From Star Wars to Trese: The Kiner Brothers on Composing Music for Today’s TV Landscape

MIXED ASIAN MEDIA - October 15, 2021

By Lauren Lola

Sean and Dean Kiner are the kind of duo who bounce off of each other; not only as collaborating composers, but also as brothers. Anytime one is lost for words, the other is quick to find them. It’s this close dynamic and working relationship that has led them to scoring for several popular TV shows; including Titans, Single Parents, Doom Patrol, Star Wars Rebels, and the final season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

Before they found themselves in the position of composing music for a wide variety of shows, the Kiner brothers were two mixed-race Filipino American kids brought up in the Los Angeles area. While they’ve always been proud to be Filipino, the feeling of being othered was still present; so much to where Dean dealt with, as he described, “self-imposed racism.”

“One thing I always noticed was I would try to get ahead of any bullies or any potential racism by embracing stereotypes that I’m the brown one,” he said.

“Using othering language proactively or preemptively almost,” Sean added.

“Yeah, to try to make sure that nobody would be able to get under my skin, because I was already under my skin. [But] we had a pretty safe and healthy upbringing.”

Sean noted how their mom, who’s originally from the Pampanga province of the Philippines, never taught them Tagalog, out of not wanting them to develop an accent, and so they could assimilate into white American culture.

“Looking back, it’s really too bad,” Sean reflected. “I definitely wish that she had taught us so that we could be bilingual, so that we could have that upbringing and talk with her in her native language, but that was her choice and we didn’t know. We were just kids.”

Both brothers already have studied music intensely; Sean with a background in classical music, Dean in indie. However, pursuing music on a professional level was something they both individually fell into.

For Sean, it began with taking on duties as a music editor on The Clone Wars when his dad, composer Kevin Kiner, went through treatment for cancer. But overtime, Sean grew frustrated with the limitations of music editing.

“I could either spend an hour looking for the string part that I know I need,” he explained, “or I could just write the string part that I know I need. And so, it started almost with training wheels. I started with these other elements and, slowly, it just became like I was writing 100 percent of the cues. It was a weird, seamless transition.”

For Dean, he was fresh out of the Berklee College of Music, where he originally started off majoring in film score, before switching to songwriting after seeing just how hard it was. While working at Starbucks, his dad challenged him to try doing a couple of cues for a small project.

“Just stuff you hear. Really simple comedy stuff,” he described. “I kept doing that for a few months, and then we got a project that he was like, ‘Hey, you play guitar and this is going to be a guitar-based show. Let’s have you working a lot more on this.’ I quit Starbucks, and I  kept going from there.”

That guitar-heavy project went on to be the score for the Netflix documentary series, Making a Murderer.

To be on the path that they’re on, the Kiner brothers consider themselves extremely fortunate to have a composer for their dad, both to show them the reigns and also to guide them in breaking into the industry — a feat they never could have imagined tackling on their own.The kinds of projects that he usually gets is what has led to the three of them becoming collaborators.

“Honestly, with Star Wars, it feels huge to be able to work on anything related to Star Wars,” Dean commented. “We’ve been huge nerds all of our lives, so doing cool projects like these, it’s incredible.”

“It maxes out our time with how many things that we’re doing, but it’s been such a blessing to be able to do so many different genres,” Sean remarked, “and it’s like we’re never getting bored. Even if we only had one of the nine shows that we have, we wouldn’t get bored, but going from scoring Robin in Titans, to battle droids in Star Wars, and then the Robotman in Doom Patrol, it’s nuts.”

Even when they collaborate with their dad, being a composer in the entertainment industry is still far from a walk in the park for the Kiner brothers. As Sean elaborated, “The industry is just a series of catch-22s where, in order to move up to the next level, you already have to be performing at the next level. Since it’s so stratifying, there’s so many different levels, it has, at times, felt difficult to break in, you know what I mean? Get front billing on shows that we’ve done a significant amount of work on. There’s just a political aspect to it that’s been keeping us back.”

While the fact that the Kiner brothers are mixed-race Filipino Americans has never been a challenge for them in the industry, that’s not to say they haven’t been exposed to the deep-rooted racism that’s still very much embedded in the system.

“It only really gets gnarly when people we work with aren’t really thinking about the kinds of things that they’re saying,” Dean explained. “Like when they are talking about a different race that’s not white, that tends to make things difficult, but it’s never like… I don’t think we run into a lot of blocks or walls necessarily. It’s mostly just emotionally difficult at times.”

Asked what they individually consider to be the most memorable pieces of music they composed, for Dean, what came to mind was the score for Making a Murderer and Doom Patrol. He really felt for the emotional weight of the projects; particularly with the latter, when it came to the character of Larry Trainor. Anytime Dean worked on sequences regarding this character, he was able to compose really quickly.

