Martin Zaltz Austwick

Podcaster, Musician. Educator, Recovering Physicist

Composition

I have been composing and recording music and songs for podcasts since 2007; here is a sample:

You can listen to some samples of my podcast music organised into Themes, Bed Tracks, Full Songs and Live Scores – or it’s all together in the above soundcloud playlist. Or visit my podchaser profile.

Most recently:

  • Composed music for the fake movie trailer for The Flab for the Fat Part 1 episode of The Allusionist [May 2023].
  • Contributed piano and guitar arrangements of Steve Martin’s banjo instrumentals for the Steve Martin-Adam Gopnik audiobook So Many Steves (Pushkin) [May 2023].
  • Music for Season 2 of the award-winning Mubi podcast [Mar-April 2023]
  • Theme music for The Last Soviet (Samizdat / Kaleidoscope / iHeart) [Feb 2023]

2022

2021

  • Released The World Outside My Window – the song with a million variations playing out on the Neutrinowatch podcast – as a digital single [Dec 2021].
  • Producer/composer on Rigged, a new series by Amy Westervelt / Critical Frequency about the history of PR [Oct-Dec 2021].
  • Composed music for the Shedunnit limited series, “Queens Of Crime At War“ [Oct-Nov 2021]
  • Wrote the music and performed with the Allusionist live at the London Podcast Festival [September 2021].
  • Created the music for Season One of the Mubi Podcast [June 2021]
  • Created the theme for The Romcom Rewrite [March 2021].

2020 and earlier

  • Co-created the pandemic Christmas song Don’t Wait For Me Beneath The Mistletoe with Helen Zaltzman and Jenny Owen Youngs, and co-created Zoom Christmas and Christmas Meat Sweats for the A Festive Hit For 2020 episode of The Allusionist [December 2020].
  • Wrote the music for all 15 Episodes of Maddie’s Sound Explorers [season 1], a science podcast for young people. Each episode features a piece of music made from the sounds of science, engineering and nature we’ve discovered during the episode, and weaves in ideas that Maddie and our experts provided during the episode [August-November 2020].
  • Contributed music to the 20,000Hz episodes about Audio Deepfakes (September 2020) and John Cage’s 4’33” [January 2020], where the music was used in the subsequent mainstage TED talk – both of which I wrote and produced on.
  • Audiocraft Podcast Festival – created a mashup of (mostly Australian) podcast themes for their opening night event [July 2020].
  • Wife on Earth – wrote a song about The Bookseller Crow, my favorite independent bookshop [July 2020].
  • I wrote theme music for the Zoom podcast – a movie podcast which focuses on a different genre each episode, so the theme song is different each time: spaghetti western, 50s scifi, zombie movie, classical, funk, Motown, Hot Club jazz… [March 2019-June 2020]
  • Wrote the theme and “hold music” for Vera Chok and Charles Adrian’s “Vera and Adrian are working from home” livestream series [May 2020]
  • Wrote scores for episodes of The Tranquillusionist, episodes of the show designed to be particularly soothing and calming [March 2020]
  • Created an original soundtrack for The Holiday Season, a podcast about the Nancy Meyers film The Holiday, inspired by Hans Zimmer’s score [December 2019].
  • I composed the music for Veronica Mars Investigations [2019-2021], apart from the stuff that the wonderful Jenny Owen Youngs wrote.
  • Wrote the song Apple Tree for the end of The Family Tree – a magic realist drama [2019].
  • I recorded the Blockchain Explainer Song and Ethereum for Episode 2 of ZigZag, and their end of Season One reprise, which was written up in the New York Times in 2018 [2018].
  • I composed and recorded the score for The Allusionist “Eclipse“, inspired by Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart [2017], and created the score for “Continental” using items in a Moab Bed and Breakfast [2016]

You can hear instrumental versions of my music on recent episodes of The Allusionist – as well as the theme tune I created.

Live Podcast Music and Performance

  • The Allusionist Live: Your Name Here [Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, 2022]: composer, musician, singer, performer, tour manager and writer on show.
  • The Allusionist Live [US, Canada, UK, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, 2017-2019] ; composer, musician, singer, performer, tour manager and writer on show.
  • Radio Diaries – Dropped Wrench with Joe Richman [Hearsay Audio Festival, 2019; NYC and Washington DC, 2019]; composer and musician.
  • The Bugle [US, 2018]; arranger and musician.
  • Radiotopia Live [US, 2018]; musician.
  • Third Coast International Audio Awards [Chicago, USA, 2017]; composer, MD and musician.
  • 99% Allusional [with 99% Invisible and The Allusionist, USA, 2017]; composer and musician.
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