Among the endless innovations which may be attributed to The Beatles is the marriage of pop music with video. While earlier rock-’n’-roll acts like Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard had made (largely forgettable) movies at the behest of their management, The Fab Four embraced film as a means of artistic expression in its own right.

Most influential were their appearances on the small screen in short musical promotion films which laid the groundwork for the modern music video. But more ambitious was their self-produced 1967 TV movie Magical Mystery Tour. Savaged by critics at the time, it is often regarded as one of the band’s few misfires – an indulgent and incomprehensible spasm of drug-induced absurdity.

While contemporary audiences may have been confused by the film’s amateurish production and lack of a conventional narrative, the film has become more accessible over time. Running just under an hour and anchored by a series of extravagant musical sequences, Magical Mystery Tour is essentially the blueprint for the modern visual album popularised by the likes of Beyoncé and Janelle Monáe.

Influences of ’60s counterculture and cinéma vérité, once condemned as inexplicable, now seem ahead of their time. As a work of multimedia pop art, Magical Mystery Tour challenged the preconceptions of an entertainment establishment which The Beatles had already outrun, and their vision was later vindicated by the emergence of MTV and the lavish music videos which have become so ubiquitous.

Arriving just months after the release of their seminal concept album ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ and the subsequent death of their manager Brian Epstein, Magical Mystery Tour was the first project over which the band exerted full creative control, serving as their own producers, writers and directors (although Ringo Starr receives sole credit as director of photography). Filming commenced without a script – all the band had were six songs, a brightly-painted coach, and a cast of distinctive supporting actors. As Paul McCartney put it, “We made it up as we went along.”

To begin shooting with so little preparation was not simply an exercise in folly, but rather grew from a sincere desire to make an unfiltered artistic statement, free from the shackles of convention. McCartney summarised, “We were fed up of everything taking so long and being such a fuss,” while George Harrison was grateful the film provided a joint focus following Epstein’s death, stating, “It got us out and got us together.”

The film’s songs, naturally the highlight of any Beatles project, are rendered in a number of fantastically conceived musical chapters, which stand up superbly as self-contained music videos. Building on The Beatles’ earlier promo films for singles including ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, these short segments illustrate their psychedelic melodies to transcendent effect.

The trippy instrumental track ‘Flying’ is accompanied by hypnotic aerial photography, originally shot for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, while other tunes play over abstract montages and preposterous mimed performances – all shot and edited with an eye on the avant-garde.

According to Steven Cockroft and Jason Carty, hosts of Beatles podcast Nothing Is Real, these musical sequences set a benchmark which generations of pop stars would follow. “The promotional films contained within the film do not make any attempt to depict the band playing live – Paul walks around some mountains, George plays a keyboard chalked on the road and ‘I Am The Walrus’ delivers an absurdist take on a concert setting,” Cockroft tells LWLies. “They are redefining what a promotional film is.”

The largely improvised non-musical sections of the film are rougher around the edges, but not without their charm. The vein of surrealist comedy which runs throughout takes influence from The Goon Show and clearly predicts Monty Python’s Flying Circus, particularly the caricatures of authority figures like army officers and vicars. A grotesque dream sequence features John Lennon literally shovelling food onto the plate of a gluttonous woman, from which a straight line may be drawn to the Mr Creosote scene in Monty Python’s 1983 film The Meaning of Life.

These comedic vignettes serve as whimsical connecting tissue between the songs, but are also a quietly provocative treatise on The Beatles’ worldview. As Cockroft argues, “The film satirises religion, consumerism, the army, censorship and attitudes to sex, and perhaps most subversively its own audience.”

The 15 million people who eventually watched the film during BBC One’s Boxing Day transmission, however, were not impressed by these postmodern flourishes. The black-and-white broadcast effectively neutered the colourful visuals, and audiences were further thrown by the plotless, meandering narrative. The headline of the Daily Mirror ran ‘Beatles Mystery Tour Baffles Viewers,’ while the US transmission was swiftly cancelled.

Such was the intensity of the critical mauling that McCartney was hauled onto ITV’s Frost Programme the following evening to answer for the apparent disaster. Most tellingly, his defence stressed that the film should be approached more like an album of music than a traditional narrative film. “If you watch it a second time it does grow on you. And this is one thing we forgot, because when you make a record a lot of people listen and say, ‘Well, I don’t like that one.’ But the second time round they say, ‘Not bad’.”

McCartney has continued to stand by the project over subsequent decades. In a 1984 interview defending another cinematic flop, Give My Regards to Broad Street, he argued, “If you remember back to Magical Mystery Tour, that got even worse reviews than this had, and if you watch that film now, I think it’s damn good to see John Lennon up there singing ‘I Am The Walrus’.”

And therein lies the crux of Magical Mystery Tour’s enduring influence. It lacks the thoroughly scripted and lavishly budgeted structure of The Beatles’ earlier feature films, but it triumphs as a cinematic companion to their music, visualising the brilliant psychedelia of their aural innovation as had never been attempted before. As Carty explains, “music videos as we would come to know them were not the norm, pop music and abstract visuals was not the norm and long form video projects/video albums didn’t have a frame of reference yet with the general public.”

Indeed, McCartney later conceded, “It was certainly shown at the wrong time to the wrong audience.” Even so, The Beatles’ pioneering multimedia approach would eventually become standard across the music industry.

Representing the last gasp of 1967’s so-called Summer of Love, Magical Mystery Tour remains an intoxicating slice of countercultural excess, serving up The Beatles at their most experimental – even if these arthouse stylings proved too rich for families gathered around monochrome television sets. “It wasn’t the worst programme over Christmas,” McCartney reflected. “I mean, you couldn’t call the Queen’s Speech a gas either, could you?”

At the end of Joni Mitchell’s second album, ‘Clouds’, sits the melancholic masterpiece ‘Both Sides Now’. The musical embodiment of smiling through tears, the song’s yearning melody was destined for cinematic soundtracks. Its wistful lyricism evokes themes that are at once malleable and universal, making it fit comfortably into any genre, from indie horror to teen drama. Here’s a look back at how this timeless needle-drop has been deployed on screen.

CODA (2021)

Most recently, Mitchell’s enduring ballad plays a pivotal role in Sian Heder’s coming-of-age drama CODA. From an acoustic guitar duet to a piano-accompanied solo ballad, each time Ruby (Emilia Jones) performs ‘Both Sides Now’ her vocal inflexion grows bolder as she finds new meaning in the way Mitchell captures the sentimentality of growing up.

Love, Actually (2003)

Richard Curtis’ Love, Actually can lay claim to giving ‘Both Sides Now’ its most famous cinematic cameo. After receiving a Joni Mitchell CD from her husband (Alan Rickman), confirming his affair, Karen (Emma Thompson) retreats to her bedroom as the orchestral swell of ‘Both Sides Now’ soundtracks her falling tears. The song’s rousing embodiment of loss, heartbreak and reflection come crashing into the frame as Thompson delivers a devastating acting masterclass.

