Night Vision - Eric Allaman

With 25 films and over 450 episodes of television to his credit, Eric is the epitome of the working composer. Independent features, network shows, tv movies, reality television and animation - Eric has done it all. And while he is classically trained and has the chops to write an opera - and in fact has composed two - he can also, like most top-tier composers, write almost any style of music... whatever the picture calls for.

Born in Missouri, Eric grew up in Orange County, CA, which, by the way, is not called "The O.C." by anyone who hails from there. His family spent summers in his mother's native Norway, and Eric credits this time in the land of Ibsen, Grieg and Munch for helping fuel his artistic desires. By the time he graduated from high school, his fate was sealed: he was determined to make a life in music.

Giving up plans to be a doctor, Eric enrolled in the prestigious music program at UCLA, where during the day he was mentored by famed composer David Raskin (Laura) and at night fronted a busy rock band, Witness. After graduating with a double major in music and theatre, he took the route of countless artists before him and moved to Paris. It was in "The City of Light" that Eric was exposed to computers, synthesizers and sequencers, which led him to the dark and decadent city of Berlin to explore these emerging musical technologies. Barely scraping by with piano gigs in hotels and bars, Eric landed his big break working with the legendary electronic group Tangerine Dream, who exploded into popularity with their landmark score for the Tom Cruise classic Risky Business. After scoring Ridley Scott's Legend with Tangerine Dream, Eric was commissioned to compose a new score for Sergei Eisenstein's epic masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin. The premiere was a big hit at the Berlin Film Festival, generating offers that led him back to Los Angeles.

While he's best known for the prodigious amount of film and television work he's done since his return to L.A., Eric has stayed true to his classical roots by writing music for theatre, opera, ballet, and solo piano. He's also released several CD's featuring his songs, piano compositions, children's and Native American music, and has worked as a producer for MCA.

An avid surfer who lives in Malibu, his biggest fear is a ten-foot swell arriving the same day he's scheduled for a spotting session. During a rare break between gigs, Eric recently traveled to the Mentawai Islands in the Indian Ocean, spending two weeks carving up seemingly endless sets of double-overhead waves. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.