP by the Buzzcocks. There’s an innocence and a naivete to their playing. They don’t know the right way to play these instruments yet, but there is a brilliance in what they’re writing. The ideas and the emotions are all there, but the ability is not there, and it’s wonderful.

When I hear the original recordings I did when I was 16 or 17, I wish I could recreate that sound, but it’s hard because I’ve already learned too much,” he explains. “I have recordings of me struggling to play guitar and I wish I could play like that again, but I can’t. I’ll never be able to again. I love mistakes! I love urgency. A lot of jazz guys are phenomenal players, but I love the ability to not play as well as a trait in my music, which sounds kind of insane. But it does make sense to me.”

Plum’s distinctive approach to writing music goes hand in black and white glove with The Cuphead Show! , which revives rubber hose style animation made popular in the 1920s and ‘30s. Google it and you’ll likely recognise the vaguely unsettling style of animation from some long forgotten vintage cartoon you watched as a kid. Rubber hose characters defy the laws of physics (more than your typical cartoon, anyway): characters with lifeless blacked-out eyes clad in white gloves stretch their spaghetti limbs, body parts suddenly double as instruments, or inexplicably morph into another character entirely; they might remove a limb, use the moon as a rope swing –a door could swallow a person. With rubber hose, the pencil’s the limit, and the elastic nature of the animation in turn informs the music.

“I LOVE THE ABILITY TO NOT PLAY AS WELL AS A TRAIT IN MY MUSIC, WHICH SOUNDS KIND OF INSANE. BUT IT DOES MAKE SENSE TO ME.”

“Animation gives you this freedom that you don’t get in any other kind of medium, I believe,” Plum considers. “It relies heavily on surrealism. It’s all over the place, and it really fits my short attention span. I’m good in short spurts of 22 seconds of some sort of nonsense!”

Cuphead the video game was released in 2017, and is noted for its animation and lively jazz soundtrack by Kristofer Maddigan.

“I had seen the game maybe a year before I was asked to work on it, and I thought it was gorgeous,” Plum says with genuine enthusiasm. “I had never seen anything like that: a game that essentially looks like you’re playing a 1930s Max Fleischer cartoon – down to the grain – it’s like a moving 1930s cartoon. The music was amazing, so when the opportunity came up, it was daunting and a bit frightening because the bar was so high with the music. I had that question of, ‘What do we do? Do we do something similar to this? Do I copy the music that Kristofer Madigan did? Do I do my own style? How do we give ourselves an identity while still staying true to what Cuphead is?’

“I thought it was important for me to try to create my own identity within the Cuphead universe,” he says. “The TV series lives in parallel to the game, it doesn’t have to be exactly like it. I went to the same well of influence as Kristofer did, and tried to create my own thing that felt very similar, like we could have existed at the same time in the ‘30s writing music together. But that being said, I also did include several easter eggs for fans of the game where you can hear little bits of Kristofer’s music in the cartoon. That was a lot of fun to do, because he’s a really fantastic composer, and the fans are rabid. They notice everything!”

Just like the elastic cup-headed characters in the cartoon, Plum wanted to also push the limits of what his instruments could do: “On one hand, we were using very traditional instrumentation that you would use in the ‘30s, but at the same time, I was trying to do very different things with it. I found a great group called Moon Hooch and they stick traffic cones at the end of their saxophone, and it creates this weird lower tone – bordering on the sound of dubstep music, but out of saxophones.”

He gives another example where he took a trumpet player and had him dip the bell of his trumpet in a bucket of water and play: “So it’s kind of gurgling as he’s playing,” he laughs.

“So I would hit these different ideas to make the music a little more unusual, a little bit more surreal – a little bit more animated, in a sense. My musical choices are also a bit unusual. I like things to be a little off. I like hitting the wrong notes at the right time, or vice versa. That goes back to surrealism and absurdity. I love being able to work in animation because I can do these silly and unusual things with music. And especially in the case of The Cuphead Show! where the rubber hose style is so surreal – everything defies logic. There’s room to be extra experimental with the music, while still being true to this 1930s jazz sensibility.”

When work sees him pulled away from his home studio, Plum works on the road, and thanks to his Focusrite Scarlett 18i8 portable interface, is ready to record anywhere, should inspiration strike. “The beauty of the Scarlett unit is that it’s something that I could take with me if I’m in a hotel or if I’m working remotely somewhere,” he says. “It’s in my bag, and the quality is great. Technology has advanced so much to the point where this little unit that you can fit in your backpack can record world-class broadcasting-quality stuff. I could do vocals, I could do guitar parts, record musicians, and people will be hearing it around the world – they wouldn’t know that it’s recorded through a tiny little box that you can hold in your hands. I’m not a very technical person, but I trust my ears and having this Focusrite unit and taking it with me has been very useful. There’s always times where I have to be working remotely, and for that it’s good to have that little red box with me.”

Plum wouldn’t be The Cartoon Composer if he didn’t have another obscure animation project in the works. He can’t talk about it yet, but his next project will be an animated feature that will see him bringing his unique musical perspective to the superhero universe, and after that, a cryptic project involving a theme park. “I won’t say if it’s Marvel or DC, but I’m going to be working on a project in that world,” he says carefully. “Another thing I’m doing is something that relates to a theme park. That’s really unusual, but also perfect for my sensibility. It’s strange, fun pieces of music, and this is something I absolutely embrace. If all I get to do is cartoons, and strange ones, I’ll be satisfied for the rest of my life. I don’t need anything else. It’s a wonderful world to be in. I’ve always identified with absurdity and surrealists – I gravitate towards it,” he smiles.

droW s by ALICE GUSTAfSON