Steve Jobs (2015)

‘Both Sides Now’ originally had a bigger part in Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs biopic, but the song still serves as a symbolic plot point for the film’s strained father-daughter relationship. Jobs’ nine-year-old daughter listens to a loop of both the original and re-recorded versions of ‘Both Sides Now’, musing that the first is “girlish” while the second is “regretful”. That latter adjective, uttered as she stares down her absent father, exemplifies their tangled relationship and lost time.

Hereditary (2018)

By far the most unexpected use of ‘Both Sides Now’ comes in Ari Aster’s supernatural psychological horror Hereditary. As the film cuts to black following its bone-chilling conclusion, Judy Collins’ chirpy cover version begins to play over the credits. If the harpsichord chimes initially seem to jar with the film’s bleak tone, Mitchell’s mournful, world-weary lyrics couldn’t be more apt.

Toy Story 4 (2019)

A few months after Hereditary’s credits rolled, Collins’ cover of ‘Both Sides Now’ appeared in the teaser trailer for the fourth instalment in Disney-Pixar’s Toy Story series. All the familiar characters are holding hands with blue sky and perfectly fluffy clouds behind them. “I really don’t know clouds at all”; the last line before Forky breaks the chain and the toys go flying. The gentle melody is lullaby-like and a pang of nostalgia for older viewers.

Life as a House (2001)

The sun is setting over the ocean’s horizon as George (Kevin Kline), a cancer-stricken architect rebuilding his home, and his ex-wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) slow-dance to Joni Mitchell, their silhouettes swaying in the house’s skeleton. Although there’s a hint of sorrow here, it’s an uplifting sequence. As Mitchell promises “something’s lost and something’s gained in living every day,” George and Robin hold each other close.

You’ve Got Mail (1998)

It’s hard to dislike Tom Hanks but he’s walking on thin ice when mocking the lyrics of ‘Both Sides Now’, proclaiming “I could never be with someone who likes Joni Mitchell,” the favourite singer of Meg Ryan’s character. While Hanks’ protagonist fails to understand Mitchell’s penned dualities of love and life – the “up and down,” “give and take,” “win and lose” – the verses perfectly encapsulate the push-pull of this rom-com relationship.

Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 film Chungking Express is in many ways his most evocative masterpiece. A two-part tale of possible romances set in the thriving back alleys of Chungking Mansions, it paints love and lust as an insatiable medley, with frenetic camerawork, neon lights and dynamic editing forming an intoxicating mix at the heart of a multicultural melting pot.

It was an international breakthrough for Wong, screening at festivals and theatres in Europe, Australia, Asia and South America before arriving in the US via Quentin Tarantino and his Rolling Thunder Pictures label. But this scintillating vision of contemporary Hong Kong, lapped up by arthouse fanatics across the globe, was not merely a one-way crossover phenomenon.

A new seven-disc Wong Kar-wai box set released by Criterion describes Chungking Express as a ‘jukebox movie’, a film whose very identity is quantified by the vibrancy of its multinational soundtrack. Cocteau Twins’ Simon Raymonde calls it a “cross-pollination of cultures and music”; in the words of The Cranberries’ Noel Hogan, it’s the kind of movie that makes you go, “What’s that song? Who’s this band?” But Chungking Express isn’t just a great soundtrack movie – it was the genesis of numerous inroads for the pop artists around it, too.

Reggae singer Dennis Brown clashes with Dinah Washington’s smoky jazz hit ‘What A Diff’rence a Day Makes’, while the Mamas and the Papas’ sunshine pop classic ‘California Dreamin’ plays out endlessly in a fast food joint that seems to have plucked its menu from Phileas Fogg’s back pocket. It’s here that Faye Wong’s hip hostess becomes the film’s most captivating fixation, for audiences and leading man Tony Leung alike.

The jangling guitars of ‘Dreams’ by Irish alt-rock band The Cranberries play out several times across the film’s second narrative (as well as over the end credits). A hazy, wistful ballad about romantic opportunity and change, it seems to fully embody the spirit and character of the film. If it weren’t for the vocals, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the original: Faye Wong’s rendition is, in fact, the only song on the soundtrack sung in Cantonese. As such, it is the track most conducive to the film’s vivid setting in pre-1997 Hong Kong: a Western import given a Chinese-language makeover.

If Faye Wong was already something of a pop star prior to 1994, Chungking Express launched her to new heights. But it wasn’t until the album ‘Random Thoughts’ – released just a few months before the film – that she truly established her identity. And it was her shimmering cover of ‘Dreams’ that cemented her move into alternative rock, elevating her above the traditional Canto-pop ballads playing on the radio. The song was such a sensation that she ended up re-recording it – this time in Mandarin – for follow-up record ‘Sky’.

At the end of the decade Faye Wong was named in the Guinness Book of World Records as the best-selling female Cantonese pop artist of all time. She became the first Chinese singer to appear on the cover of Time magazine, and, in 2009, commanded the highest appearance fee for any singer on the China mainland at $1 million per show.

Yet Faye Wong wasn’t the only party to benefit from the success of Chungking Express. By 1996, The Cranberries had become household names in Hong Kong. The success of ‘Dreams’ thrust the Irish band into the cultural mainstream in a manner that was highly unusual at the time for a Western artist.

“I don’t ever remember hearing of anyone else getting their song covered and released in the way that ‘Dreams’ was down there,” says lead guitarist Hogan. “The story we’d been told was that Faye’s version of ‘Dreams’ became the favourite song of the Chinese Prime Minister’s wife. When she’d go places, they’d play the song – and it made it a hit.” Hogan laughs as he recalls the rumours the band heard about the track’s success – another being that the Chinese Olympic team had used it as their team song for a period. “It could have been fiction for all I know, but you’d hope that somewhere in there is a bit of truth.”

The question became moot when The Cranberries arrived in Hong Kong for the first time in 1996. Headlining the 12,500 capacity Hong Kong Coliseum was a statement in itself, but the band were still wary. “If you go to a place for the first time and the gigs are empty, then you know you’ve been told lies,” says Hogan. “You wonder if one song is really going to fill a stadium.

“Of course, it can do,” he quickly adds, recalling the vast crowd that sang along to ‘Dreams’ when the band reached that point in the setlist. “The place went crazy. We knew it had been a hit, but it was a level up when we played ‘Dreams’.”

The Cranberries weren’t the only band to strike it big in Hong Kong via Chungking Express. Another Faye Wong cover, ‘Bluebeard’, by Scottish dream pop pioneers Cocteau Twins, also featured on the film’s soundtrack – and, as the opening track on ‘Random Thoughts’, it became a mission statement for Wong’s creative direction as her career took off in the mid-’90s.

