Robert Cotnoir: The Man Behind the Music, and the Music Behind the Man

Some musicians spend their careers in the spotlight. Robert Cotnoir has spent most of his in the dark of the screening room, shaping the music you feel before you ever notice it. For three decades the New York native has worked alongside some of the most respected composers and showrunners in film and television, and in his own Jersey City studio he has built a second life as Grapefruit Sound Lab, an electronic project that pulls freestyle, house, electro, synth pop, classic rock and the classical repertoire into one unmistakable sound. The two careers are not opposites. They are the same restless ear, pointed in two directions.

It started with synthesizers. As a teenager Cotnoir was drawn to electronic music, house, electro and synth pop, and when he arrived at SUNY Binghamton as an undergraduate he found an electronic music and MIDI course tucked inside the Theatre Department. He took the class, ended up teaching it, changed his major to Theatre and became the department’s student sound designer. He graduated in 1991 and went on to earn his master’s degree from the Yale School of Drama in 1994, then spent about a year on Broadway assisting the celebrated sound designer Otts Munderloh.

The turn that defined his career came next. Cotnoir helped Academy Award-winning composer Howard Shore build his music production facility in upstate New York, and Shore hired him as his assistant on the film Seven. That role grew into programming the electronic tracks for Shore’s film scores on his vintage Synclavier, work that connects Cotnoir’s name to titles including M. Butterfly, eXistenZ and The Cell. On Seven he also met Ellen Segal, MPSE, the first music editor he ever worked beside, and the person he credits with showing him how a true professional operates.

Television became his home ground. In 2000 Cotnoir joined music editor Daniel Evans Farkas on the NBC series Ed, and before long he was cutting music in his own right, staying with the show from its first season through the 2004 finale. He considers his proudest work to be the series Damages starring Glenn Close, which he worked on from 2007 through 2012 in close collaboration with the show’s editors, music supervisor Mark Wike, composer James S. Levine and creators Glenn Kessler, Todd A. Kessler and Daniel Zelman. He went on to serve as Tom Fontana’s music editor on the Canal+ series Borgia, partnering with composer Éric Neveux in Paris, and his more recent credits include Chaos Walking and the Netflix drama The Diplomat starring Keri Russell.

Those who have never sat in an edit bay may not realize how much a music editor carries. On Borgia, Cotnoir built a temporary score for every episode, refined it with the composer and music supervisor, brought it to the executive producer for notes, rebuilt approved cues as multitrack files and then guided the re-recording mixer on the stage in New York. He has described taking broad orchestral recordings and, side by side with the composer, reshaping them into new cues for new scenes as the very essence of the job. He has also been a vocal advocate for his fellow craftspeople, serving on the board of IATSE Local 700, the Motion Picture Editors Guild, as an alternate director for the Eastern Region.

Even in the middle of all that, Cotnoir never stopped making his own records. Grapefruit Sound Lab announced itself in June 2019 with “Don’t Fall For It,” co-written with Sheila Brody, known to dance and funk audiences as Amuka, a P-Funk alum and member of the Brides of Funkenstein who has worked with Public Enemy and John Mellencamp. Her vocals were recorded at the legendary United Sound Systems in Detroit, and the single was mastered by Geoff Pesche at Abbey Road in London. Cotnoir described the song as a rallying cry against the con artists in our midst, and Amuka, for her part, has called him “a gem.”

The music that followed showed just how wide his range runs. “Dum Dum Gun,” released June 26, 2020 and featuring actor, singer and audiobook narrator Sarah Naughton over a live string quartet, was a reflective, folk-tinged departure written in memory of the many lives lost to gun violence, from Sandy Hook to Las Vegas, Parkland and the Pulse nightclub. Cotnoir dubbed it “Patriotic Music for the 21st Century.” Weeks later he stepped up to the microphone himself for “To Make You Mine” and “The Flavors of Tears,” with Layonne Holmes on backing vocals and Andrew Synowiec on electric guitar, and he reunited with Amuka for “Love Cards,” an electro-pop ode inspired by the Major Arcana of the Tarot and the journey toward becoming centered and whole.

Those songs came together on Eight Days Across America, the full-length Grapefruit Sound Lab album released in September 2020, followed by “Original Face” in April 2022. Across all of it, the craftsmanship of his day job is everywhere: mixes by Mike Degen at Stimulant Sound in New York, mastering at Abbey Road, strings arranged with the care of someone who has spent years listening to orchestras breathe. The result is a sound that nods to the golden age of the 1980s and the euphoric club culture of the 1990s while still sounding very much of its time.

Asked once what advice he would give anyone hoping to follow his path, Cotnoir offered something that explains both of his careers at once: “Less talking and more listening.” It is a philosophy that has served him in the edit bay beside Howard Shore and Glenn Close, and in a Jersey City studio where a teenager’s love of synthesizers became a lifetime’s work. Robert Cotnoir has spent his life making other people’s stories sound right. With Grapefruit Sound Lab, he is telling his own.

Discover Sun1 and RACC

Sun1 Official Website: https://sun1.band

RACC Official Website: https://racc.work

Grapefruit Sound Lab: https://grapefruitsoundlab.com

New Clear Sky: https://newclearsky.com