More movies than ever are being scored by alternative musicians, from Trent Reznor to Mica Levi to Jonny Greenwood.
If there is a defining image that captures underground music awkwardly rubbing shoulders with Hollywood glamour, it is from the 1998 Oscars. On a dark and enveloping stage, dressed in a crisp white suit, Elliott Smith stood motionless with his acoustic guitar. His “Miss Misery” was an unexpected nominee for Best Original Song that year, thanks to its inclusion in Good Will Hunting, Gus Van Sant’s indie drama turned box office hit. Desperately bleak words crept out of Smith’s mouth with a fragility that belied the setting, if only for a moment. Up next was Celine Dion performing “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic, which of course won the award.
When Smith stood under the glare of the Academy’s spotlight, movie soundtracks were en route to becoming an exercise in crate-digging. It was a trend bolstered by still-growing CD sales and a decade filled with hip, successful releases, like Pulp Fiction, Trainspotting, and Romeo + Juliet. In this post-Tarantino explosion, dropping a record collection into a movie in the hopes that it would garner a chart-busting soundtrack was a popular move, and it continued into the 2000s. Eventually this gave way to more indie-leaning sensibilities being heard on-screen—something that was boosted greatly by the influence of Wes Anderson and echoed in films like Garden State and Juno.
In this decade, though, that twee phase has been on the wane. The concept of soundtracks as mixtapes, curated for you lovingly by directors and music supervisors, has lost some appeal in the age of endless, semi-personalized Spotify playlists. Instead there is a desire to create movies that sound like nothing else.
More independent films have been utilizing original mood-based scores, from an ever-widening pool of collaborators. New, often experimental, voices have formed a generation of film composers that just might be the antidote to the tired conventions of mainstream movie music. And increasingly, these composers come from the worlds of alternative and underground music.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross created a template for industrial-tinged electronica on-screen, winning an Academy Award for The Social Network along the way. Mica Levi went from a lo-fi pop artist with a modest following to an Oscar-nominated composer, for Jackie, following the success of her first score, the disturbingly tactile soundscape to Under the Skin. The late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, whose background was in conceptual ambient music, created engulfing, earth-trembling work for big movies as varied as Sicario, Arrival, and Mandy. Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood became the go-to guy for underscoring Daniel Day-Lewis’ unparalleled forms of intensity in Paul Thomas Anderson films, among other things. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis captured the blood-soaked landscapes of movies like The Proposition, Wind River,and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Geoff Barrow of Portishead and Ben Salisbury are responsible for soundtracking Alex Garland’s nightmarish sci-fi thrillers, Ex Machina and Annihilation. There’s also Chromatics’ Johnny Jewel, Colin Stetson, Oneohtrix Point Never, Ben Frost, Mogwai, Max Richter, and Lesley Barber, to name just a few more who’ve become synonymous with progressive score work.
Of course, experimental or alternative film scores are not a new thing. Nor is them coming from unconventional sources. Comprised of erratic beeps and immersive whirrs, Bebe and Louis Barron’s score for 1956’s Forbidden Planet was so ahead of its time, there wasn’t even a name for the music they were making yet; it’s credited as “electronic tonalities” in the film. Miles Davis ripped open the possibilities of what a jazz soundtrack could be on 1958’s L’Ascenseur pour l’Échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows), while Krzysztof Komeda turned lullabies into nightmares in 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby. A pioneering era for film, the 1970s established many blueprints for the tone, language, and particularly the sound of alternative cinema—from Wendy Carlos’ mesmerizing synths in A Clockwork Orange to John Carpenter's homemade horror drones and Tangerine Dream’s pulsing electronics. There’s been no shortage of notable cult-movie scores in between then and now (Vangelis’ Blade Runner chief among them), but at the moment there seems to be a swing back to the experimentation of that 1970s boom.
“We’re in interesting times,” says director Jim Jarmusch, whose work is synonymous with outré music. Since his 1980 debut Permanent Vacation, Jarmusch has worked with Tom Waits, RZA, Neil Young, John Lurie, Boris, and Mulatu Astatke on scores for his films; more recently he’s been doing them himself, alongside his band SQÜRL and minimalist composer Jozef Van Wissem. “It’s healthy to see people break out of predictable Hollywood scores. The possibilities of film music are so incredibly vast, and yet the approach is often used very narrowly: to signpost a certain kind of feeling you’re supposed to have. It’s so lazy.”