From that moment on, Wong solidified her association with Cocteau Twins. Having already covered two of their songs on ‘Random Thoughts’ (fifth track ‘Know Oneself and Each Other’ is a reworking of ‘Know Who You Are at Every Age’), she found herself collaborating with the band for a string of subsequent releases, each act working in their native studios, separated by approximately 6,000 miles and an impenetrable language barrier.

“I was a massive film buff – we all were,” says bass guitarist and keyboard player Raymonde. “Wong Kar-wai was somebody who was being talked about a lot, and we’d all seen Chungking Express and thought it was brilliant. When the possibility [of collaborating with Faye Wong] was mentioned, there was a recognition there because of the film and how good it was. It was the film that sparked our interest in doing it.”

Cocteau Twins’ contributions ‘Fracture’ and ‘Spoilsport’ appeared on Faye Wong’s 1996 album ‘Fuzao’, which was heavily influenced by the band’s aesthetic and sound, while ‘Amusement Park’ appeared alongside a cover of ‘Rilkean Heart’ on her 1997 follow-up ‘Faye Wong’.

The association brought a new audience to the Cocteau Twins, just as the band had hoped. While their plans to tour Hong Kong in the late ’90s were scuppered when vocalist Liz Fraser quit the band, their 1996 album ‘Milk & Kisses’ was released in Eastern Asia; it included an exclusive duet version of ‘Serpentskirt’ featuring Wong. “That was a real first,” Raymonde recalls. “Letting someone else’s vocals be on our recordings. We thought it was fun. It was different.”

As contemporary Canto-pop stars like Candy Lo began to emulate the same jangly, dream pop sound on records like the 1998 EP ‘Don’t Have to be… Too Perfect’ and subsequent album ‘Miao’, and with Cocteau Twins having gone their separate ways, Faye Wong moved away from the musical style that had defined her ascendency amid what Raymonde believes were creative tensions between her and her record label.

Wong initially retired from the pop scene in 2005, having sold close to 10 million records by the turn of the century, earning her comparisons to Madonna from media outlets who had dubbed her “the Diva” of Hong Kong. She reunited with Wong Kar-wai in 2004, appearing as a bouffant-haired android/hotel landlord’s daughter in the Palme d’Or-nominated 2046, and later revived her singing career with a series of triumphant comeback shows between 2010 and 2012. Her versions of ‘Dreams’ and ‘Rilkean Heart’ were regularly included on the setlists.

The Cranberries, meanwhile, returned to Hong Kong and mainland China several times before the death of singer Dolores O’Riordan in 2018 spelled the end for the band. “I do think that a lot of our popularity in China is because of ‘Dreams’,” concludes Hogan. “It takes just one movie like that. It opens the door.”

Raymonde agrees: “It can have the effect of spawning interest in a whole movement of music. And that style of music in the West – with female vocals and effects and reverb – it did cross over. Because if it didn’t then bands like The Cranberries and the Cocteau Twins wouldn’t have had the opportunity to travel around the world in the way that we did.”

With publications like the South China Morning Post and Time Out Hong Kong still championing dream pop artists in Hong Kong as recently as July 2020, the influence of these visionaries evidently remains strong. With artists such as Taipei shoegazers U.TA quick to acknowledge Faye Wong’s influence, it’s safe to say that if music is a universal language, Chungking Express requires no interpretation.

It’s been 10 years since Jon M Chu’s 3D documentary Never Say Never caught viewers up on Justin Bieber’s rapid and extremely online rise to stardom. How exactly did this well-coiffed 16-year-old go from busking in small-town Canada to selling out Madison Square Garden? Chu’s film answered that question using what he called a “hyperlink” approach, connecting concert footage to scenes of Bieber’s personal life. The formula was pretty straightforward, relying heavily on home video clips that evinced early musical promise, staged ‘candid’ moments of him and his loved ones, and interviews with just about everyone in his circle.

Never Say Never was produced by the star’s team as a way to capitalise on Biebermania. (One early shopping mall appearance resulted in five hospitalisations and an arrest.) It didn’t matter that it had only been a year and nine months since the release of his debut single, or that he had yet to experience any real conflict. (Bieber HQ assembled two feature-length docs before he reached his lowest ebb, after which point it assembled a third.) What mattered was that he had fans who turned out in droves to spend a couple of hours with him.

And turn out they did. Never Say Never became the highest-grossing concert film of all time, raking in almost $100 million worldwide. It was only a week after its release that Katy Perry began her California Dreams Tour, during which time she filmed her own 3D documentary, Part of Me. Though its central conflict, a divorce, made for a more emotional film, it stuck to the Bieber formula in that it made little effort to pretend that it wasn’t pandering to fans – as opposed to, say, critics. The opening credits sequence to the next entry in the genre, One Direction: This Is Us, seemed designed to encourage in-theatre screaming as each of the band’s five members were introduced.

In 2021, these films are still making big bucks. This is partly because they double as promotion for the artists in question, generating album and ticket sales. But over the last decade, these films have migrated away from theatres and directly into viewers’ homes – first via prestige TV, then with the help of streaming giants. The likes of Netflix have spent the last few years engaged in a frenzied bidding war with rival platforms to secure the exclusive rights to various pop star docs, in the hope that fans will subscribe to their service over the competition.

Beyoncé’s three-project deal with Netflix was worth a reported $60 million; Apple TV+ paid Billie Eilish $25 million for the forthcoming The World’s a Little Blurry; and Amazon Prime paid the same amount for an as-yet-untitled Rihanna doc, also due out this year. Who knows how much Nicki Minaj, who’s already been the subject of two feature films, recently made in her deal with HBO Max. Same goes for Demi Lovato, whose Dancing with the Devil – her second YouTube-produced film – hits the platform next month.

At the same time as these films appear to be reaching critical mass, their reception among non-fans has not really improved since 2011, especially as the stars themselves have run out of ways to disguise the fact that these are only not cash-grabs but exercises in brand control. It’s telling that the best-received examples – including but not limited to Lady Gaga’s Five Foot Two, Beyoncé’s Homecoming and Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana– largely deviate from the Bieber formula, or else are less bald-faced in their stage-managing.

Still, these exceptions do not appear to have coerced streaming platforms away from the Bieber model entirely: Eilish’s doc, as well as Netflix’s recent BLACKPINK: Light Up the Sky, suggest that fan power still outweighs years active in the industry when it comes to commissioning such films.

