Since so many clients get antsy when they hear the music Tomandandy compose for their ads, the avant-garde music house often takes it upon itself to give its agency clients a variety of choices,often composing as many as five different tracks for a given project.

"The first reaction we get is usually over the quantity we give them because we have so many guys working here on a given project," says Tomandandy executive producer Scott Brittenham. "The second thing they say is that it's amazing and really cool, and then turn around and in almost the same breath say we can't go to our client with this -- it will scare them!"

Perhaps that is because the bicoastal music house founded and directed by Tom Hadju and Andy Milburn goes out of its way to hire composers others might consider outsiders.

"For one thing, I don't think there are that many of these guys in the world," says Andy Milburn. "They all have this freakish relationship to technology and a way of applying technology to their music making. Drazen [Bosnjak] is a great example; the depth of his understanding of and willingness to tinker with bizarre electronic technology is astounding, as is his patience."

Milburn is referring to one of the four composers he works with out of Tomandandy's New York offices. Bosnjak is an immigrant from Bosnia who lived in Sarajevo during the Balkan war. He came to work with Tomandandy after taking an electronic music class in his hometown, which was taught by a Tomandandy programmer, Jay Hardesty, during the conflict. Bosnjak is a devout student of electronic music and a key culprit in Tomandandy's tendency to provide overstimulating music for ad clients.

"If you are talking to dudes in Amsterdam, you better come up with some pretty slamming track that no one has heard before," says Bosnjak. "But if you [are talking] to someone in some mid-American city, make sure you have some distorted guitars in there because otherwise they will flip out and think it's not even music, just some alien noise."

Bosnjak has come up against this problem for a current project -- music for ads to launch a new pre-workout energy drink replete with caffeine and carbohydrates. The Chicago-based ad agency came up with film with industrial, grainy gears superimposed over guys working out or doing some athletic activity.

"They wanted us to do something that was very emotional and heroic, but not push towards the dark realm," says Brittenham.

More accustomed to darkening the feel of film with his work than lightening it, Bosnjak says he changed his approach after his first, nastier piece was not accepted. He first looked at the parallel between the evolution of computer graphics and computer music. He based his approach on the fact that the blocky and pixel-heavy graphics of the 1970s are miles away from today's nearly better than perfection CG work.

For the next song he wrote, says Bosnjak, "I told them let's do the same thing [musically] that happened in the evolution of rendering graphics -- let's write a track that has real human sounds, but they will be so processed in order to bring them to some imaginary level of perfection; they will sound like obviously computer-manipulated human sounds."

The resulting track leads off with distorted yet soothing vocals, and builds itself around drum rolls and tonal waves reminiscent of Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada or Autechre. Working within the innards of his computer, Bosnjak delves into digital signal processing and uses programming languages like Super Collider to write algorithms that affect sound.

"Another program I use is called Max, and it is more object oriented and visual," says Bosnjak. "You put objects together on the screen and hook them up with patch cords and assign different operations for each object [much like the technique used with vintage analog synths like the famous Moog]. I have definitely been getting into digital signal processing from inside the computer to affect sounds, which seems to me to also be much like analog synthesizers from before, using patch cords to make many unique sounds possible."

The client has yet to approve the job, and while Bosnjak's creative director, Andy Milburn, is unsure of the status of the project's final fate, he stands behind his people's work.

"Music for advertising needs to take chances," says Milburn. "Looking at the history of advertising music, it often comes from somewhere different than where popular music is coming from. To that end, mining underground music kind of makes sense to agencies -- what they really need is something striking and attention grabbing, and a good way to do that is with stuff people haven't heard before. I think agency people get it from a strategic angle, if not always from an aesthetic one."

Tomandandy has produced music for commercial clients such as Sony,. Fanta, Boeing and Microsoft, and for feature films including Arlington Road and Natural Born Killers.

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Tomandandy: http://www.tomandandy.com