With Monos, Mica Levi has further established themselves as the foremost contemporary experimental film composer, using dissonance and unconventional instrumentation and composition to build tension and unease. The score’s most striking music is also its most jarring. Sounds akin to […]
Borrowing from a concept he first explored in The Witch, Mark Korven‘s score for The Lighthouse gives a voice to the film’s monolithic “Lighthouse.” A monotonous, deafening wail roars out intermittently, overwhelming everything. This is the call of the Lighthouse, […]
The world is full of noise. On David Lynch and Alan Splet’s score for Eraserhead, that noise is the industrial chaos of a blue-collar nightmare. The score begins with howling winds and a slow, low rumbling like the maw of […]
The films of David Lynch have always been renowned for their bizarre, surreal nature. However, this attention typically overlooks the music of his films, which are as equally strange. Take, for example, Tractor’s score for Lynch’s early short film The […]
What does it mean to be human? Is it to be loved, to face conflict, to make choices and feel their consequences? In Mica Levi’s score for Under the Skin humanity is anxiety, fear, and isolation. Those fleeting positive moments […]
Sometimes things are not what they seem. Take Demolition Man. At first glance it’s the dumb, brutishishness you’d expect from a 1993 action movie starring Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes. But it’s also an oddball comedy and social critique and […]
In an uncharacteristic twist, one of the most famous modern composers agreed to make the soundtrack for a somewhat strange, B-tier horror movie. Philip Glass believed that Candyman would be an artsy, independent re-telling of Clive Barker’s original short story. Much […]