And then there’s the small matter of Shawn Mendes: In Wonder, which feels like a bizarre full-circle moment in their history. Mendes is another small-town Canadian who broke through covering others’ songs – this time on Vine, where he gained thousands of followers after posting his rendition of Bieber’s ‘As Long As You Love Me’. The closest thing the younger Canuck’s film has to a central conflict is him stretching his voice to its “breaking point” mid-tour. That just so happens to be the lone ordeal suffered by Bieber in Chu’s film.

Thanks to COVID-19 restrictions, being able to go to the cinema has been a rare luxury for many of us this year. Yet that didn’t stop 2020 from producing its fair share of memorable movies. And with all that extra time indoors, there’s been plenty of opportunity to become immersed in great movie soundtracks. Here’s a look at 10 of the very best scores released in 2020, each proof that film music is in a great place as we head into 2021.

Da 5 Bloods (Terrance Blanchard)

Legendary jazz trumpeter and composer Terrance Blanchard provides Spike Lee’s films with their beating heart, and he continued this run with Da 5 Bloods, a film about a group of black US military veterans who return to Vietnam in pursuit of ghosts and gold in the Jungle. These arrangements shift from soul-cleansing, saxophone-driven nostalgia to thunderous kick-drums that indicates chaos is just a land mine way. Thanks to the transcendent beauty of ‘MLK Assassinated’ and the patriotic wonder of ‘Bloods Go Into The Jungle’, it would be a crime if Blanchard wasn’t nominated for an Oscar.

Mank (Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross)

Whether you believe Mank is a “cynical delight” or just Ed Wood with all the fun sucked out, there’s no denying the effectiveness of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score. It is full of playful melodrama and tender jazz grooves that harken back to the glitz and glamour of Hollywood in the 1930s and ’40s. The playful energy of ‘A Fool’s Paradise’ is a particular highlight, while the humming dissonance present in ‘Time Running Out’ feels like all the loose puzzle pieces in Herman J Mankiewicz’s head, just waiting for an outsider to help piece them together. When you see the names Fincher and Reznor together you tend to think of something dark or nihilistic, but this score proves they’re still capable of surprising us.

Possessor (Jim Williams)

Composer Jim Williams expertly uses distorted wind chimes, squeamish synths and stabs of dark bass to build tension that you can feel right in the pit of your stomach, with this unhinged music the right fit for Brandon Cronenberg’s psychological horror about an assassin that takes over other people’s consciousness in order to take down her targets. ‘Skin After Successful Skin’ is as skin-crawling as its name would suggest, while the ambient terror of ‘Opposite Inaccessible Corner’ is something you can imagine David Lynch unwinding to. Possessor is one of the best horror films of recent years, and its twisted futuristic score deserves a lot more recognition.

American Utopia (David Byrne)

A contender for best concert film of 2020, Spike Lee’s American Utopia brought the eccentric David Byrne’s Broadway show to the big screen. The music has that same delirious weirdness which is present in the Talking Heads frontman’s best work, always probing at the contradictions of Western culture. These songs find whimsy in dark places in a way only Byrne can really pull off (check out True Stories too). Fantastical songs like ‘Toe Jam’ and ‘I Should Watch TV’ shift between giddiness and tragedy, both feeling like a much-needed injection of energy amid such an exhausting time for the world. Just try not smiling.

Tenet (Ludwig Göransson)

Tenet may not be looked back on as one of the great Christopher Nolan films, but it’s certainly one of the great Nolan scores. Ludwig Göransson’s music has a fidgety cyberpunk energy, letting up the pace only occasionally for moments of gorgeous self-reflection (see ‘From Mumbai to Amalfi’). The way the synths on Posterity sound like a helicopter spinning out of control is particularly exhilarating. By the time Göransson forces you to take a swim through US rapper Travis Scott’s wavy subconsciousness, you’ll be fully converted. The Swedish composer, who is a frequent collaborator of Childish Gambino’s, is a name you can expect to hear a lot more of in Hollywood across the 2020s.

She Dies Tomorrow (Mondo Boys)

Musical duo the Mondo Boys provide a suitably tense score for this underrated drama about a woman convinced she only has 24 hours left on earth. The ticking clock on ‘The Morning After’ suggests something life changing is on the horizon, drawing closer and closer, but given the lushness of the music (just check out the glowing choir that colours ‘Desert Through The Door’), whatever it is can’t be that bad, surely?

Birds of Prey (Various artists)

Utilising some of rap and pop music’s brightest stars, the all-female Birds of Prey soundtrack moves at a blistering pace that rips the figurative rug from underneath you just as things threaten to get too syrupy. Doja Cat’s anthemic EDM/rap hybrid ‘Boss Bitch’ will make you miss those sweaty dance floors, while Megan Thee Stallion calling diamonds her “new boyfriend” tapped right into the anti-hero, feminist individuality of Harley Quinn herself.

Swallow (Nathan Halpern)

This effective psychological horror about Hunter, a nervous housewife (played by an excellent Hayley Bennett) who develops a worrying eating disorder that compels her to swallow inanimate objects, sadly went under a lot of people’s radars. The brilliant score by Nathan Halpern really brings you inside Hunter’s psyche, with songs like ‘The Glass House’ and ‘Equilibrium’ combining grandiose instrumentation, which attempts to mirror the domesticity and warmth of a 1950s housewife, with the kind of cutting synths you might expect to hear on a Mica Levi score. This musical juxtaposition shows something strange and sadistic is bubbling just under the picturesque surface, mirroring Hunter’s character journey perfectly.

Calm with Horses (Blanck Mass)

This film about small-time drug dealers in rural Ireland is elevated by its score by Benjamin John Powe (of Blanck Mass). The electro-industrial producer consistently conjures up an otherworldly hum, mirroring the dreams of the film’s characters, who each seem to wish they were just about anywhere else. ‘Loyal Skins’ and ‘Jack’s Theme’, which sounds like new-age John Carpenter, are both filled with invention; you’ll revisit these songs over and over.

Shirley (Tamar-kali)

There’s something haunting about Tamar-kali’s Shirley score, with the rising composer’s sparse music expertly tapping into the claustrophobic mood of the eponymous author’s writing process. The interplay of the string section, which possess an urgent, dread-inducing chord progression, is particularly engrossing. Tamar-kali lends her own bluesy vocals to some of these pieces, succeeding in giving a voice to the pain that sits at the heart of Elizabeth Moss’ lead performance. In our interview with the singer and composer, she said: “Music built around emotion and feeling; that’s ultimately where I try to exist as an artist.” She certainly succeeds here.

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2002 film Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler’s Barry Egan finds it difficult to express his true feelings. In order to fit in with society his fractured personality often takes on a disturbingly jovial form. Barry does everything possible to keep people at bay, even if that involves smashing up his clingy sister’s living room windows.

