Mother’s Recipe

“Working with Ngiam Teo on Mother's Recipe was one of the most seamless creative collaborations I've had on a film. He joined us on set for the entire shoot, which made a real difference. Because he was present throughout production, he had a deep, lived understanding of the film's emotional world before he ever wrote a single note. By the time we entered post-production, he already knew intuitively what the music needed to feel like, and that shared foundation made the entire scoring process far more focused and efficient.

His musicality is genuinely in service of the story. Every cue he delivered felt connected to the specific emotional texture of a scene rather than generic background scoring. The music he composed for Mother's Recipe conveyed the characters' inner lives in a way that elevated the film as a whole. What impressed me most was how intentional each choice was: instrumentation, dynamics, pacing. Nothing felt placed arbitrarily.

Ngiam is also exceptionally responsive to directorial feedback. We went through multiple rounds of revision as the edit evolved, and each time I gave notes, he not only applied them accurately but genuinely built on them. The music consistently improved with each pass rather than simply changing. That kind of collaborative maturity is rare.

He was one of the most reliable people on the production. Despite a twelve-hour time difference between us, his response times were consistently fast, which kept post-production moving at the pace we needed. He never created a bottleneck.

I would recommend Ngiam without hesitation to any director looking for a composer who is technically strong, communicative, and deeply committed to the film he's working on.”

—Izumo Kawabe, Director of Mother’s Recipe (2026)