By Metal Lair |Interview by Christy Norris
Composer Andrew Gordon Macpherson sat down with Metal Lair to discuss scoring Hulu’s Into the Void A documentary series that dives deep into heavy metal’s darkness and mythology.
When Into the Void roars to life, you’re not just hearing a documentary score, you’re entering a requiem for heavy metal itself. Composer Andrew Gordon Macpherson doesn’t observe the genre from afar; he breathes it. He channels the ferocity and fragility of the genre into something mythic. As a lifelong metalhead, he translates its raw spirit into cinematic form. A language of distortion, emotion, and lore.
“Music isn’t background noise,” Macpherson says. “It’s the gravity pulling the story apart.”
Inside the Sound of Andrew Gordon Macpherson Into the Void
Andrew Gordon Macpherson Into the Void is the focus of this Metal Lair interview about the making of Hulu’s new heavy metal documentary series.
Andrew Gordon Macpherson Into the Void captures the emotional pulse of metal through distortion, ambience, and grief. Macpherson’s music doesn’t simply underscore the stories of metal’s icons, it amplifies them, shaping redemption into something almost sacred.
we explore how he forged that delicate balance between reverence and rebellion, crafting a score that feels sacred and as defiant as the legends themselves.
Now, with Hulu and VICE’s Into the Void, Macpherson reunites with producers Evan Husney and Jason Eisener to sonically chart heavy metal’s mythology, its rebellion, excess, and redemption. Into the Void doesn’t romanticize the genre’s darkness; it dissects it with affection and precision. Season One dives straight into the deep end, tracing stories of addiction, violence, and transcendence told through the lives of metal’s most haunted icons.
🎥 Watch: Into the Void – Behind the Score with composer Andrew Gordon Macpherson
One of the series’ most devastating moments, the Dimebag Darrell episode demanded more than a score; it required a eulogy in feedback and sustain. Macpherson responded with an unorthodox orchestration: a “string section” built entirely from whammy-pedal glides, reimagining Dimebag’s signature tone as a harmonic requiem. The result is a cue that feels both personal and monumental, vibrating with loss yet shot through with reverence.
Macpherson walks us through the making of that sound. How to write “cinematic ambient metal,” how to make feedback feel sentient, and how to honor a scene that has always lived between death and devotion.
INTERVIEW
Christy: When you first signed on to score Into the Void, what creative problem did you know you had to solve to make the series feel honest and respectful but still undeniably metal?
Andrew: The obvious technical challenge is that dialogue is hard to understand at the same time as double kicks and shredding solos, but I didn’t want to write a score that felt outside of the tastes of metal fans. So we developed a kind of cinematic ambient metal that uses a lot of the ingredients of metal; Scoring techniques like adapting amp feedback to string arrangements and palm muted chugging into ostinato sequences, metal drum grooves into gate patterns on synthesizer noise. Stuff like that. Also, I never wanted the score to feel like a cheap sound-alike of metal songs, it needed to be markedly different and obviously “score.”
Christy: Which metal subgenres, artists, or sonic textures did you draw from most (e.g., doom weight, thrash momentum, ambient/drone, cinematic strings)?
Andrew: All of those found their way in, and thrash was my favourite subgenre growing up, but doom/stoner rock vibes have been on the menu from me a lot lately. I love Octave fuzz, big muffs and super fuzz pedals and how they can create this dreadful strut with even a minimal drum groove, and that’s perfect for some story moments. Thrash-y down picking patterns with some added sync’d gating helped drive and move the story forward. I leaned into ambient/drone feedback for the eerie, reflective quality—it’s amazing how a few held notes of feedback with an envelope can feel alive as a string orchestra. And yes, I brought in strings and piano, but often disguised them with distortion and other production techniques so they felt like cousins to the guitars rather than outsiders.
Christy: The Dimebag Darrell segment hits especially hard. What was your north star for that tribute, musically and emotionally?
Andrew: Dimebag was on my wall as a teenager. His posters literally surrounded me while I learned guitar so I don’t think there’s been a musician’s death I was more personally affected by. I wanted something unique for his episode that paid tribute and built on what I was figuring out for the style of this show and I landed on building a “string section” out of whammy pedal glides—a very Dimebag sound, but reimagined in a harmonic, orchestral way.