Chicago rapper, comedian, wrestler and podcaster Open Mike Eagle (real name Michael Eagle) has also made an art out of masking his emotions, using subversive jokes to throw listeners off the scent across colourful albums that intelligently poke holes in the notion of the human condition. In Sandler’s character, Eagle says he instantly recognised a kindred spirit. “I just related to how Barry seeks to keep people at a distance,” he tells me after I remark that bars such as ‘On that laugh to keep from crying tip / no one seems to know when I’m joking’ (from 2014’s diary-entry ‘Dark Comedy Morning Show’) reminded me of Barry.

“Barry points to how he’s feeling but doesn’t go into specifics,” Eagle continues. “When people ask me how I’m feeling it makes me so uncomfortable. He has that in him, too. He doesn’t really want anyone to know who he is. A big thrust of the movie is Barry finding a woman he wants to get to know but having no idea what to do. He’s trying to control his own narrative, but different forces conspire to take that away from him. I can relate to that. The fact that Punch-Drunk Love transforms going to the supermarket into this otherworldly event made a real impression on me, because that’s what I try to do with my music. I try to find whimsy in mundane, everyday stuff.”

It’s clear that the romantic narrative of Punch-Drunk Love means a lot to Eagle. Yet it was the film’s “off-centre” music – steered by composer Jon Brion, who improvised many of the songs live on set while Anderson described the sounds in his head – that made the biggest impression on the rapper. The film begins with a harmonium melody that’s clearly out of key and twitchy synths that seem to echo the displacement of Barry’s life – sounds that signify an outsider.

However, as the character falls deeper in love, becoming less and less insular, the chords trade their disparate feel for the kind of doe-eyed optimism you might find in an old Disney movie. This emotional metamorphosis is completed with Brion’s use of ‘He Needs Me’ – a love song originally from Robert Altman’s Popeye – during a climatic dinner date in Hawaii.

“Barry feels like a flat note in most of the scenes he’s in, and I love how the music reflects that,” says Mike, who remembers looping the Sgt Pepper’s-esque ‘Overture’ into a beat he wrote lyrics to at college. “Jon Brion has these same templates he revisits; he keeps on doing a slightly different spin on the same musical idea. It’s kind of like sampling, and there’s something very hip hop about that. He shows how our inner monologue can evolve as we become sadder or happier. It’s experimental, sure, but the music also feels like these old bright show tunes. Some of it wouldn’t be out of place in Fantasia.”

In the same way Barry becomes more honest with his emotions as the film progresses, it feels like Eagle has undergone his own transformation. His album ‘Anime, Trauma and Divorce’, released earlier this year, finds Eagle trying to plot a new path while considering his limitations. The music was recorded while he was going through a painful separation, yet he somehow makes hitting rock bottom feel therapeutic. A chance to heal. The lyric “I need more fingers to pick up the pieces”, from funky album highlight ‘Bucciarati’, acts as both a window to Eagle’s soul and an allegory for the overwhelming hopelessness of 2020.

So, has the artist changed? And is he now less interested in pushing people away, or masking his feelings with jokes? “I am definitely kind of a dark person,” he admits. “I spent a lot of my career trying not to acknowledge it and trying to talk around it. Usually I would record a dark song for an album before going back and completely changing the lyrics. I really needed to confront some of that darkness and put it on this record. It’s an album about cycles of trauma.”

Although at times it sounds like Eagle is struggling to carry this weight, he also maintains his trademark wit, whether that’s through poking fun at yuppies with asses for heads or reflecting on how life sometimes feels like one big Black Mirror episode. There’s something inspiring about hearing him crack jokes knowing he was experiencing one of the lowest points of his life. “I guess that’s proof I am still fighting, no matter how heavy things get.”

Eagle says his next project will be a lot brighter than ‘Anime, Trauma and Divorce’. “It isn’t going to be as reflective. Honestly, I am feeling like I really need to flex my rap skills. I want to double down on rap as a craft and show that I’m one of the best. I sense that’s becoming valuable again to hip hop culture.” Might it include a song as innocent and tender as ‘He Needs Me’? “Only if I can rap about loving someone so much that I want to chew their face and scoop out their eyeballs,” Eagle replies, giggling. “I like to use language like Barry does!”

Whatever the future holds, Eagle says he can’t picture a day where he won’t turn to Brion’s score for inspiration. “If you are ever on a city bus and just want to go to another world then I’d say put the Punch-Drunk Love score on your headphones. It’s a really pretty thing without ever feeling too much. You could listen to Brion’s arrangements 100 times and still pick up on something new. There’s a lot of words on an Open Mike Eagle album – I try my best to make my music that way too.”

Pioneering rapper and producer El-P’s music has always felt cinematic. A big portion of the artist’s solo material is rooted in post-apocalyptic themes that explore the hollowness of late capitalism, with songs like ‘Dead Disnee’ and ‘Delorean’ clearly made by a keen student of John Carpenter’s They Live.

His fragmented beats surge with the urgency of a chase sequence in a Mad Max film, helping to illuminate nightmarish flash imagery such as drones conducting a “mechanical fox hunt” over Brooklyn, or wagging finger tips capable of conducting MRI scans. He’s the closest thing rap music has to Philip K Dick.

El-P is also one half of Run The Jewels, alongside rapper Killer Mike. Arguably, the duo’s music is underpinned by a lot more hope than El-P’s solo work, pushing the idea that the evil in America can be overcome by people from different walks of life (El-P is white and from New York City, Mike is black and from Atlanta) coming together. With its references to police brutality and the idea of toppling despotic world leaders, new album ‘RTJ4’ might just be this year’s most socially relevant release, with El-P producing a record that not only sounds like the soundtrack to a raucous party at the end of the world, but also the fuel for a protest movement.

“With ‘RTJ4’, resistance comes in the form of me and Mike’s friendship. We wanted to make this cinematic album where the anti-heroes survive and speed away into the sunset,” El-P says. “The thing I am most proud of about ‘RTJ4’ is you don’t walk away from it frowning or feeling down, even when the odds often feel insurmountable. The idea was that if we’re going down then we’re gonna go down swinging, and I think there’s a real beauty and relevance to that right now.”

Despite the fact that El-P’s music is often the antithesis to stillness, his all-time favourite film score, Cliff Martinez’s composition for 2002’s Solaris, is above all soothing. Steven Soderbergh’s divisive remake was something El-P was grateful to discover while experiencing the hangover from hell. “I had partied all night and I was completely destroyed. It was one of those classic hangovers where you spend the whole day locked on the couch and rent a movie. The music was so soul-cleansing that I immediately bought the soundtrack and just played it on a loop for 10 straight hours. To be honest, I kind of never stopped.”

Everyone has that one record they turn to whenever life becomes a bit too much; the familiarity of the music provides us with a necessary emotional reset. For El-P, that record is Martinez’s Solaris score. “This music just became the soundtrack to my life. To this day, I cannot fly without listening to ‘Will She Come Back’ as the plane takes off. The music touches on stress, but also stress resolution. It’s perfect to listen to when you just want to level out.”

