Dren McDonald is a San Francisco Bay Area composer, producer, and musician whose work spans video games, film, theme parks, and immersive media. After founding Vaccination
Records in the 1990s and releasing music with several Bay Area bands, he transitioned into scoring for interactive media, accumulating an extensive catalog of game credits that includes
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive/2 (Valve), Ghost Recon Commander (Ubisoft), Cooking Dash (GLU Mobile/EA), Gunman Taco Truck (Romero Games), and the award-winning indie title Gathering Sky (Pontoco) — which earned him three Game Audio Network Guild Awards in 2016, including Best Indie Game Audio. His music has also been heard in Stranger Things VR (Netflix/Tender Claws), Stay: Forever Home,, as well as in the VR animated films Mescaform Hill: The Missing Five (premiered at Tribeca 2022) and Perennials (premiered at Venice Film Festival 2023). Beyond his work in interactive media, McDonald has released several solo and collaborative albums, including The String Arcade (2014), a string quartet interpretation of video game music that won a GANG Award for Best Cover/Remix; polyheDren Psychic (2022), featuring collaborations with Josh Freese (Foo Fighters/NIN), Nels Cline (Wilco), and Iva Bittová (Nonesuch); and Oceanic (2024), an ambient record on Appearing Records. He arranged and performed two songs by The Residents for their 50th Anniversary concert at SFCM — released on Cherry Red Records as The Residents: Secret Show (Live in San Francisco) — with a band that included Josh Freese (Foo Fighters/NIN), as part of a larger evening that also featured guest performers Les Claypool (Primus), David J (Bauhaus), and Ego Plum. He has additionally appeared as a guest on releases by Melodic Virtue’s Star Stunted II, alongside Rob Crow (Pinback), Nick Rhodes (Duran Duran), and Roy Mayorga (Ministry).
McDonald’s upcoming album, Vox Pterous, updates his 2023 album Pterous. That instrumental album features hundreds of layers of guitars, and guitar-like instruments, repeating parts over and over on different instruments at different distances from different microphones, to create the impression of a guitar orchestra, with just one musician. The new album adds lyrics and vocalists including Australian singer-songwriter Sophia James, who appears on lead single “Fading.”
“‘Fading’ is indeed a thing of beauty, and aptly named. Its hypnotic, cycling acoustics are perhaps the only constant, Sophia James arabesque-infused vocals, and the subtle atmospheres that drift in her wake, often on the edge of disappearing completely, as if a change of wind direction would see the whole thing suddenly dissipate and dissolve.” – Big Takeover
“McDonald orchestrates a nuanced, melancholic environment from unconventional, layered guitar lines, providing a mesmerizing platform for James’ profound, drone-like vocal tones to construct a symbolic dreamscape.” – Obscure Sound
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Label: Appearing Records
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