For Sean, the theme for the character of Omega in one of their most recent projects, Star Wars: The Bad Batch, is a score he described as, “a whole confluence of emotions and situation[s], because my little daughter had just been born, and it was the theme for a young girl, and it was a dark time in U.S. history. It’s also a dark time in Star Wars history, so everything just lined up there.”

While in any other year, the two would usually be working on five shows at a time, they’ve really only been able to work on two shows throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The Bad Batch is one of them. Having previously composed for both Rebels and The Clone Wars, they felt ready to take it in a new direction with its bombastic and militaristic tone. They were also encouraged to really bring their own flair to the sound more, which is something they already started getting advised to do when scoring the final season of The Clone Wars.

“[Creator] Dave Filoni started to really push us to more than ever have our own voice in the music of Star Wars, where it wasn’t just John Williams,” Dean explained. “You can hear it especially at the end of the very last episode. We really did what we wanted to do and felt was really appropriate for the end of the series. We got to take that new idea of having ourselves and more synths and more of what we feel like works really well for these characters, and we got to implement it way more than we ever have. That’s one of the really nice aspect[s] of The Bad Batch.”

The other show they’ve been working on during the pandemic is the Netflix series, Trese; an anime adaptation of Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo’s supernatural comic book series of the same name. The opportunity was brought to them by Dave Hartman, the supervising director of one of their previous projects, Transformers: Robots in Disguise. When he talked about how he was working with Jay Oliva, the executive producer of Trese, on a show about Filipino myths and fantastical creatures, the Kiner brothers were ecstatic by the opportunity to score for it.

“It’s like, ‘How is this possible?’” Sean recalled. “There’s this awesome Filipino show that’s coming to us.”

While they were not familiar with the comics, working on the show really elevated their knowledge of Filipino lore and culture. This especially resonated with Sean, who recalled an experience from his childhood where while out playing one day, he suddenly couldn’t put weight on his right leg. Lying on a couch, a local fortune teller and healer was summoned to pray over him with a candle.

“He was murmuring over me and dripping hot wax onto my leg,” Sean described. “And then I could walk afterwards, so I don’t know.”

Sean was said to have been put in a binding spell after accidentally stepping on a dwende (a creature from Filipino folklore similar to an elf or goblin), but what he found weird was that his mom didn’t refer to them by that name.

“She always called it a leprechaun,” he added, “so I always associated leprechauns with that experience.”

Getting to compose for Trese really allowed for the Kiner brothers to get in touch with their cultural roots, especially given the fact that they hadn’t really been taught about it growing up. Through their research, they learned about the Northern Philippine tribe of the Ifugao people and their practice of Hudhud chants. They sent over their cousin, Mark, with recording equipment to capture some of the Hudhud chants for the score. 

“It was so interesting to see the confluence of Spanish culture and native culture,” Sean reflected. “But we ended up, at least for the main title, going for something that was a little bit… is something that was untouched by colonialism. That was 100 percent Filipino, you know what I mean? It was really cool. It just ended up being perfect because the Ifugao are matrilineal and Alexandra [Trese] is this amazing, badass female protagonist and everything worked out.”

Through a mix of pre-colonial Filipino music and modern synthesizers and scoring techniques, the final result felt very true to the Kiner brothers, as a mix of Filipino and Western cultures themselves.

At the moment, projects that they have scored for to have recently come out include the third season of Doom Patrol, the third season of Titans, the second season of City on a Hill, and coming in November, the third season of Narcos: Mexico. They are currently working on the score for season two of The Bad Batch, as well as a couple of other projects they currently can’t talk about. Dean assured how, “We definitely know our fans will like these things quite a bit. That’s all I can say about those two projects.”

While they currently have no idea if Trese will be renewed for a second season (“We’re always the last to know,” Sean noted), they are grateful for the experience, as it has allowed them to meet and connect with other Filipino and Asian creatives.

“It’s really just changing my whole world,” Dean remarked. “I keep getting more and more excited about all of the people that work in the industry, or all the other Filipino and Asian people who work in the industry. I’m so excited to work with all of them, and I want to be working with them immediately. It’s been really cool to work in the industry and work on the shows that we do, but getting to work with other Filipino people gets me very excited.”

“Especially since it feels like Filipinos are invisible a lot of times,” Sean added. “It’s like I know that we’re out there and I know that we’re doing great stuff, but it tends to be more behind the scenes. I’m just really excited to see how much talent there is. Suddenly it opened my eyes that way.”

Lauren Lola is a San Francisco Bay Area-based author, freelance writer, playwright, and screenwriter. She is the author of the novels, An Absolute Mind and A Moment’s Worth. She has written plays that have been produced at Bindlestiff Studio in San Francisco, and in 2020, she made her screenwriting debut with the short film, Breath of Writing, from Asiatic Productions. Aside from Hapa Mag, Lauren has also had writing featured on The Nerds of Color, CAAMedia, PBS, YOMYOMF, and other outlets and publications.

You can find Lauren on Twitter and Instagram @akolaurenlola and on her website, www.lolabythebay.wordpress.com.