Soderbergh’s film follows psychiatrist Dr Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) as he investigates a space expedition to Solaris, a strange nebulous-like planet that’s somehow capable of embedding itself into the human subconscious, turning people’s desires into reality. This results in Clooney having interactions with his dead wife (played by Natascha McElhone), with Martinez combining electronic and classical instrumentation that feels like it floats searchingly in and out of the narrative.

It’s easy to see why Martinez’s score made such a big impression on El-P; the music feels meditative and dreamlike, as verdant synths bloom and a Cristal baschet (which El-P tried to buy after watching the film, but balked at the $50,000 price tag) purrs at a frequency that doesn’t quite feel of this world. Nothing is how it seems in Solaris, and this is evidenced by the way the score and the unconventional sequencing reflect the splintered emotional state of Clooney’s character. Yes, it’s a film set in space, but it’s more about the spaces in the human mind and how we choose to fill them after experiencing loss.

“I love that even through the dread, there’s this undercurrent of hope that exists within the film’s music,” El-P says. “Cliff hints that this is a hopeful story through the resolution of his chords and there’s this gorgeous alchemy to the music. It’s what makes it feel different from Tarkovsky’s adaptation [of Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel].”

He adds: “I believe that sci-fi is a vehicle to exaggerate the human experience and make a statement about it. This film isn’t about space, it’s about loss. But even though the film is embedded in sadness and fear, Cliff never makes you feel despair no matter how tense things get. His music beautifully carries you through this thing and doesn’t drop you on your head, and that’s a masterful thing to be able do.”

Interestingly, El-P sees parallels between the work of Martinez (who, incidentally, was interviewed for this series), and the way rap music is constructed. “With Solaris, Martinez combines steel drums with these long string chords that swell through the music. All of the notes are syncopated through delays. A lot of these choices don’t make sense – just like the world of Solaris doesn’t. Sampling and combining things that aren’t normally drawn together is fundamental [to being a rap producer], and Cliff works like that too. As a producer, your ears get tainted. I’m able to figure out and recognise a process when I listen to most types of music, but I could never really pin this one down, and I love that.”

While Run The Jewels has taken up a lot of El-P’s time in recent years, he has started to make fresh moves into film scoring. First there was the leak of the music he submitted for the trailer for Blade Runner 2049. Though it was ultimately turned down, its frenetic pace chimes with the eyes-in-the-back-of-your-head paranoia of Ridley Scott’s original. “I wanted to tap into the spirit of Vangelis’ score,” he explains. “Maybe in another reality that gig was offered to me. I hope that someday I get my hands on something of that magnitude.”

Then there was Josh Trank’s Capone, which may not have been warmly received by critics but does at least feature an emotionally resonant score by El-P. Rather than being embedded in the Prohibition era, the restrained music is rooted in dissonant electronica that succeeds in tapping into the loneliness and disaffection that comes with being a notorious gangster past his prime.

“How do I make a period piece with synths?” El-P says of the starting point for his Capone score. “How do I use a fucking Yamaha CS-80 on a period piece about a syphilitic Al Capone shitting his adult diaper and having all these disconcerting flashbacks of his violent past while alone in his house? The music you hear shows what’s inside Capone’s heart. I didn’t want this music to be its own character, but more of a narrator.”

There’s even a loving reference to Cliff Martinez in his Capone score. “The wind chimes that you hear on the song ‘Little Italy’ were definitely a homage to Solaris,” El-P reveals. “I knew I wanted to incorporate my own version of that disparate, ethereal bell sound, which echoes within this big open space and is so often Cliff’s trademark. I wanted to create a piece of music that bled into every moment. Learning how to play a wind chime was so much fun too!” He says it would be a “dream” to one day work with Martinez and learn from his process.

Looking ahead, El-P says that ‘RTJ5’ will happen but “only when the time is right”. He admits that the self-isolation protocols brought about by the coronavirus pandemic have impacted his and Mike’s working relationship, with the pair very much fans of being in the same room together and “feeling each other’s energy” opposed to emailing verses, which is something El-P says they will never do. He’s excited to tour the ‘RTJ4’ album in 2021, but jokes that these shows might have to feature “personal mosh pit bubbles” for every audience member in order to prevent the spread of germs.

Whatever the future holds for El-P, you can be sure Martinez’s Solaris score will be playing in the background. “I remember buying the Star Wars vinyl as a kid and it having such an impact on me,” he concludes, “but there’s still no piece of music in my life that I have listened to more than Solaris. There are records I hold in high regard, but this one has stuck with me and pushed me to grow as a producer. The music is medicinal. It shepherds you through these complex emotions, but does it in a way that feels responsible. It acknowledges pain, but also takes responsibility for not shattering you. I can’t envision a day where I won’t turn to it for inspiration.”

El-P’s Capone score is out digitally now, and available to pre-order on vinyl at productomart.com

Saul Williams is a master of many mediums – poetry, hip-hop, acting, activism – and throughout his career he’s exhibited a keen instinct for knowing which will best serve his message of love and liberation. As a musician, he’s recorded with Nine Inch Nails and Allen Ginsberg; as a speaker, he’s visited 30-plus countries; as an actor, he’s reached Broadway (in 2013’s Tupac musical Holler If Ya Hear Me) and starred in a Sundance prize-winner (1998’s Slam).

In Akilla’s Escape, which premiered at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Williams plays the lead role of a marijuana dealer who is robbed on the eve of his retirement and endeavours to help one of the young thieves (Thamela Mpumlwana) escape the same cycles of gang violence he never could.

The crime-noir is heightened by Williams’ hypnotic score (co-composed with Massive Attack’s Robert “3D” Del Naja), capturing those cycles as nightmare loops, weaving between its protagonist’s traumatic youth and his tortured present, with Mpumlwana also playing young Akilla. For Williams and director Charles Officer, a thriller exploring masculinity and mythologies of gang violence allowed both to advance previous conversations they’d had.

“As Black men in the Americas, we’re thinking about these things off-camera more than we’re given the opportunity to think about them on-camera,” explains Williams. “How do we put an end to generational trauma? How do we successfully question patriarchal ideas and ideals that have been programmed into us? How do we thwart systemic suppression and oppression when we birth children who are once again born into it?”

Early on, Officer asked Williams whether he would contribute music to Akilla’s Escape, but it was only after filming that Williams was able to disassociate from the scenes he’d acted in, putting himself in the right space to provide the soundtrack.

