The world is slowly dying, but the dead aren’t. Sqürl’s (the musical duo of director Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan) score for Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die provides the perfect foil: meandering, darkened drone against the film’s silly meta-comedy backdrop. […]
There can be catharsis in even the deepest grief. Such is the case in Bobby Krlic’s score for Midsommar, in which he manages to salvage warmth and respite from a slow decay into madness and sorrow. People have immediately compared […]
Hans Hess is a relatively new film composer, born in Brazil and currently living in England. His latest score, Clownface, just released and has already notched wins at the London Independent Film Awards, the Los Angeles Film Awards, and the […]
A Chorus of Jazz Scores Lead the Month For The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Emile Mosseri has composed one of the best scores of the year. It is a heartfelt and longing grandiose composition driven by the softer […]
Sometimes looks can be deceiving. The film title Clownface, for instance, did not inspire much optimism. Yet, I was pleasantly surprised as Hans Hess’ score proved to be more interesting and dynamic than the film’s name let on. Hess hits […]
The final frontier. Today we have a tendency to take the miracle of space flight for granted: a 60-year history, hundreds of launches a year, and thousands of manmade objects in orbit have made it almost routine. But, decades ago, […]
Film music can be incomprehensible when detached from the underlying film. Snippets of ascending strings building tensions, rhythmic unaccompanied drums, or ominous rumbling synths build atmosphere for the images on screen. But they have trouble standing on their own. They […]
Cyberpunk gives composers great musical flexibility. Not only is “futuristic” sounding music appropriate, but so is contemporary and classical music. After all, cyberpunk is often a dark imagining of our current trajectory. Rory McFarlane, in his score for the UK […]
Western European Music Invades On The Hustle, Anne Dudley opts for a vibrant and energetic French and Mediterranean style. While the score is built largely off of variations on a handful of themes and motifs, the short runtime keeps this […]
Nicholas Britell’s score for If Beale Street Could Talk conjures up a parallel world, where memories, hopes, and fears meld together, floating like some great overwhelming cloud. Much of the film lives in the memories of its main character, Tish. […]
Independent film is one of the great breeding grounds for new film composers. Consider Hans Zimmer, for example, who started his career scoring direct-to-video films before eventually securing eleven Academy Award nominations. While these films don’t offer the same monetary […]
Krzysztof Komeda is considered the forefather of European jazz. And yet, his most famous and enduring work is the haunting and discomforting score for Roman Polanski’s horror classic Rosemary’s Baby. The opening credits introduce Komeda’s single most well-known song – […]