BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW (2010)
A haunting, disturbed soundtrack that recalls some of the more psychedelic kosmische musik electronic albums from the 1970s (Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Popol Vuh). The work of Sinoia Caves (Jeremy Schmidt), I was fascinated by this film score when I first heard it. Stranger Things, but much, much darker.
And it's rare when music cues can also stand on their own: the soundtrack, weaving in fragments from the movie, is a gorgeous work of music all by itself.
PIG (2021)
I love the lonely, aching bowed instrument drone here—a fiddle? I hear it doubled with a baritone instrument too. Fragile, textured. When overlaid/underlaid with that glassy texture—or are those string harmonics?—it takes on a ghostly, haunting quality.
It deftly echoes the protagonist's life choice—and the ghosts that haunt him.
SOLARIS (2002)
I've been following the film scores of Cliff Martinez ever since this movie's release (props to director Steven Soderbergh). This soundtrack in particular strikes the perfect balance between the acoustic and the electronic—the earthly and the unearthly. Those sordino strings and gentle brass swells merging and unmerging with the ever-present gamelan ostinatos...and is that a glass harmonica? Mesmerizing and ever-evolving like the planet's surface. But those ostinatos are hybrids too, masterfully blended with electronic ephemera; a subtle way to bring a kinetic urgency into an otherwise static setting.
Ultimately this is a story of lost love; the music expertly captures that awful longing.
DUNKIRK (2017)
This film score deserves special attention. The interplay between Richard King's sound design and Hans Zimmer's music is a soundscape that eschews the "war movie" mode and casts the story in an atmosphere of creeping dread. It's horror. Even the quietest passing scenes are stalked by a persistent, sickly drone.
The unreleased cues are perhaps the most telling here: the music isn't just a character, it insinuates itself into the psyche. The effect of ever-rising pitches and obsessive, accelerating rhythms is to ratchet up the tension, painfully delaying any release.
LET'S TALK ABOUT KEVIN (2011)
Jonny Greenwood's touch is often so light that it creeps up on you. There's an otherwordly sensibility to this music that succeeds without the tired drama-thriller tropes. Steel harp, traversing unusual scales, was on point given the recorded songs accompanying this film.
Always thinking outside the box—actually, in it: "[...] laptop-generated stuff broadcast to, and recorded from an old LW radio"—Greenwood
UPGRADE (2018)
Director Leigh Whannell did well to find Jed Palmer to score this film. The main theme has a wonderful downsampled quality (similar to the treatment used in the original Terminator movie). That texture has an unearthly eerieness about the man-machine hybrid—like something's not quite right. In fact, I'm hearing a subtle glitch sensibility all over this delicious soundtrack—inspiration from The Crystal Method perhaps?
Most of all, I love the emergence of raw, unvarnished waveforms—colored with overdrive, detuning, grittiness. In the gentler moments I hear echoes of Loscil...or maybe it's Deru.
WAR AND PEACE (2016)
Martin Phipp's score for this multipart TV series is transporting. The sound palette and the tonal sensibility that pervades every cue all came together into perfect unity. This is how you score visuals.
The solo vocal lines, eerie and haunting, are in stark contrast to the story's scale and breadth. Very personal stories over the backdrop of war and revolution.
The instrument combinations are a constant reminder of the clash between new and old, between church and state, between man and woman: Russian choir (Latvian, actually) and solo cello. Solo baritone and electronics. A duet of plaintive, detuned altos cooing over sordino basses. Marya is sublime.