The Colossus series for Omnisphere has a very fond space in my roster of soundset releases. It harks back to how and why I got into becoming The Unfinished, and why I started making computer music and playing with synths.

I’d always been a dance/electronica head in my youth; from the late 80s origins of house music, through rave, techno and trance into the late 90s. But, a part of me was always drawn to dance music that incorporated a bit of piano and strings.

As year 2000 came around, the sounds in my head had become more and more in vogue, via artists such as Craig Armstrong and Rob Dougan. I myself even wrote a theatre score at university that fused slowed down hardcore rave breaks with workstation ocrchestral sounds provided by a Kurzweil K2500. But, most of all, a band called Hybrid had taken lush orchestral sounds and fused them with trancey synths and hi-octane breakbeats with their debut 1998 album, Wide Angle.

It blew my mind.

Although, at the time, my mind remained elsewhere, not yet thinking of music and sound as a career.

Then, in the mid 2000s, Hybrid released their third album, I Choose Noise. A stunningly cinematic, electronic album, it was here that I first learned of their work with Harry Gregson-Williams and, furthermore, Gregson-Williams‘ film soundtracks.

Spy Game, Phone Booth, Man On Fire and Deja Vu all captured my imagination. Whilst Hybrid had expanded my ideas of the orchestra meeting dance music, these film scores integrated the techy, electronic synth sounds I’d grown up loving into the action and emotion of cinematic scoring in a way I had simply never heard before.

It was at this point I decided I had to get into making music with computers, to try and make my own blend of the cinematic and the synthetic.

And the origins of The Unfinished were born…

Subsequently both Hybrid and Harry Gregson-Williams have continued to influence my music and my sound design. The Colossus series for Omnisphere (kicked off in 2015) has, naturally, been more informed by Gregson-Williams‘ more recent work, as well as the music of contemporary film composers.

Total Recall, The Equalizer series, Infinite and Retribution have continued that seam of hi-octane, emotional and atmospheric Hollywood soundtracks, progressing that blend of the cinematic and the electronic that I fell in love with some 20 years ago.

I hope the love I have for that sound comes through in Colossus V and Colossus V Deluxe.