An opening montage of archival footage and newspaper clippings, set to Bob Marley and the Wailers’ ‘Punky Reggae Party’, depicts Jamaican history as a gale of political unrest, inseparable from colonial intrusions and the rise of drug trafficking. Headlines charting the CIA’s 1976 efforts to destabilise the Manley government flash as a hand reaches for an Uzi submachine gun. Intercut with these images, Williams dances in a warehouse to the same bouncing needle drop.

“It was easier to choose that song than it was to clear it,” Williams reveals. No other soundtrack choice made the production jump through as many hoops – in fairness, no other soundtrack choice was Marley. The soundtrack broadly explores Jamaican musical history while charting its diasporic extensions: included are ’60s balladeer Jackie Edwards; ’70s roots reggae group The Gladiators; and modern EDM duo Zeds Dead (specifically, their bass-heavy ‘Rudeboy’, from the Jamaican slang term).

“From the moment the script came, I used it as this wonderful excuse to dive into Jamaican archives of sound,” says Williams. Marley, the global flag-bearer for Rastafari sound and ethos, was kept in heavy rotation, as were two other ’70s island icons: dub pioneer Lee “Scratch” Perry, and Burning Spear, whose roots chants exhibited a bracing political anger. Williams adds that he was equally inspired by Miles Davis’ spaced-out soundscapes, as well as minimalist composer Terry Riley, noted for innovative uses of repetition and delay.

He’s also a noted trip-hop fan. When Williams was approached by Officer, he was already deep into trading unrelated sonic experiments with Del Naja. Getting the go-ahead, he tested out their compositions in the mix – haunting synthscapes driven by skeletal beats and an air of distorted menace that seemed to fit perfectly. “It made sense in deepening the narrative and bringing out qualities Charles wanted in the genre of a crime-noir,” says Williams. “There was a depth necessary in the sound to complement that. It came about not easily but clearly, how those two worlds might connect.”

Ironically, the placement Williams agonised over most is the only instance in Akilla’s Escape where we hear his musical voice. An early scene of young Akilla being interrogated in a New York police station segues into neon-lit present-day Toronto, where the older Akilla is introduced. Bridging the timelines is ‘Skin of a Drum’ from Williams’ 2007 record ‘The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust!’. Over clanging crate drums and anxious violins from Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, Williams contemplates his relationship to his father (“His completions won’t complete me / I’ve divided me by one”).

“That’s probably the one thing I fought Charles on,” says Williams, who was more focused on creating new beats than repurposing old ones. “It’s probably what led him to thinking I should work on the sound of this film, but it was too on-the-nose for me to see.” Between the song’s inclusion and Williams’ performance, Akilla’s Escape doubles as a meta-meditation on his career interest in breaking patriarchal cycles through art. He welcomes this reading.

“To play with these questions in a creative sense is liberating. You feel the possibility that, by facing this challenge publicly, it may touch something in someone else who’s also been in that uncharted territory of self-questioning. Maybe that will lead to something closer to an answer.”

When singer-songwriter Julia Holter suddenly became obsessed with the sound of church bells back in 2010, a friend recommended she watch legendary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s stirring 1966 film Andrei Rublev. It’s fair to say the film, which depicts medieval Russia as a brutal, uncompromising place, isn’t the easiest watch. Yet Holter instantly fell in love with its persistent use of bells and how they mark the passing of time, with their ethereal chimes powerfully cutting through the struggle of 15th century Russia.

“It’s a film that’s got a lot of suffering in it, but whenever the bell rings out it feels like Tarkovsky is showing that there is still a glimmer of hope on the horizon,” says Holter. “There’s something about the way the bell functions that is so spiritual to me, as the bell’s counting of time signifies something very poetic. I love that this one musical instrument could represent something so important.”

She continues, “There’s a scene at the end of the film where all the people erect this bell tower. The way the rope bluntly stretches symbolises the collective pain of the Russian people. When you hear the bells’ percussive clinking, you also hear a woman’s chanting, and it is so haunting and powerful; the way the non-diegetic and diegetic sounds work together is so genius.”

Holter’s music has long been described as avant-pop, with her albums known to switch unpredictably between gentle introspection and organised chaos – she’s just as inspired by Gyorgy Ligeti as she is Joni Mitchell. Holter believes this kind of juxtaposition is also present in composer Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov’s score for Andrei Rublev. “It’s obviously a very fragmented film that’s more about emotion than plot, and his score speaks to this, but very subtly,” she explains. “You can feel the sounds right in the pit of your stomach. I like that the score can create this atmosphere of dread but then knock you away with a gorgeous choir or string section. It has an element of unpredictability.”

A street jester dances with his last ounce of energy in the hope of being given some vegetables by admirers; starving, shivering peasants desperately eat snow as ants crawl across their bodies; a woman delicately braids her murdered friend’s hair; hungry dogs violently fight for just a morsel of food. These are all horrifying images, impossible to erase from the memory, but Holter says the way Ovchinnikov’s sparse score cuts through them is “deeply beautiful”.

Another memorable scene depicts a group of rebellious naked bodies having a late night skinny dip, which then descends into a chaotic orgy that climaxes in both pleasure and death. During this scene, the score transitions from stillness to a tornado of screaming violins, reflecting the contrast of their carnal adventure with the more regressive values of the authoritarian society that they are all still shackled by. “The music in that scene is both visceral and sensual, and that isn’t an easy balance,” adds Holter.

Tarkovsky’s film is loosely based on the life of painter Andrei Rublev, showing how religion and war forced Russia into revolution across his lifetime, and why his art was ultimately a great triumph over such pain and turmoil. But one of the reasons the Tarkovsky’ masterpiece, which for many years was banned by the Soviet Union, still packs such a visceral punch is down to the bold way in which it shows how the poor inevitably suffer the most whenever society undergoes a cultural metamorphosis. It’s a prescient idea. “This idea that it’s always the poor that struggle more deeply whenever there’s a revolution says so much about our world right now,” Holter agrees.

The way the film, and its music, shifts between light and darkness reminds me of Holter’s own work. “Everything is just vanity and decay,” Theophanes the Confessor tells Rublev in one memorable sequence, which encapsulates the themes of the morose lullabies present on Holter’s 2018 album ‘Aviary’. She even confirms that one of her more experimental songs, ‘Underneath the Moon’, was directly inspired by Tarkovsky’s film; its dream-like lyrics (“Writhing in the laughter like / The jester’s high”) directly reference the film.

Throughout Andrei Rublev, there are moments of thick electrical synths that don’t seem to go anywhere. However, Holter says this speaks directly to Tarkovsky’s vision for the future of film scoring. “In his book, ‘Sculpting in Time’, Tarkovsky says that electronic music has the ‘right capacity to be absorbed by a film’s sound’,” Holter recalls. “‘It can be hidden behind other noises and be distinct. It’s like the voice of nature. It can be like something breathing.’ The fact he was instilling this vision way back in 1966 is so clever.”

