Deru

Benjamin Wynn, the Chicago-born composer, producer, and sound designer, crafts richly detailed, filmic experimental electronic music under the Deru name. While his output under his own name forms a substantial portion of his body of work, notable Deru projects encompass the score for the 2007 ballet Genus, rhythm-oriented releases such as the 2010 album Say Goodbye to Useless, and the original 2018 soundtrack for the YouTube sci-fi series Impulse. His 2022 album We Will Live On was realized on a Disklavier piano.

After earning a music technology degree at the California Institute of the Arts, Wynn issued his first Deru record, the experimental electronic set Pushing Air, in 2003 on the Neo Ouija label. The follow-up, Trying to Remember, appeared on Merck Records in 2004, the year he and composer Jeremy Zuckerman established the Emmy-winning music and sound-design duo the Track Team. Together they scored episodes of the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008), Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness (2011-2016), and The Legend of Korra (2012-2014). Meanwhile, as Deru, Wynn joined British composer Joby Talbot to create music for the 2007 ballet Genus, a Paris Opera Ballet commission based on Darwin’s On the Origin of Species; their recording surfaced in 2009 on Ant-Zen and Dear Oh Dear Records. That same year the pair also co-composed the score for the film Just Peck. Deru’s Say Goodbye to Useless arrived on Mush Records in 2010.

In October 2011 Wynn journeyed to Iceland alongside filmmakers and photographers, yielding the film Outliers, Vol. 1: Iceland, whose score drew on his location recordings. A 2012 summer soundtrack combined Wynn’s contributions with tracks by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Son Lux, and Shigeto. He and Zuckerman later reunited for the 2013 film A Leading Man. Drawing on a cache of flea-market memorabilia, Deru released 1979 on Friends of Friends in June 2014, paired with nine short films directed by Anthony Ciannamea. 1979: Remixed followed in 2016, and the National Ballet of Canada gave Genus its North American premiere in March 2017. Two months later Deru issued Territories, his first release on the audiovisual label 79Ancestors, which Wynn co-founded with Ciannamea and software designer Yaniv De Ridder. The Impulse score appeared in July 2018, succeeded in October by Torn in Two, Deru’s full-length successor to 1979. His next album, recorded on a Disklavier—an acoustic piano fitted with solenoids for digital control—was We Will Live On, issued by Friends of Friends in 2022.