Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, Dan Wool is a San Francisco–based composer and sound designer whose work spans New York, Los Angeles, London, Mexico City, Bangkok, and Anhui, China. He has created scores and sound design for broadcast television projects, multichannel audio theme-park installations, and more than 35 feature films, including seven films for celebrated cult filmmaker Alex Cox (“Repo Man,” “Sid & Nancy”). He is perhaps best known as the principal composer in the soundtrack group Pray for Rain.
Wool has also worked extensively in international and domestic advertising, sound branding, and feature-film and documentary sound design. As a music producer and engineer, he has collaborated with artists such as Bernie Worrell (Parliament-Funkadelic); Philip Chevron and James Fearnley (The Pogues); Debbie Harry (Blondie); and numerous Bay Area musicians, including All My Pretty Ones, Meredith Axelrod, essence, The Glowing Stars, Indianna Hale, Joe Lewis, The Mermen, and Kally Price.
In the arts, Wool has created scores and sound-design compositions for the Architecture and Design Museum (A+D Museum) in Los Angeles; Amy Seiwert’s Imagery (Sketch Series); AXIS Dance Company; Liss Fain Dance; RAWdance; choreographers Sonsherée Giles and Alice Sheppard; and Ballet de la Compasión. In 2018, his music and sound-design work for Phil Tippett and Lucy Raven’s experimental film “OUT THERE” screened at MoMA in New York. He has also worked as a sound engineer and sound designer on dance compositions with composer Beth Custer (Joe Goode, Jo Kreiter) and composer Rob Reich (Circus Bella, Gaucho, Tin Hat). He has performed in composer Jem Finer’s “Longplayer” installation, presented by the Long Now Foundation at YBCA.
From 2015 through 2018, Wool was engaged by the U.S. Olympic Synchronized Swimming Team for ongoing composition and musical services.
He has twice been nominated for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award (Izzie Award) for Outstanding Achievement in Music/Sound/Text: in 2017 for his work with Liss Fain Dance and in 2013 for his work with AXIS Dance Company.