Christy: When you’re scoring something as emotionally charged as Into the Void, how do you decide when not to score or when silence or minimalism tells the story better than sound?
Andrew: I guess it’s a taste/intuition thing primarily, but Jason Eisener’s style tends to be pretty “wall-to-wall” music, so it’s rare that I am laying out totally. So in the case of HIS films, silence is a significant punctuation, usually on a big revelation in the interview dialogue. Otherwise, the “density” of the arrangement has gotta ride the narrative, push or stretch or propel when it has the opportunity and just float or dance or rally as the story demands.
Christy: You’ve scored Dark Side of the Ring—what lessons or techniques from that show did you carry into Into the Void?
Andrew: Dark Side of the Ring was the first show that I scored and I’ve developed so much over the course of doing it. My entire creative process is built on the lessons learned from it whether they be how to build and elaborate or a uniques style for an episode (choose a limited palette of instruments as the key ensemble, write thematically, etc) , to dealing with the pressure and time constraints of a post production schedule (spending only 45 mins writing a first draft of each piece, then switching to an editing/refining mode until my time runs out). I have kind of a framework/shorthand now of translating the musical need of the scene into one of 16 verbs (a list that has been refined over 60 episodes of DSOTR). In conjunction with what I’m getting from the story, these verbs unlock all of the creative questions I need to answer to get a piece finished quickly and also helps me figure out how music can get repurposed elsewhere if it needs to. Lastly, these shows are both music-edited by the picture editors, so making my arrangements “editor-friendly” with potential loop points, up endings and down endings, etc has helped.
Christy: How did you balance period authenticity (tones/gear) with a modern, cinematic mix that works for streaming?
Andrew: I went down the rabbit hole of old pedals, amps, rack FX and even bought a replica of Eddie Van Halen’s bumblebee guitar (the one buried with Dime). That gave me authenticity at the source. From there, it was about treating those sounds like orchestral instruments—layering, EQ’ing, and placing them in a modern cinematic mix. So you’re hearing something that evokes vintage metal tones at times, but sits as an element in this lush dreamscape of (hopefully) unique modern cinematic music.
Christy: Any favorite cues or cues that almost didn’t make it or little “composer secrets” fans should listen for?
Andrew: In the Judas Priest episode, which deals with subliminal messages and back-masking, a lot of the themes are present forward and reverse; I actually recorded them, reversed it, re-learned the parts backwards, re-recorded it and reversed it again. So subliminally I’ve been manipulating the public to lobby the Hulu/Vice executives to greenlight a lot more seasons for me to score 🙂
Christy: What do you hope longtime metal fans feel when they hear this score and what do you hope newcomers hear for the first time?
Andrew: For longtime fans, I hope the score resonates and speaks a language they recognize. For newcomers, I want them to feel an atmosphere, sense of place and the emotional scope of these metal giants. Ideally, everyone walks away feeling moved by the stories and a deeper connection to a community of metalheads.
Christy: If you could describe the soundtrack in three words, what would they be?
Andrew: Shedding Tears Shredding
“I went down the rabbit hole of old pedals, amps, rack FX—and even bought a replica of Eddie Van Halen’s Bumblebee guitar, the one buried with Dime.”
— Andrew Gordon Macpherson
Into the Void: Life, Death & Heavy Metal (Hulu)
“Into the Void” isn’t a museum tour of metal; it’s a crime scene walk-through with the amps still humming. Across eight episodes, the series digs into the genre’s most gut-punching chapters, Randy Rhoads’ plane crash, the murder of Dimebag Darrell, the Judas Priest trial and pulls real feeling out of stories most outlets treat like spooky trivia. The voices you trust, Osbourne, Sarzo and Aldridge aren’t interviewed through filters; you feel their fractures.
The series keeps pressing on the tension metalheads know by heart: how something this life-giving is always shadowed by risk, bad venues, corrupt managers, addiction and true crime crossing the stage barrier.
The filmmakers know the weight of memory and the flames of performance. Archive footage, raw testimony, and tight pacing make tragedy visceral, not voyeuristic. It sometimes leans heavy into darkness, but that’s part of metal’s tension: how creation exists on the edge of ruin.