Saxophonist Colin Stetson has been scoring movies for years, but his ambitious and unsettling work served a crucial function for one of 2018’s most critically revered horror films, Hereditary. “There seems to be a bit more freedom floating around—a desire to be open to new sounds and to trust directors with their vision,” he says. Johnny Jewel, whose work on the influential Drive soundtrack has led to countless film and TV projects, echoes this. “There’s a lot of experimentation,” he says. “It’s pushing smaller budget films to think outside of the box, which opens the door for people who don’t traditionally do film scores.”
Warren Ellis, who has been playing with Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds since 1994 and scoring films with Cave since 2005, suggests it’s a perfect storm of technology and circumstance. “Stuff that was marginal is now accessible,” he says. “This is enabling people who are normally on the fringes to get on board, which is fabulous.” But Ellis does acknowledge that a tonal shift is palpable. “One thing that has changed is people are not just looking at the score as creating emotion. People are making effort to create character with music.”
Lesley Barber, who has scored films such as Manchester by the Seaand the upcoming Late Night, sits a little more in the traditional scoring camp but also senses a change. “It’s a transitional time,” she says. “We’re seeing scores that pose a more diverse cinematic musical language. People are looking to form partnerships to find a sound that matches their storytelling.” Electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani, who dabbled in film scoring for a spell in the ’80s and ’90s, adds: “There’s a melding of sound design with instrumental score going on. There is inspiration to move out of the traditional score frame into a non-literal sound dimension.”
Ben Salisbury, a traditional composer who frequently works with the non-traditional composer Geoff Barrow, credits the filmmakers as much as the musicians: “There are lots of great scores being written, but that’s mainly down to a lot of interesting filmmakers wanting to make interesting films.” Barrow echoes the notion that directors are leading the charge: “They are fed up with stock music scores and want to go directly to the people who make the music that inspires them.”
In an age of too much content, there is also the simple function that more idiosyncratic sounds help films stand out from the crowd. “Everything sold to us now is done so under the guise of optimizing our own specific curated experience,” Stetson offers. “In an era where the volume of content is so huge, scores become more important. Everything wants to be seen as this singular identity that doesn’t look or sound like anything else.”
Along the way to this pursuit of creative singularity, there have been clear turning points—scores that have changed minds and opened doors. “The one that really kicked my ass was Under the Skin,” says Barrow. “That broke rules. I thought, ‘What the fuck is that sound?’ It set a benchmark.” Spencer Hickman of Death Waltz records, a label that specializes in soundtrack releases, felt the impact as well: “That opened up the possibility to include things in film scores that don’t necessarily have to be musical but can still be interesting and listenable.”
Another moment commonly cited is Reznor and Ross’ work on The Social Network. “I didn’t like Nine Inch Nails so I was kind of annoyed by how good it was,” recalls composer Brian Williams, who as Lustmord recently lent a world of dark ambient to Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. “It was really interesting sonically, a bit of a landmark in that sense. Although there are plenty of landmark moments creatively, it’s just the financially successful ones that have a real difference.” To that end, the influence of The Social Network score was felt almost immediately. “Ten years ago, it might have been weird to have a synth score, and now they are everywhere,” offers Barrow. “It wouldn’t be surprising to hear synth music on the [TV fishing show] ‘Deadliest Catch’ now.”
Stetson picks out the success of Greenwood and Jóhannsson as being key. “They have furthered the artform for us all,” he says. “It does not go unnoticed when something a bit more off the beaten path gets influential. Anybody that has scored film over the last 10 years knows that Jóhann's score for [2013’s] Prisoners just took over and was basically the temp for every dramatic film.”
Temp music refers to the stand-in soundtrack used while editing a film, and the outsized influence of it could be seen as one driving force behind this new wave of composers and their desire to squash predictability. “The reason why so many mainstream films sound the same is because they are all temp’d using the same fucking music,” Williams says. “People get so used to seeing the film with the temp track that when they bring someone in [to do the score], it’s to basically copy the temp as much as possible without getting sued.” Jarmusch adds, “For money people it’s always, ‘What can you tell me that exists now that it will sound like?’ Anything that doesn’t have a reference point frightens them.”
Admittedly there is some innovation to be found in the scores of select mainstream films. (Along with the aforementioned Reznor/Ross and Jóhannsson, look to Hans Zimmer’s surprisingly experimental work for Dunkirk and Ryuichi Sakamoto, Alva Noto, and Bryce Dessner’s understated but still anxiety-inducing score for The Revenant.) But it’s primarily independent cinema where the alternative film score has thrived. “The studios that hold the keys have traditionally played it safe,” says Williams. “Films budgeted under $10 million are more prepared to take a risk because there is a good chance they’ll get it back.” In other words, the greater the financial backing, the greater the risk of creative interference. Or as Ellis says, “More money, more morons.”