In recent years Holter has started scoring films herself, including the 2016 boxing documentary Bleed for This and 2020’s critically-acclaimed abortion drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always. She says she’d love to score a horror film next, which makes perfect sense: check out the surreal romance of ‘Hello Stranger’, a song that sounds like it was made with David Lynch in mind.

She admits film scoring requires, “a lot more restraint. I can’t go as crazy with the music as I don’t want to detract from the film, which I am in service to.” Yet you sense her admiration for Ovchinnikov’s work on Andrei Rublev has greatly helped her with this transition. “Ovchinnikov and Tarkovsky were great believers that film music should dissolve into a film and become an organic part of it. That even if something is dark, it should still be intimate and have a romanticism to it,” Holter adds, “I think they were on to something, don’t you?”

Is it cinema? Or is it supposed to be like an art installation? Why is a giant baby floating through space? These were some of the questions flying through Max Richter’s head when he first watched 2001: A Space Odyssey as a teenager. But even though the film’s highly subjective plot, which is centred around a mysterious monolith guiding humanity through pivotal moments on its evolutionary path, leaves more questions than answers, the German-born British composer was certain that director Stanley Kubrick’s use of classical music was groundbreaking.

“I was already studying the piano but watching 2001 really consolidated my love for classical music,” says Richter. “It’s a film I owe a lot to, it taught me the power of matching incredible images with incredible pieces of music. Kubrick knew that if there wasn’t a piece of music that could match the pure spectacle on the screen then it was best to leave things silent, which is probably why so much of 2001 is in silence and based around the white noise of space. I learned a lot from that. If silence is more powerful or symbolic, then your job as a composer is to exercise some restraint.”

Richter is regarded as one of Britain’s greatest living composers, with his records ‘Memoryhouse’ and ‘Infra’ among the standout achievements of contemporary classical music. He’s also contributed original scores to the theatre, ballet and film. His work is grounded in raw emotion and other worldly mystique, blending electronic and classical seamlessly together.

Whether it’s working with neuroscientists to ensure his eight-hour magnum opus, ‘Sleep’, would allow listeners to actually doze off, or the mournful lament of ‘The Blue Notebooks’, which channels the avoidable pain of the war in the Middle East, Richter’s cerebral pieces are filled with hidden meaning – something he learned directly from Kubrick’s classical choices. “The film is about asking these big philosophical and scientific questions,” Richter says, “and it’s clear Kubrick wanted to pick songs that reflected their enormity. The opening, with Richard Strauss’ ‘Also sprach Zarathrustra’, with its direct echoes of Nietzsche and the idea of the human species transitioning from the animal world to the next evolutionary leap by becoming the Ubermensch, sets up the whole psychodrama of the film in such a unique way. From Strauss to György Ligeti [the film] runs the full gauntlet of the human experience.”

Kubrick had originally commissioned British composer Alex North to score 2001, but felt his work was too obviously trying to tap into the conventions of the sci-fi genre. So the director ended up licensing the “guide pieces” he had chosen in the editing suite instead. The legend goes that North didn’t find out that his music had been scrapped until he was sitting in the audience at the film’s premiere. Although this method was “clearly horrible”, according to Richter, Kubrick’s decision was ultimately “fully vindicated”.

Richter particularly admires Kubrick’s decision to use Ligeti’s discordant and experimental ‘Requiem’ in the film’s ‘Stargate’ sequence, where astronaut Dr Bowman (Keir Dullea) is pulled into a vortex of contrasting colours that sit somewhere between blissful acid trip and nightmarish assault on the senses. As this surreal scene unfolds, the dread-inducing music sounds like death rattles filtering through the wind, as the music slowly transitions from twisted hell-scape into strangely soothing equanimity.

“Using Ligeti in that scene was such a bold choice,” he says. “Remember, this was very experimental classical music that was only a few years old [when 2001 was made] and confused just as many people as it enthralled. Ligeti’s music hits you in such a direct way. His music is so sophisticated in its construction. It is a myriad of interlocking lines moving through these sonic masses, but it really works with the film’s bold, abstract imagery. The fact that Kubrick even thought to combine them says a lot about his genius.”

Richter provided the score for director James Gray’s 2019 sci-fi Ad Astra, which follows Brad Pitt’s depressed astronaut as he moves through the solar system in pursuit of his father. The plot quite obviously mirrors the journey taken in 2001, and the construction of the film’s score spoke profoundly to Richter’s admiration for Kubrick’s meaningful song choices. Arguably, Richter went even deeper.

“A lot of the electronic music in Ad Astra was made with old mood synths from the late ’60s so we could directly channel the spirit of Ligeti’s work in 2001. It’s both an inward-looking story and also this big space epic, so I knew I had to tow the line between punchy sounds and these tender, introspective moments, where the music has to symbolise and elevate all that isolation Brad is feeling. I knew I wanted to do something really different, too.”

He explains further: “I came across the Voyager probes, which have been sending back data every nine seconds while travelling through our solar system since the mid ’70s. We actually got our hands on their raw data. We took the plasma wave radiation readings of their flybys of all the planets and created computer model insolence from this data. It means I could transform the data into actual sounds and then play their sounds like actual instrumentation. When Brad flies past Saturn or Neptune, you are actually hearing material gathered from the Voyager satellite probes from those planets. The soundtrack is quite literally embedded in space.”

This unique approach looks to have been extended to Richter’s upcoming new studio album, ‘Voices’, which he says evokes the spirit of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. “It is a project that is about the societal changes we have been going through over the last few years, and what we might have lost. I want the music to remind us of some of the good stuff that we have achieved as a species, which is why the piece is centred on the UN declaration of Human rights. It’s quite amazing that you had this thing drafted by thinkers and philosophers directly after the disaster of World War Two. It isn’t a perfect document, but I believe it points the way.”

Even though it sometimes feels like the world as we know it is falling apart, Richter seems fairly optimistic about the future. Switching back to the subject of 2001, Richter is keen to stress that the film shares the hope that he feels, arguing that it’s less rooted in darkness and emotional dissonance than its reputation suggests. “Remember that the gorgeous ‘Blue Danube Waltz’ lights up an interlude that features spaceships which appear to dance in rhythm to the music. There’s an incredible playfulness to that sequence and Kubrick’s choice of music. It’s very balletic. The music and the imagery represents everything that’s great about human endeavour and ingenuity, but also joy, too.

“There are touches of humanity like this all over the film,” Richter concludes. “The ending is full of potential and channels the spirit of optimism and modernism in the 1960s. It fights against this idea that technology will be our downfalls and suggests humans can fix their own problems. This is an idea that speaks deeply to where we find ourselves today. It suggests that we can change things for the better, and that there’s a light on the horizon.”