5 COMPOSERS WHO SHOULD’VE SCORED BLADE RUNNER 2049 INSTEAD OF WHAT’S-HIS-FACE
© SPACE SICK by Mike Dubisch
W
e got ripped off by the future twice. We were never getting flying cars (only 5-0 and fat cats had them in Blade Runner, anyway), but we deserved a score for Blade Runner 2049 that would enable us to sit in our burnt-out Priuses up on blocks and dream of flying over the gleaming spires and methane torches of monolithic mega-cities.
Of course, the bar was set higher than anyone could reach. Vangelis’s score was revolutionary, perfectly wedding the glossy atompunk future to the seedy noir past. Darkly romantic and uncannily cold, the soulful saxophone and Demis Roussos’s vocals creating a sense of a world buried alive in a postmodern mass grave. Though he’d won an Oscar for Chariots Of Fire, Vangelis was a bold choice, coming as he did from the space music genre; but somehow, noodling improvisations while watching a rough cut video of the film, he did what he did, and created a milestone that influenced almost everything since.
Obviously, the score for the sequel was as critical to its success as it was impossible to top. There was an initial push to pick someone equally visionary—Cliff Martinez, Holly Herndon, Mica Levi, Arca and even El-P of Run The Jewels were all considered—before Villeneuve opted for familiarity and went with his Arrival and Sicario composer, Johann Johannsson. But when even that choice wasn’t safe enough, the producers brought in the cinematic equivalent of New Car Smell. Hans Zimmer and Daniel Wallfisch delivered something vaguely influenced by the original with none of its vitality, and little of its fetishistic futurism. Haunted by the original, with little to add beyond a vague memory of having heard dubstep once, we get a lot of sonic wallpaper and vacuous pastiche.
Save your arguments, cram your death threats: while it might’ve been fine for any other movie, as a successor to Vangelis’ masterpiece, this score sucks. So sterile and drained of emotion that the music supervisors larded the soundtrack with generic boomer-bait like Elvis Presley and Frank fucking Sinatra and an on-the-nose tech-pop tune that would’ve sounded dated twenty years ago. This is a soundtrack that aspires to be forgotten. (Honestly, how could anyone slavishly cover Tears In Rain without raising a goosebump or inspiring a single tear? They found a way.)
Unless it was somebody’s idea of a statement to deploy a score that could’ve been composed by a corporate AI, Zimmer (a fine composer in his own right, if you want something that sounds important but immediately forgettable) and Wallfisch were the wrong artists for the job. But who were the right ones? I humbly submit that any of these should’ve booked the gig.
5. LORN
Brian Eno once said that the aesthetic of an era is defined by its technical limitations—the crackling of LP records, the flat, fading colors of Polaroids, the brittle glitchiness of pre-digital video. Marcos Ortega understands this, and his crunchy, deceptively minimalist oeuvre taps into and expresses the buried dreams of lost futures. Maybe his work doesn’t show the kind of grandeur that distinguishes the original, but nobody thought Vangelis was going to reinvent the game when he did, either.
4. ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER
(See also Younger Brother, Prometheus, Plaid)
Moving from elaborate, challenging albums like Garden Of Delete to balls-out scores like Good Time, Daniel Lopatin gives your ears more than they can handle, then opens up gulfs of acoustic space that feel big enough to hide dead universes. Consistently delivering visionary music that doesn’t just service the visuals, Never could’ve been the key to delivering a score that related to 2049 as the original did to BR without ever swiping from it.
3. ARCA/NORTEC COLLECTIVE/CUMBIA
COSMONAUTS/BURAKA SON SYSTEMA
True, this would have been a soundtrack for a slightly different movie… but didn’t it seem weird to you that Los Angeles in the future has only one Mexican in it? Curated soundtracks are a relic discredited by record companies trying to front-load whatever crap wasn’t sticking at radio in the 90’s, but a thoughtfully curated soundtrack that extrapolated the cultural and ethnic realities of California could’ve been epic…
2. FUTURE SOUND OF LONDON
(see also Forest Swords, The Orb, Orbital)
If ever a band was wholly spawned by Blade Runner’s aesthetic, it’s FSOL. Gary Cobain and Brian Dougans have been marinating in paranoid futurism for thirty years. So far as anyone knows, they’ve still not left the recording bunker from which they launched the first ISDN virtual concert tour in 1994. One might argue they already scored the sequel to Blade Runner in 1995 with Dead Cities, which includes a sample or three from Vangelis and still sounds, three decades on, like something stolen from tomorrow. Their emerging from self-exile for this would’ve been like a prophecy fulfilled.
1. AMON TOBIN
(see also Eskmo, Noisia, Broken Note)
Maybe this list was all a ploy to get here. This guy. While there’s an army of composers who’d happily dig up a Yamaha emulator and honk out Vangelis pastiche even his mother wouldn’t know from the real thing, there’re a lot fewer artists who could give you those goosebumps without dipping into the nostalgia pit. Like Vangelis, Amon Tobin gets how to raise goosebumps with a perfect blend of synthetic and acoustic sounds, an insidiously attuned ear for an unforgettable hook and an uncanny knack for weaving an epic atmosphere around deceptively elemental melodies. From his early drum-and-bass beat surgery to the space opera grandiosity of Dark Jovian and ISAM and his latest experimental sorcery under the Nomark label, Amon Tobin’s interest in doing a Blade Runner sequel score should’ve been the #1 reason for making a Blade Runner sequel in the first place. He’s scored films (Taxidermia) and videogames (Infamous, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory) before, and he moved to LA with the itch to do more. It’s too late to fix this one, but don’t let it happen again, Hollywood.