While creativity tends to bubble up in smaller productions, these films are trickling into territory where bigger movies normally reside—awards buzz, lots of press and, most important to Hollywood, decent numbers at the box office. Hereditary made close to $80 million, from a budget of just $9 to 10 million. Wind River more than tripled its $11 million budget, while Ex Machina and Jarmusch’s Paterson more than doubled theirs. “These smaller films end up getting a lot more attention and therefore their scores do too,” Stetson says.
Given these success stories, it’s worth wondering if more blockbuster films will soon be filled with the hissing electronics, atonal strings, and rumbling drones of weirdo musicians. That’s a firm no from Clint Mansell, who has been scoring films—both big and small—since Darren Aronofsky’s Pi in 1998. “You can be more experimental on smaller films, but I just got fired from a mainstream film for being experimental,” he says, preferring not to name names. “The director got locked out of the fucking edit suite.”
Mansell’s most famous piece of music is arguably “Lux Aeterna,” from Requiem for a Dream. It’s a true masterwork of slow-build string tension that—when combined with the on-screen images of drug addiction, mental illness, hospitalization, and happier times—results in an indelible fusing of sound and image. “If Requiem for a Dream had been made for a major studio, the music wouldn’t have made the cut,” he says. “They wouldn’t allow us to even use that music in the trailer. They used Moby because that’s what was popular.” He adds that, just a couple of years later, “Lux Aeterna” became a go-to piece of trailer music—it was even used in the preview for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. “That proved to me that people are largely interested in doing the same thing over and over again to make money.”
Perhaps the closest recent example of an outsider composer slipping into more mainstream territory was Jóhannsson being hired to score Blade Runner 2049 in 2016. He was subsequently removed and replaced with Hollywood mainstay Zimmer, along with Benjamin Wallfisch. “That’s a typical example of the industry,” says Mansell. “They shit themselves and then say, ‘Oh, we’ll get a guy like Hans who can make all the problems go away.’ But it’s shite, isn’t it? Effectively he repurposed Vangelis’ music. What higher level are you aiming for when you fire Jóhann? It’s already there.”
Barrow and Salisbury have crept into bigger budget territory with Annihilation, a film that director Alex Garland fought to keep in line with his vision. “Ultimately, Paramount was frightened of it as a commercial prospect and sold [the international rights] to Netflix,” says Salisbury. The film’s hard-won score ended up landing Barrow and Salisbury on the Oscars shortlist. With Netflix and Amazon now pumping money into film and TV—the former allocated $13 billionfor original content in 2018—there is a whole new world of avenues to explore. “Netflix is big enough that they can play around a bit and eat up any losses,” Williams says.
Scores finding success as standalone albums is also a contributing factor to a feeling of momentum around film music presently. Barrow is also involved in Invada Records, another label that focuses on score/soundtrack releases, and has seen the surge firsthand, citing releases like Stranger Things and Drive as doing relatively huge numbers. “The sales resurgence started from nostalgia,” Hickman says. “But it’s developed into a huge amount of people having an appetite for new soundtracks, which is mind-blowing because if you go back 15 years nobody cared.” Ellis backs this up. “Originally when I asked about The Proposition score [from 2005] being released on vinyl, I was told there was no market for that kind of thing.”
All of this contributes to a swell of activity surrounding film music: more studios, more films released, more scores made (and sold), and new, boundary-pushing sounds enabled through technological advances. It amounts to an indie-film golden age in the eyes of some composers, while others remain skeptical of mainstream cinema taking real risks when it comes to music. But they seem to agree on at least one point: Truly stirring work still stems from the collaborative process between composer and director.
“It’s key to have reference points,” says Jozef Van Wissem. “To create a cultural language between you and the director—a shared knowledge.” Adds his collaborator Jarmusch from the other side, “I’m a control freak but filmmaking is collaborative, so my control comes from choosing my collaborators. Music comes in very early in that process for me. Music has to be woven into the fabric of film, rather than being slapped on the outside.”
After 20 years in the business, Mansell has built up a seething insouciance toward the industry at large. Instead of negotiating with Hollywood’s conservatism, he tries to forge meaningful relationships with cult filmmakers. “I want to work with people who have something to say,” he adds. “I don’t want to be lying on my deathbed looking at all these DVDs in the bargain bin with floating head covers on them. My idea of a good collaboration is ending up somewhere you would have never expected, and that you certainly couldn’t have gotten to on your own. Not having someone interfering all the time and turning something that could be Taxi Driver into fucking Venom.”
Article Credit: Pitchfork | Daniel Dylan Wray
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