artist: Peter Miller country of origin: Australia style(s): Ambient, gothic, orchestral, soundtrack essential releases: Love Versus Gravity (1990, Warner) The Violet Flame (1993, Archon Music) Perpetual Ocean: The Collected Works (1998, Origin)

Miller is well-known in Australian media and arts circles as an award-winning sound designer and composer of soundtracks for film and television, including TV advertisements for Nike and Mercedes and more recently sound design on Hollywood films such as horror thriller The Ring. But what of his gifts as a composer? His second and third albums Love Versus Gravity and The Violet Flame make a strong case for his ranking as one of the most gifted electronic composers in the world today. They are works characterised by both risk and refinement, accessible but never vapid, brimming with a quiet inventiveness and capable of springing plenty of surprises.

Love Versus Gravity is the more experimental of the two. The melody count may be lower than on the follow-up but some of Miller’s most imaginative work can be found here. The opening “Bird Mystery” is a fascinating collage of bird sounds electronically manipulated into a series of interlocking melodies and rhythmic pulses. “Follow Your Heart” and “Careless With Chloroform” are cleverly constructed montages of voice samples from soap operas combined with suitably eerie electronic embellishments that sound like cello or violin. “The Forge”, with it's dark, ominous orchestral soundscape, more explicitly suggests the influence of film music and is chillingly effective.

If the ideas on Love Versus Gravity aren't always completely focussed, it's a logical precursor to the next album and Miller’s tour de force.  The Violet Flame is stunning; an unforgettable walk though the world of horror writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Ray Bradbury, with an occasional detour via the wreck of the Titanic and the twilight world of hypnotism. Every track is characterised by intelligence and invention, at times spiced with a wonderfully wry sense of humour. “From The Diary Of Madeline Usher” combines gothic strings with the rhythmic qualities of closing doors, footsteps, a ticking clock, and samples of a woman voicing her ‘fear of premature burial’. The mesmerising “Sleepers” juxtaposes the looped, disintegrating voice of a hypnotist with the sounds of a moving train, while the highly evocative “Titanica” builds upon a sampled sonar bleep and Harold Budd-like piano phrases to take us on a spine-chilling journey around the wreck of the Titanic. This is an electronic album, but the samples are so refined and well integrated you'd swear the composer was accompanied by a live orchestra on magisterial tracks like "Blood and Roses" and "At Dark's Carnival". With The Violet Flame Miller has acheived a full realisation musically of what an elite few 20th century directors like Roger Cormen (with his Poe adaptions), Mario Bava and Dario Argento managed to acheive in their own medium of film: he has made horror beautiful.

Perpetual Ocean: The Collected Works is a welcome 2CD set that repackages the above two albums and it is the easiest of Miller's releases to find.

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