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I have a G3 that I've maxed-out. It's about two years old, [it does] a lot of communication and librarian chores. When you're working with sampling so much you have thousands of lists of collated material and specific sounds that you need to tap and reference very quickly. I have a dual G4 and I still use my 5300 CS. I use the Airport to communicate - that's terrific. I have a 2-story loft and I can be up on my roof and stay connected."

Throughout his early involvement in rock bands he didn't foresee film scoring. He began performing downtown in New York with the experimental groups, The Last Gasp Ensemble and ENVLP, an electronic music trio. At one point he went to Europe and toured the U.S. with his project, The Mechanical Guitar Orchestra.

MGO was "a robotic ensemble consisting of automated electric guitar sculptures and machines" that live-musicians played with custom designed instruments. It's this kind of experimental human-machine collaboration that strikes him as fertile territory for experimentation. "Anything left of center has always been a more interesting place."

A lot of people in film started to look for the kind of sound work that Tomney was doing and a director got in touch with him through mutual friends in Los Angeles.

Some of those films were indie productions such as "When The Bough Breaks" directed by Michael Cohn, and Tamra Davis's directorial debut "Guncrazy" starring Drew Barrymore. Other features include "Getting Off", "Spin The Bottle" and "Bobby G. Can't Swim" for Cineblast, and "Amnesia" by Margaret Harris. His most recent film scores are "Garmento" for Spanish Moss Productions and "The Pagans" for Cineblast.

"The independent films I've done are truly independent," he emphasizes, the term indie having been coopted by Hollywood. "All these people shooting on DV and Final Cut Pro are going to change things."

Indie is good, but so is the opportunity to do high flying projects such as "American Chronicles" for Fox (David Lynch/Mark Frost), "Wonderland" for ABC, and one-hour specials for PBS, The History Channel, and The Discovery Channel, as well as the Todd Haynes feature "Safe" for Sony Pictures Classics.

Tomney is inspired by common sounds and he wants that to inform his scoring: "You got phones and fax machines, door bells, you got all this stuff that didn't exist before . . . I want to create a more subconscious level of listening in terms of creating these long-playing sound-scapes that are built on definitive structures. There's no improvisation at all. It's all focusing on an idea. It could be choir music on old vinyl recordings and processing that and sampling it and augmenting it and saturating it." 

It's easy to imagine Tomney's world as lopsided, experienced through the heightened awareness of sound which acts as a perceptual filter, like one of the filters he uses to manipulate the samples he is endlessly cataloging. That may explain his distant but focused appearance - one that seems as if he might be analyzing the waveforms of your voice while you're talking to him. carpetshock@earthlink.net www.musicforever.comrprecords.com