The brief for the score from the team was that they wanted the audience to ‘feel’ the score rather than ‘hear’ the score; never to overdramatise the story but to be almost documentary like in places.

The music had to come from or within the environment to totally immerse you and make you feel like you were in the drama with the characters experiencing it in a visceral way so I was working in the space where sound design meets score, influenced by the surroundings of the location and environment such as the swimming pool, the hotel corridors, the basement kitchen and gun shots.

The team gave me sound effects of the industrial hotel kitchen , the sucking sound of waves crashing on the beach, the gun shots, various atmospheres which I manipulated and integrated into the music.

I really enjoy working with found sound , it was like going back to my roots as a sound designer.

Jo spends much of her time running up and down corridors and so I though the idea of using breath in some cues, particularly at the end of episodes 1 and 2 could be very effective; using breath for fear and breath as a visceral immersive up-close feeling for tension. To achieve this I used Keeley Hawe’s breathing from some of the sync recordings and injected it into rhythms in some cues.

The visuals feel different from most TV dramas set in hotels, and the soundtrack had to equally progress the momentum – to be non conventional – and also match the aesthetic of the show.

Rhythms and pulses were always restrained without being cliched big bombastic percussion but created from subtle found sound elements. I wanted to bring out feelings of tension, compression, claustrophobia, a visceral immersive discomfort and disorientating feeling. We didn’t want the music to distract from the picture but I also had to bring out moments of emotion so I had to establish a theme for our heroine Jo that would tie in throughout the series which I created using the saxophone.

Strings are an immediate go to ‘cliché’ which I wanted to avoid. So with that in mind I decided to use reed instruments and use the concept of breath, I used prepared , Xaphoon, saxophone and bass clarinets recording them using extended techniques such as circular breathing. I felt it also added an evocative touch to represent Joe’s seduction and illicit romance with Chinar. You can hear it in the flashback moments in an emotional seductive way but also ‘present’ day moments of tension in a rhythmical way.

We felt that little smatterings of melodic motifs for these emotional moments juxtaposed against the generally non-melodic score of ‘music design’ would create greater impact.

When the family arrive at the hotel I also brought in touches of nylon string guitar that have a very slight Moorish touch to evoke the Spanish location.

The different locations had their own feel – I tried to open up the score for the beach and exterior scenes with a wide expansive atmospheres that provided a breather from the interior close claustrophobic moments which had tight intense ambiences.