Production wise, you can feel the fingerprints of Jason Eisener and Evan Husney (the team behind Dark Side of the Ring). They know how to balance archive shock with human detail, so a headline becomes a life. That pedigree matters here; it’s why the series lands emotional body blows instead of just listing disasters.
If names like Rhoads or Dimebag still echo in your head, watch this. It’ll make you hear the music again with your heart in your throat.
Verdict: Mandatory. Sit with it. Let it shake the bones.
Closing Thoughts
There’s a kind of poetry in watching metal’s story told by people who lived it and hearing it scored by someone who understands why distortion feels like truth. Andrew Gordon Macpherson doesn’t just compose for Into the Void; he translates what this music has always meant to its followers: the catharsis, the mythology, and the beauty buried in the sound.
Season One sets the tone for what could become the definitive chronicle of heavy music’s human core. One that refuses nostalgia and embraces honesty. It’s a reminder that metal, for all its chaos, is still about connection: between artist and fan, grief and grace, brutality and transcendence.
Metal Lair exists in that same tension between the underground and the eternal and Into the Void mirrors that mission perfectly. It’s not just another documentary; it’s a requiem for those who carried the torch, and a call to everyone still burning in its glow.
ABOUT COMPOSER ANDREW GORDON MAPHERSON :
Andrew Gordon Macpherson is an award winning Film/TV/Video Game composer. He has contributed original music to (Top 100 cable series) “Dark Side of the Ring” for which he has won and been nominated for several awards. It led to spin-offs “Who Killed WCW” and “Tales from the Territories,” for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s company, Seven Bucks.
Andrew has also written hundreds of minutes of music for AAA video games “Far Cry 5”, “Far Cry: New Dawn,” “Starlink: Battle for Atlas” (Ubisoft), Rainbow Six: Siege and helmed feature films, “Kids vs Aliens,” for Director Jason Eisener and Jay Baruchel’s horror film “Random Acts of Violence.”
Andrew mentored international participants as part of the Red Bull Music Academy from 2010 to 2019 and has been a guest lecturer at Ryerson University and Sheridan College. Andrew won an ASCAP Screen Music Award for Dark Side of the Ring and 2 Global Music Award Silver Medals and has been nominated for 4 CASMA awards and 2 CSA awards.
ABOUT INTO THE VOID
SYNOPSIS: INTO THE VOID is a groundbreaking documentary series that explores the epic struggles and the cultural impacts made by Heavy Metal’s most compelling artists. Their intensely personal stories about finding success offer an intoxicating combo of volume and distortion delivered via pulsating tales of murder, addiction, rebellion and redemption.
For more stories on metal’s cinematic edge, check out our Deep Cuts archive.
CREDITS: Helmed by executive producers Evan Husney and Jason Eisener, the co-creators of the hit pro wrestling documentary series “Dark Side of the Ring,” which debuted in 2019 – becoming Vice TV’s most-watched series of all time.
Into the Void Episode Listings
Episode 1
Randy Rhoads: The life and death of guitarist Randy Rhoads, including interviews with family members and Sharon Osbourne.
Episode 2
NME: Seattle death metal band led by Kurt Struebing who was convicted of killing his own mother in 1986 when he was 20 years old.
Episode 3
Judas Priest: Looking back at the 1990 trial when Judas Priest was accused of including subliminal “suicide” messages in its music.
Episode 4
Death: Chronicling the rise of the Florida death metal band and the 2001 passing of its leader, Chuck Schuldiner.
Episode 5
Wendy O. Williams: Toeing the line between punk and metal, Wendy O. Williams created a bold onstage persona with The Plasmatics that pushed boundaries and created controversy.
Episode 6
Confess: Iranian metal band that was given a combined 14.5 years in prison for what was believed to be anti-government and anti-religious views in its music. Band members later sought political asylum outside of the country.
Episode 7
Hellion: Focus on lead singer Ann Boleyn who fought sexism as a performer. She later earned her law degree to help battle the issue in courts.
Episode 8
Dimebag Darrell: The tragic death of the legendary metal guitarist, featuring interviews with his widow, Rita Haney, and former Pantera bandmates Phil Anselmo and Rex Brown.
Andrew Gordon Macpherson Online:
