Illustrations by Stephanie Lane Gage.
In 1996, Brian Eno reflected on his run of ambient albums for EG Recordings twenty years prior, writing that he recognized a desire among his friends “to use music in a different way—as part of the ambience of our lives—and we wanted it to be continuous, a surrounding.”1 I was reminded of these lines while watching Harmony Korine’s Aggro Dr1ft (all films 2024), a film characterized less by its plot or its performances than what Eno refers to as a “sonic mood.” The picture floats by on an ocean of sound that ebbs and flows but never breaks, never crashes.
Over the last few years there has been a slew of articles complaining about the lopsided sound of major blockbusters—especially since the pandemic provoked an escalation in the streaming wars. Netflix, Apple TV+, & co. are aware that many home-cinema viewers are only half-watching while scrolling through their phones or doing something else entirely. Sound has become a tool for needily grabbing audiences’ attention: whisper-quiet dialogue to get you reaching for the remote control followed by gunshots and explosions so loud they’ll wake up your neighbors’ neighbors.
Aggro Dr1ft is different. There have been a handful of theatrical screenings, but the idea strikes me as perverse. Everything about the film feels designed for home viewing, from its video-game cutscene visuals to the sound mix. I imagine Korine and his crew approach cinema much like Eno’s friends thought of sound back in the 1970s. This simple story of an assassin facing up to a quasi-supernatural crime lord, with its hallucinatory color palette and ruminative voice-over, is not really asking for your full attention; it's more like something you might have on in the background while you hang out. Korine and sound designer Fernanda Cardoso have everything more or less on an even keel, with brilliant music by AraabMuzik (né Abraham Orellana) pitched somewhere between the soundtrack to a Sega Mega Drive game and Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II—products of the early ’90s. It’s a score that is as compelling as it is subdued; it bumbles along throughout, but with few of the usual gear shifts that characterize mainstream film scoring: no sudden drops, no shrieking stings. Instead, it maintains a consistent emotional tenor, becoming—in Eno’s words—continuous, a surrounding. Even the gunshots are not so loud as to poke out from the overall aural wallpaper.
Top: Aggro Dr1ft (Harmony Korine, 2024). Bottom: Dahomey (Mati Diop, 2024).
Also taking its sonic cues from the world of ambient music is Mati Diop’s Dahomey, a documentary about the restitution of looted African artworks that takes the form of a magical-realist fable. One of the artifacts—a statue of Ghezo, the nineteenth-century king of Dahomey—narrates their voyage home to the Republic of Benin after a century locked in a Parisian museum. These parts are spoken by Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel through an electronic voice changer. They are usually delivered over a black screen, to singularly powerful effect—as if the void itself were speaking. The soundtrack, composed by British electronic producer Dean Blunt and French keyboard virtuoso Wally Badarou (renowned for his work with Level 42 and Talking Heads), is replete with bubbly electronic textures and ethereal synth choirs—none of which would have sounded out of place on one of Eno’s albums with Harold Budd from around the turn of the 1980s.
Blunt’s track “Eight,” originally featured on his 2013 album, Stone Island, accompanies shots of the Ghezo statue, entombed in a crate, rolling through the cool, clinical environment of the Musée de Quai Branly’s storage rooms. It’s a bright enough piece of music, delirious in its own electronic artifice, but its digital sheen is of a piece with the gray walls and air-conditioned aura of the place. It strikes a dramatic contrast with the more frantic, openly celebratory scenes in the streets of Cotonou shortly after, as people line the streets to greet the artworks upon their repatriation. Later on, Badarou’s “Vesuvio Solo” (from his 1989 record, Words of a Mountain), a similarly effervescent track recalling early electronic experiments from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (famous for their “special sound” effects for Doctor Who) or Raymond Scott (one of the first to bring an electronic sound to library music), plays over nighttime shots of Benin’s Palais de la Marina museum. “Is this the end of the journey?” asks the statue in voice-over. “Everything is so strange—far removed from the country I saw in my dreams.” The film seems to suggest that the spirit of the sculpture is scarcely less imprisoned in its new home than it was before. Everything about the soundtrack contributes to the fabular quality of the story, the sense of dissonance between the worlds of myth and museology. As the members of the Radiophonic Workshop understood well, electronic music has always represented a kind of sonic animism, drawing strange magic from dead circuitry.
Pepe (Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias, 2024).
Like Dahomey, Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias’s Pepe is an adventure story of sorts. It follows the journey and subsequent adventures of a hippopotamus traveling from its home in southwest Africa to the Hacienda Nápoles outside Medellín and ultimately the Magdalena River, Colombia. In the late ’70s, drug lord Pablo Escobar smuggled four so-called “cocaine hippos” to his private compound in Colombia. After his death in 1993, they roamed free, eventually escaping and multiplying until the government began attempts to bring the population under control. Our eponymous hero and narrator would be the first victim of that program in 2009. But Pepe eschews the rousing themes and surging strings of the classic Hollywood adventure movie, nor is its score quite as ebulliently synthetic as Blunt and Badarou’s music for Dahomey. Composed by the director himself, the music makes occasional use of little samples from elements of the location sound—the foghorn of a ship, the crack of a twig—which are then looped and built up into patterns and textures, such that it’s often hard to detect where the wild track ends and the music begins. The two elements merge imperceptibly, simultaneously drawing you into the environment and making it strange.
Director de Los Santos Arias started working on the film while studying on a DAAD fellowship in Berlin, and in interviews he’s spoken about being inspired by the experimental music scene in the German capital, where hyper-minimal contemporary composition can share a stage with improvised electronics and freeform noise. Though he produced all the music in Pepe himself, he has claimed, “I’m not interested in making music, but I was interested in creating a sound landscape that was complex.”
A rich organ-led score from Canadian artist Sarah Davachi sets the tone for Sky Peals, the low-key feature debut from Londoner Moin Hussain. Late-night burger-flipper Adam (Faraz Ayub) learns of his estranged father’s death—and of his possible extraterrestrial origins—against the uncanny nocturnal backdrop of an almost-deserted British motorway service station. As a result, a great deal of the sound design (by Lynne Ramsay regular Paul Davies) is made up of the buzz of neon lights, the Dopplered whooshes of cars driving by at high speeds. But tucked in and around those swooshes are rich pedal notes and fattened chords that swell and throb like alien lifeforms. The score from Davachi, who studied at Mills College with Alvin Lucier, sounds deceptively simple. There’s nothing you could really call a melody—or even a rhythm, for that matter. Instead, there are long, drawn-out drones, but each one is full of life and subtly unsettling, perfectly matching the film’s sense of anomie and dislocation.
Top: Sky Peals (Moin Hussain, 2024). Bottom: Longlegs (Osgood Perkins, 2024).
Osgood Perkins’s Longlegs opens with title music that sounds less like a track, per se, more like the bits between tracks in a live set or studio session. You can hear a muffled voice, an electric guitar, but these sounds are fitful, tentative, as if finding their way toward something. These noises are also mixed incredibly low, almost buried under the thick hiss of wind and room tone. The film is marked by its use of silence; identifiable instrumental sounds are scarce throughout. There are a few little zings of pizzicato strings to bring out the jump scares, but mostly, the film’s aural landscape consists of easy-to-miss sounds emanating from the shadows: small groans and whistles, along with brief squalls of unidentifiable noises, often sounding like they’ve been played backward.
The first stormy crescendo of music arrives about fifteen minutes in, when Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) comes to grips with the case file on the Longlegs murders. Electronic tones and manipulated concrete sounds seem to creep gradually out of the silence, coloring it, darkening it, as though manifesting the growing psychic link between Harker and the killer she’s stalking. But even here, with the score at its most pronounced, it almost sounds like the ambient noises in the room are feeding back on themselves. Sound design and score are thoroughly entangled to the point of indistinguishability. An audience won’t really notice the music (composed by Zilgi, a.k.a. Elvis Perkins, the director’s brother); rather, it’s there to make you keenly aware of the long stretches that pass without it.
Similarly, some of the most effective moments in Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s pounding, relentless score for tennis drama Challengers come when the music stops—often abruptly, in the middle of a bar. Luca Guadagnino pairs quiet, intimate scenes with a banging electro underscore so he can whip it away and run the action scenes with nothing on the soundtrack bar the pock-pock-pock of tennis balls and the corresponding coarse, heavy grunts. As in the treatment of Eiko Ishibashi’s music in last year’s Evil Does Not Exist, there is something disarming in these sudden drop-outs. We are left with the vertiginous feeling of the ground having been whipped away from under us.
All You Need Is Death (Paul Duane, 2024).
Even laying aside the year’s two big auteur musicals, Joker: Folie a Deux and Emilia Pérez, there have been some pretty bold needle drops in 2024, from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s wild, climactic use of Richard Harris singing “MacArthur Park” to The Bikeriders making The Shangri-Las’ masterpiece “Out in the Streets” into its guiding refrain and leitmotif. But sometimes it’s not the foreground melodies and rhythms that make a film score sing; it’s the ambiences in between. In the Irish horror film All You Need Is Death, two luckless folk-song collectors travel around Ireland in search of rare ballads, only to find themselves at the mercy of an ancient tune bearing a curse for anyone who attempts to record it, leaving its victims withered and mad, haunted by black “smudgy things” in their peripheral vision. It’s an interesting premise, with plenty to say about the mutual entanglement of music, politics, and everyday life, but it’s not always convincingly executed. Cue lots of clichéd scenes of white-haired drunkards with quavering voices swathed in heavy, rough-hewn woollens. Far better than the songs themselves (some of which are traditional, others written for the film) are the sounds in between: unearthly drones and reedy swells composed by Ian Lynch from the group Lankum, all weirded by eerie electronic effects into thick, vaporous clouds that suffuse the whole soundtrack with a foreboding sense of dank, chthonic evil. As with All You Need Is Death, so with the cinematic year in general: less big themes, more weird dreams.
- Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices (Faber and Faber, 1996), 293. ↩
