Ego Plum

Ego Plum is an Emmy-nominated composer, producer, and performer whose music inhabits the strange territory between animation, experimental sound, vintage electronics, cinematic orchestration, and popular culture. Known for creating distinctive musical worlds rather than simply accompanying them, he has built a career bringing an outsider sensibility to television, film, immersive entertainment, theme parks, recordings, and the concert stage.

Plum received an Annie Award for the music he composed for Netflix’s acclaimed animated series The Cuphead Show!, drawing upon early jazz, big-band cartoon scoring, cabaret, and the mechanically precise musical inventions of Raymond Scott. He is also the composer behind the musical identity of Nickelodeon’s The Patrick Star Show, including its theme song and end-title music, and has written extensively for SpongeBob SquarePants, Kamp Koral, and other productions within the SpongeBob universe. His animation credits also include Warner Bros. Animation’s Jellystone! and the feature film Aztec Batman: Clash of Empires, for which he combined pre-Hispanic instruments and percussion with a dark, gothic orchestral vocabulary.

His work extends beyond the screen into some of the world’s most recognizable immersive environments. For Disneyland, Plum composed new music for the reimagined Adventureland Treehouse, expanding upon Buddy Baker’s original “Swisskapolka,” and created nearly an hour of music for the Haunted Mansion’s expanded grounds. These projects allowed him to engage directly with music that shaped his imagination as a child, approaching the work as a dialogue with Disney’s musical history while extending it into newly created spaces.

As a record producer and collaborator, Plum has worked with artists from the intersecting worlds of punk, post-punk, experimental music, and animation. His collaborators and guest performers have included members of The Residents, Oingo Boingo, DEVO, XTC, Bauhaus, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, The Dickies, and the Descendents. He has also produced new recordings by The Residents (ESKIMO: Folk Tales) , a group whose radical approach to music and visual identity has influenced him since childhood.

Plum’s live work brings music normally confined to screens, archives, and obsolete machines into physical performance. Through the Ego Plum Laboratory of Electro-Musical Instruments, he performs original compositions alongside works by electronic-music pioneers including Raymond Scott, Jean-Jacques Perrey, Mort Garson, and Wendy Carlos. His concert projects have included live scores for classic Gumby films and plans for large-scale performances of music from The Cuphead Show!, as well as a live score to Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s surrealist landmark Un Chien Andalou.

Raised in East Los Angeles by Mexican immigrant parents, Plum developed his musical identity from an unlikely mixture of Disneyland attractions, Saturday-morning cartoons, punk records, surrealist cinema, electronic exotica, and the work of composers who treated sound as a form of invention. Whether writing for an animated character, a haunted garden, a lost silent film, or a room filled with experimental instruments, Ego Plum creates music for unusual worlds—and then finds ways to make those worlds real.