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Erik Blicker

Erik Blicker is an American musician, composer, audio engineer and entrepreneur. He is a founding partner of Flavorlab; a full-service sound studio headquartered in New York City (Manhattan), where he continues to score and lead complete audio packages for all sectors of the entertainment industry.

Early Life

Erik Blicker was born on November 7, 1964, in New Haven, Connecticut. He’s one of four children of Fred and Jeanne Blicker. At a young age, Erik was encouraged to explore the world of music and quickly became hooked on recording and learning the guitar. At the age of 14 Blicker started guitar lessons with Jim Shepley, a blues and rock musician who grew up with Duane Allman and is credited with inspiring the iconic Allman Brothers Band.

Career

in 1997, Erik met Glenn Schloss; they quickly partnered up to form G&E Music and landed a gig scoring a VH1 show 100 Greatest Artists of Rock & Roll starring Kevin Bacon as the host. The show was short lived but the duo rolled through score after score across a variety of entertainment networks.

Working together on History Channel’s Extreme History with Roger Daltrey, Blicker and Schloss composed the show’s theme as all as mood music, completing music for more than 200 original track (additional credit: Music Supervision Book) and creating an exclusive Extreme History Library for the show to choose cuts from. On a show by show basis, Blicker and Schloss would create the score / music based off of a description, mood or vibe the producers were looking for, vs. based off of picture which is more standard. The theme song and score combines acoustic strums and pics with electronic grooves and beat box hits. The producers were ecstatic “These guys got dirty, which is what the show was all about. We hear from a lot of people who dig the show and rave about the music!”

Continuing the collaboration Blicker spearheaded the team in creating three albums of baseball highlight music dropping a heavy dose of Rock on ESPN’s flagship show SportsCenter. ESPN caught a sample arena rock anthem and hired G&E music to create an album's worth of big orchestral hard rock music. The ten-song library scores the sports story arc “the building tension of the pre-game, the kick-off and chase, the close competition and buzzer-beater victory, the sweeping defeat...it's all there, in revving Metallica-esque guitars and pounding drums filled out with orchestral strings and horns, and symphonic choirs.” Blicker was specifically notes for rocking on the guitar, laying a foundation for the songs in spontaneous jam sessions. “From the up-tempo "Rise Up" with its wailing guitar to the determined-from-the-start "I Won't Let You Score," the G&E hard rock library puts ESPN in a whole lot of moody metal.”

Working closely with the filmmakers, Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer, Blicker and G&E music created the emotional core of the soundtrack for the HBO documentary Nine Lives of Marion Barry. “Musically, G&E created the overall mood of the film. They were so giving and worked tirelessly until we found that emotional center--the sounds that felt right and evoked those certain feelings we were looking for. And, they really hit that '60s and '70s funky soul sound, which was key."

G&E kicked off the writing process with some live funk sessions, developing thematic elements that would course through the film score. Nine Lives of Marion Barry led Blicker to creating new and different-sounding instruments by electronically manipulating and bending organic sounds that were so unique he and Schloss completed an album and planned to release it under the name Ambient Gelly.

Working with Toby Oppenheimer led Blicker to another project scoring music for The McVeigh Tapes for MSNBC. Blicker was challenged with creating a score that would set the mood for the chilling accounts of the Oklahoma City bombing, as told by McVeigh himself through never-before-heard audio interviews. Blicker and the team developed a musical palette for the project by creating “atmospheric tones that felt organic but also had momentum and groove,” and “finding interesting voices using reverbs and delays,” working with Ableton Live and Spectrasonics Omnisphere among other production tools. To supplement, they also pulled from their Producer’s Tool Box — an extensive collection of sound design elements and musical loops created for visual based productions — giving the producer and editors plenty to work with.

In 2004, Blicker and Schloss partnered with Brian Quill and evolved G&E Music to form Flavorlab. Under the Flavorlab brand, Blicker continues to score and create show packages for all sectors of the entertainment industry - notably scoring a new theme song for ABC’s The View, in collaboration with Glenn Schloss, that premiered on November 24, 2014.

Philanthropy

Finding ways to work in philanthropic projects as well, Blicker composed music for Operation Rebound, an organization that won the 2012 Mutual of America Life Insurance Community Partnership Awards, where Mutual of America chooses a community organization that makes a positive impact on society, and the prize is a documentary gets made about them that they can use as a fundraising tool. Blicker worked directly with the filmmaker to compose the music for Operation Rebound, which provides adaptive sports equipment, sports prosthetics, training, mentoring and competition expenses for active duty service members, veterans and first responders who have suffered permanent physical injuries as a result of their service.

New Article The Rest

The Rest (historic house) is the oldest house in Washington DC. Believed to be originally built around 1700 by Charles Jones. The majority of the work on the house was done around 1800.