Info

T. Griffin is a songwriter, composer and producer based in Brooklyn New York. He has composed music for over 20 feature films and dozens of live multidisciplinary projects. He was one of six composers selected as a fellow at the Sundance Composer's lab in 2008 and has been nominated twice for CinemaEye Honors for original music score.



Bio Short

T. Griffin is a songwriter, composer and producer working in Brooklyn, New York. Alone and with his band The Quavers he has released four critically acclaimed CDs of songs in a homespun electronic style that's been described as 'porch techno'.

He has scored films for Tristan Patterson (SXSW Grand Jury winner DragonSlayer, 2011), Liza Johnson (Cannes’ only American Director’s Fortnight entry, Return, 2011), Marshall Lewy (California Solo, 2012), Tze Chun (Children of Invention, 2009), Landon Van Soest (Good Fortune, 2009), Michael Almereyda (New Orleans, Mon Amour, 2008), Cynthia Lester (Slamdance Jury Prize Winner My Mother's Garden 2008) Kim Reed (Telluride sensation Prodigal Sons, 2008), Esther B. Robinson (Berlin Teddy Award Winner, A Walk Into The Sea, 2007) as well as shorts for Peter Sillen and Jem Cohen and others. He wrote original songs and a full score for avant-garde theater director Anne Bogart's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and has created and performed live soundtrack shows for Jem Cohen, Brent Green, and international tours with Sam Green and the late Danny Williams' Warhol Factory films.

As a producer and player he has worked with musical luminaries including Vic Chesnutt, Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine, Mary Margaret O'Hara and members of godspeed you! black emperor, Fugazi and The Ex. Griffin was a 2008 fellow at the Sundance Institute Composer's Lab. He has twice been nominated for CinemaEye Honors for original score, once for Utopia in Four Movements, and once for Dragonslayer.

Bio Long



T. Griffin is a songwriter, composer and producer working in Brooklyn, New York. He has released four critically acclaimed CDs of songs on the Shiny Little Records label: Tortuga and Light in the Aisles as solo projects, The Sea Won't Take Long under the moniker T. Griffin Coraline and Lit By Your Phone in collaboration with violinist Catherine McRae under the band name The Quavers. His combination of acoustic instruments, narrative songs and homespun electronics has been described as "porch techno". As a solo artist and with McRae he has been featured on NPR, toured nationally and internationally, and received raves in music press.

A prolific film composer, Griffin was selected as one of six fellows at the 2008 Sundnce Composer’s Lab. He has composed and recorded feature film scores for Tristan Patterson (SXSW Grand Jury winner DragonSlayer, 2011), Liza Johnson (Cannes’ only American Director’s Fortnight entry, Return, 2011), Tze Chun (Children of Invention, Sundance 2009), Michael Almereyda (New Orleans, Mon Amour, SXSW 2008), Esther B. Robinson (Berlin Film Festival Teddy Award Winner, A Walk Into The Sea, 2007), Kimberly Reed (the 2008 Telluride sensation Prodigal Sons), Cameron Yates (Canal Street Madam, SXSW 2010), Landon van Soest (SilverDocs Witness Prize winner Good Fortune), Cynthia Lester (Slamdance Jury Prize Winner and MSNBC Special, My Mother's Garden 2008), Dan Lohaus (the Tribeca NYC Doc Prize Winner When I Came Home, 2006), among others. Short films he has scored include Jesse Epstein's 34x25x36, (POV 2008), Tze Chun's Silver Silng (ITVS Futurestates 2010), Peter Sillen's Alice's House (2003), and Esther B. Robinson's Phototaxis (2006).

Academy Award nominated director Sam Green (The Weather Underground) tapped Griffin and The Quavers to provide the live score for his Utopia In Four Movements project, a presentation with live narration and music that premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and toured for most of ’10 and ’11 all over the united states and international festivals including Istanbul, Warsaw and Amsterdam. He has collaborated with the noted filmmaker Jem Cohen on many projects, beginning with the short film Blood Orange Sky (alongside Sparklehorse) and including the shorts NYC Weights and Measures, Free, and Night Scene, the feature Chain and the installation Chain x 3. Griffin and Cohen have also collaborated on numerous live soundtrack projects, from the loose, often improvised series 8 Ball, Corner Pocket at various NYC venues (2002-2008), to the evening length Empires of Tin which closed the 2007 Viennale. Empires of Tin, which also featured Vic Chesnutt, Guy Picciotto (Fugazi) and members of A Silver Mount Zion is available on DVD from Constellation Records. A 2010 live collaboration with Cohen and DJ/Rupture, Andy Moor (the Ex) and Guy Picciotto (Fugazi), Mexico City By Chance, premiered in Mexico City in 2009 and was presented at the Santiago Film Festival in Chile that August.

In 2004 Griffin composed a full score and original songs for avant-garde theater director Anne Bogart's radical restaging of A Midsummer Night's Dream which premiered at San Jose Reparatory Theater and was subsequently produced by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and for a Northeast Tour, both in 2006. He created scores for live accompaniment to two plays by Kristen Marting, Dead Tech (2002) and Erendira (2003), both produced by HERE in New York. His first theater score was for Wreckage (1997) which he also co-created and performed with Aaron Landsman at PS 122.

Griffin had a long working relationship with the songwriter Vic Chesnutt, he produced and arranged his song "Foxx and Little Vic" for the DVD of Jem Cohen and Peter Sillen's Benjamin Smoke, put together and led a 9 piece band backing Chesnutt for a 3 night New York stand celebrating the re-release of his first four records in 2006, and played guitar and electronics on his 2007 CD North Star Deserter. In the fall of 2009 Griffin joined Vic's all-star band for five weeks of shows across North America, powerful concerts that would, sadly, be Vic's last.

For Patti Smith, Griffin music directed and played in a band featuring Tom Verlaine, members of Fugazi, A Silver Mount Zion, and The Ex as part of the Fusebox festival in Ghent, Belgium curated by Jem Cohen. He also arranged an original setting of a William Blake poem for Smith backed by a string quartet. At the same festival he joined Tom Verlaine and Guy PIcciotto for a largely improvised instrumental set, playing 2nd guitar and electronics, with Picciotto on bass. Also with Piccotto, he created a soundscape of WW 1 recordings for a film by Cohen, which they reprised for the Empires of Tin soundtrack.

As a sidebar to Esther Robinson's acclaimed documentary A Walk Into The Sea, Griffin and violinist Catherine McRae created a live soundtrack for the 16mm films that Robinson's subject, her uncle Danny Williams, shot at the Warhol Factory in 1966. That live soundtrack show has been presented at the London Film Festival, the Viennale, The Buenos Aires Film Festival, the MIX festival in New York, International House in Philadelphia, the NW Film Forum, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Walker Art Center. Beginning in the Summer of 08 Guy Picciotto replaced Catherine McRae as the second performer and appeared with Griffin at the Santiago International Film Festival and the ICA in Boston.