Music editor Micha Liberman on 2 Emmy nominations for ‘Only Murders’ and ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’: ‘Unbelievable!’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

Twenty years ago, music editor Micha Liberman won an Emmy Award as part of the sound editing team for the “Deadwood” pilot. Years later, Liberman was again nominated for “Deadwood: The Movie.” But the industry veteran says his double 2024 nominations for “Only Murders in the Building” and “Avatar: The Last Airbender” are “unbelievable,” in part because the pair of nominations better encapsulate Liberman’s long and diverse career.

“If someone spent 17 years working on the same television show and had five nominations from that television show that would make sense – it would be a fair, accurate representation of their career,” Liberman says to Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview. “But it always felt a little misrepresentative of me to have nominations two decades apart from the same franchise. So now that I have the ‘Only Murders’ nomination, which is for a half-hour comedy, that’s completely different from ‘Deadwood.’ And then, ‘Avatar The Last Airbender,’ which is a sci-fi epic – a big, dramatic piece. I feel like now at least my nominations are more in line with what my career has been. I know that it’s kind of a crazy thing to think, ‘Oh, my Emmy nominations should represent my career.’ But now they do.”

Liberman is an Emmy nominee in the Best Sound Editing (Half-Hour)n category for “Only Murders in the Building,” one of 21 total nominations for the FX comedy’s third season. He’s also a nominee for Best Sound Editing (One Hour) for Netflix’s “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”

Of “Only Murders,” which had a third season set on Broadway during pre-production on a lavish stage musical, Liberman says the project “was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my entire career.”

“It wasn’t actually a musical,” he explains. “In a real musical, the music starts and the background sounds disappear. Professionally recorded music comes out, people start dancing and singing and lip-syncing, and nobody in the audience expects that to be real. But for ‘Only Murders,’ this is a show about people putting on a musical. So when they’re on stage, you have to honestly 100 percent believe that you’re watching an actor sing on stage. And you are sometimes – but, for example, if there’s a line of singing: One of the lines where the first two words are from the production and the actor singing on stage when they were recording. The next two words are from a pre-production session when we pre-recorded the song so that they could sing along. And then the next two words are from post-production. We brought that actor back in to record those just two words that we couldn’t find good versions of in production and in pre-production. Then, we go back to production for the last word. So that’s for just one line – and the entire show is like that.”

The “Only Murders” sound nomination is for the show’s eighth episode, “Sitzprobe,” an ambitious effort that includes several musical performances – including Emmy nominee Steve Martin singing the patter song “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?” (The track is nominated as well.) “Every single syllable that Steve Martin said had to match his lips perfectly. And they edited that together from multiple takes,” Liberman says. “Thank God he’s such a talented musician. And not just him: we have this luck of like everyone in this cast happens to also be a professional musician, which made my job easier. In fact, I wouldn’t have been able to do my job if not for that… It was a challenge but I’m very proud of how it came out.”

With “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” the challenge presented to Liberman was different. A huge fan of the property – he had watched the anime series twice before joining the live-action Netflix adaptation –  Liberman was required to work on the show’s score from composer Takeshi Furukawa.

“We went to Vienna to record the orchestra there – it was an 80-piece orchestra and a 50-person choir. Netflix really was super behind that show and spared no expense. Takeshi… I was just blown away. He’s the guy who you get in his car and he’s listening to John Williams. Film score is his life. He’s the real deal…. Watching him work was astonishing and the music that he wrote was incredible.”

“Avatar,” Liberman says, “set a record for me in my career” because of how long it took to come together, more than three years from when he first started on the project to its premiere. 

“I watched that show go from really good to great,” Liberman says, particularly highlighting the show’s visual effects (also Emmy nominated this year) and the overall sense of attention to detail paid by the entire crew. “One of the things that I really loved about recording that score was watching Takeshi give notes to the orchestra because his notes were mostly about dynamics. Like, ‘I need a little bit more second violins there and a little less trombones.’ He was really focusing on the minutia and the details and it did exactly the same thing we were talking about before with ‘Only Murders.’ It created this rich world that I really liked. It draws you into this alternate reality and that was really an amazing thing to be a part of, an amazing thing to watch that show grow and become what it became.”

“Only Murders in the Building” is streaming on Hulu.

“Avatar: The Last Airbender” streams on Netflix.

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