Theme music for a series about a hard-boiled private eye

Design brief

The theme music will be used in each episode of Lowlifes that is a series of web videos about a hard-boiled private eye. The piece should be a 3 minute long indie rock/ambient/sparse instrumental song. The opening and closing 7 seconds have the pre- and post-roll titles/credits followed by mood visuals over which a woman narrates a story.

We would like designers to follow these guidelines:

The theme music should be something like a cross between these two tunes:
(a) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8qlOH0jGeE
(b) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXWlL7qMR_E

The first 7 seconds should have a distinctive intro (as they've done in (b) with the Twin Peak's style guitar chord. For Lowlifes theme however the intro must be in the opening 7 seconds). After that the track should "simmer" like it does here (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8qlOH0jGeE#t=02m30s). We would like to maintain that sort of athmosperic sounds in the theme music. You can loop the middle parts and it should build slowly to a climax 7 seconds before the end. The last 7 seconds can either be simmering or sound similar to the 7 seconds in the intro.

Lowlifes is produced by Zen Films that is an independent media content production office in San Francisco, US. This is a no-budget, personal creative project for the writer and director. The project site is here: http://www.lowlifes.tv

The web videos will be given away free online but will be sold as a series on DVD and possibly mobile.

The draft episode below about is 2 mins 30 seconds - so less than the 3 mins we're asking for. The exact length of an episode might vary but we aim to edit the track ourselves to shorter lengths.

Reference videos

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