Thinking In Sound: Antony Demekhin and Filip Mitrovic's Wild Card Approaches

Antony Demekhin is an entrepreneur and music supervisor. A classically trained percussionist, Antony began his career in advertising at ad shops like Leo Burnett and DDB before shifting to music partnerships and shaping the music marketing strategies for Coca-Cola and later, American Express before founding Ear Candy with Filip.

Filip Mitrovic is a Serbian-American composer and producer from Los Angeles, California. Filip is a Grammy nominee and two-time Emmy nominee who has worked on countless television adverts, TV shows and films. As a producer, he’s worked with Jon Batiste, St.Lucia, Sofi Tukker and others.

LBB> When you’re working on a new brief or project, what’s your typical starting point? How do you break it down and how do you like to generate your ideas or response?

Antony> My creative partner Filip and I have different takes on every brief, so we usually formulate a plan of attack independently of each other first and then compare notes. Before briefing artists or composers we see if we’re on the same page and if we’re not we send a group down one path and a group down another.

We also love wild card approaches and try to look for opportunities to surprise the client, and ourselves, in the final response to a brief. 

LBB> Music and sound are in some ways the most collaborative and interactive forms of creativity - what are your thoughts on this? Do you prefer to work solo or with a gang - and what are some of your most memorable professional collaborations?

Antony> As a music supervisor and creative director, I try to capture the feeling that we want to get across in the work and express it to the producers and musicians we work with. Filip who is our lead composer will personally jump on briefs that are in his stylistic wheelhouse as a composer and producer. We are always collaborating in a two way dialogue to make sure we create something genuine while hitting all of the client requirements in the brief. 

LBB> What’s the most satisfying part of your job and why?

Antony> Convincing an agency creative team to take a different musical direction than they originally envisioned. It’s sort of what they pay us for at the end of the day, and it’s fun to surprise everyone with a fresh take on storytelling in a world of cookie-cutter work.

LBB> As the advertising industry changes, how do you think the role of music and sound is changing with it?

Antony> Absolutely. We see a few interesting shifts. One is about the generational gap between decision makers and younger consumers. I love working on throw back briefs, but we have to strike a balance with popular styles and subgenres popping up among young artists.

Another is a shift towards library music and lower budgets as more of the work becomes lower budget digital work. We prefer creating original music for ads, but are also seeing a lot more activity with our curated music catalogue. 

LBB> Who are your musical or audio heroes and why?

Antony> I’m a big fan of Kris Bowers, he just scored the 'Wild Robot' and is a rising star composer in Hollywood. We’ve been fortunate enough to work with him and he’s both humble and incredibly hard working. Not to mention a killer composer and musician. Very inspired by his work. 

Another is Teddy Swims. We did a cover of 'Georgia on my Mind' with him in 2021 when he was just getting his record deal and its super inspiring to see how far he’s gone in his career in such a short time! 

LBB> And when it comes to your particular field, whether sound design or composing, are there any particular ideas or pioneers that you go back to frequently or who really influence your thinking about the work you do?

Filip> For me, it would have to be Angelo Badalamenti - my favourite composer ever, with whom I had the honour of working with for many years back in New York, after graduating from music conservatory. Another huge influence for me was the film music collective tomandandy - with whom I ended up working very closely as well. I remember hearing their incredible score for Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" as a teenager and thinking to myself - well, this is what I want to do in my life.

I reached out to them many years later and they brought me into the fold. Another interesting thing about those guys was, that they were the first to approach music for advertising as an artform. To basically say, "hey we do all this cool stuff as film composers and we want to bring creative energy to your TV ad". And they did. 

LBB> When you’re working on something that isn’t directly sound design or music - are you the sort of person who needs music and noise in the background or is that completely distracting to you? What are your thoughts on ‘background’ sound and music as you work?

Antony> I usually prefer quiet because lyrics are really distracting to me, I pick up on them even if they’re far away. But if someone is talking around me while I’m working, I’ll throw on some lofi or jazzy break beats to drown them out. 

LBB> I guess the quality of the listening experience and the context that audiences listen to music/sound in has changed over the years. There’s the switch from analogue to digital and now we seem to be divided between bad-ass surround-sound immersive experiences and on-the-go, low quality sound - how does that factor into how you approach your work?

Antony> We make everything assuming it needs to sound good on any device or in any situation, and its also how we mix. It’s the same approach we take with mixing our own records. They’ll sound epic on a hi-fi system, but they will also cut through on your laptop speakers. Since we recently added a Dolby Atmos room to our Los Angeles studios, we’re also doing a lot of immersive mixing and that’s been a lot of fun. 

LBB> On a typical day, what does your ‘listening diet’ look like?

Antony> Lots of tracks across a handful of different projects, with some personal listening here and there. My ears stay ON. 

LBB> Do you have a collection of music/sounds and what shape does it take?

Antony> I have some jazz records on vinyl but that collection is small. My DJ collection is across a few USBs and a hard drive with about 40,000 tracks. Everything else is in Spotify! 

LBB> Outside of the music and sound world, what sort of art or topics really excite you and do you ever relate that back to music?

Filip> I tend to be the non-musician's musician, because I grew up surrounded with friends who were not necessarily in music, but had great taste in music and great taste in art in general. Because of this, I draw a lot - if not the majority - of my inspiration from fiction novels and visual art.  

LBB> Let’s talk travel! It’s often cited as one of the most creatively inspiring things you can do - I’d love to know what are the most exciting or inspiring experiences you’ve had when it comes to sound and music on your travels?

Antony> As cliché as it might sound in certain circles, my recent trip to Burning Man has reignited my interest in dance music. I’ve also been really inspired by the jazz and small club scene in LA, seeing local musicians play in small rooms takes me back to my musician days. 

LBB> As we age, our ears change physically and our tastes evolve too, and life changes mean we don’t get to engage in our passions in the same intensity as in our youth - how has your relationship with sound and music changed over the years?

 Filip> I have this hard rule that I abide to religiously - any music that is older then five, but younger then 25 years old, gets erased from my Spotify playlists until it ages into the next "tier". I do this because I think music should be the bridge that helps the humanity resonate at a common frequency, where we all travel together in time and space. Or, as my director friend Daniel Scheinert once told me, "art doesn't need to be timeless, it just needs to be timely".