Settling Scores: Mica Levi
The second in our series of evaluating the scores of our favourite film composers
It’s edition 52 of Laughing Stock, and it’s the middle of October, Jesus. Rich Walker takes a deep dive into the electrifying, slightly terrifying world of Mica Levi’s film scores.
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(Image: Annie Noelker/The Times)
“I think music is a type of magic. Music has strange capabilities that move people in certain ways. And film can suspend disbelief.”
Mica Levi, Rolling Stone 2021
It might be a short CV in terms of volume, but it also happens to be one of the most impressive of the last 10 or so years. Mica Levi, the extraordinary South London musician, has had an indelible effect on film scores since the exhilarating Under the Skin burst through the cinema sound system in 2013. I could (and maybe will, one day) spout on about how brilliant all of Levi’s musical endeavours are, from their OG band of Micachu and the Shapes, through to their latest collaboration with Alpha Maid in the shape of the grubby, grungy Spresso, but we’re here to look at their seminal film score work. From that Scarlet Johansson starring first collaboration with Jonathan Glazer through to their latest work in the shape of the insidious horror of The Zone of Interest, we’ve ranked Levi’s scores from ‘essential’ to ‘if you’ve got the time’ (spoiler: there are no ‘don’t bother’ scores in her body of work so far). You’ll need to be brave, but dive into some of the best films scores of recent times with us.
Essential
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)
At just 14 mins long, The Zone of Interest stakes a claim for the shortest, most vital score in film history. Levi’s second full length collaboration with Jonathan Glazer is horrifically effective as the opening and closing credits of this extraordinary film. Much more music was written for the film by Levi, but was ultimately rejected as it acted as ‘morphine for the viewer’, almost desensitising the experience for the audience. This meant all that was left in the final cut was sound designer Johnnie Burn’s unforgettable, nightmare inducing soundscape of human and mechanical horrors. What did survive of Levi’s work, however, were those opening and closing sequences (and some of the infra red/night vision sequences), mainly accompanying a black screen in the cinema, forcing you to listen to the extremely unsettling, place setting score from Levi.
The opening piece is meant to communicate, according to Glazer, ‘the idea of ‘ears first’’ for the film, a descent into the impossible horrors lurking unseen but constantly heard beyond the walls of the Hoss family’s idyllic house at Auschwitz. It’s an unsettling mix of synth drones and human voices, melded together to create something that just doesn’t sit quite right, before birdsong and chirps interrupt towards the end as the lights come up on the setting of the Hoss household, bathed in warm sunlight by a bucolic river. Instantly you know this setting is somehow wrong, that the birdsong isn’t the thing here. It’s creepily effective.
The closing piece, having sat through one of the most emotionally affecting films I’ve ever witnessed, is no balm. It’s 6 minutes of real human screams twisted out of all sense of body, melded with choral phrases gradually warping in pitch until it’s one haunting mess of sounds that represent, as Emile Mosseri said,“the most fucked up music you’ve ever heard — beautiful and cathartic in how it delivers the horror you’ve been self-generating the whole film.’ It’s extraordinarily, horrifically effective, and stays with you alongside Burn’s sound design for long after the images have disappeared. It’s astonishing this work didn’t win more awards; it’s everything a film score should be, and much more.
Under the Skin (Dir: Jonathan Glazer, 2013)
A masterpiece in scoring, and on Levi’s first attempt too; really quite something. A lot has been said about this work, it’s hard to add anything new. The whole thing, like the film, is startling and deeply unsettling. There’s no release, it keeps you constantly on edge, and it’s so integral to the film’s aesthetic that it’s impossible to listen to and not conjure up the startling images from Glazer’s thrilling film, despite Levi stating in an interview with the LA Times that ‘a lot of the time when I’m making music, I’m just making music - I’m not looking at any screen pictures or anything like that. Jon (Glazer) told me at that time, ‘carry on making what you’re into.’
Even the less intense moments like ‘Love’ still cut to the very soul of you. The recurring three note motif (a device used through their film scores - see Monos below) is a masterstroke, starting off kind of warm before decaying to the point of rot, mirroring Johansson’s alien journey. Under the Skin has become so influential, such a canonical entry to the score world, that other musicians-turned-composers like Geoff Barrow and Bobby Krlic have made a living off the back of it. Like Johansson’s victims in the film, it swallows you down into a thick black nothingness and never lets you go.
Top Tier
Jackie (Pablo Larraín, 2016)
AKA ‘the Oscar one’. Lighter in tone and less intrusive than the Under the Skin score, Jackie functions more as a complement to the images on screen than the all encompassing work on Under the Skin. However, despite its stately exterior it still retains an ominous edge of something not quite right beneath the surface. Take the minute long ‘Tears’ for instance, which has a sweet, almost lullaby tune punctuated by portentous strings that burst the bubble of safety provided by the melody. Or the military drum rolls in ‘Autopsy’ that conjure up images of a state burial. Or the lurching strings in ‘Walk to the Capitol’. Much like the film, it’s all surface calmness with an underlying feeling of turmoil throughout. It lingers like the camera on Portman’s face, just about composed, but not quite convincing anyone that everything is ok.
Monos (Alejandro Landes, 2019)
Back to sci-fi for Levi, this time working with the Columbian-Ecuadorian director Alejandro Landes on a little-seen post-apocalyptic film that won the best film at the 2019 London Film Festival. Focusing on a group of teenage recruits training for a conflict in the Columbian mountains, it’s a visceral, spectacularly shot film that descends into something along the lines of Lords of the Flies x Apocalypse Now (it’s streaming on Film4 for those in UK, and comes highly recommended). Levi’s soundtrack is as urgent and tumultuous as the ongoings on screen, and is sparsely used as in Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest - the score is 30 mins long, and apparently about 22 mins of that features in the film.
When it does punctuate the action, it adds layers to the hallucinogenic, horrifying goings-on on screen. It ratchets up the tension in an already powder-keg-ready-to-go-off situation, timpani rolling, electronics sinister, a repeated four whistle motif that sounds simultaneously like a code for ‘everything is ok’ and ‘everything is fucked’. There’s a naturalistic streak to it, with elements of Morricone about it, particularly in the superb ‘Lobo y Lady’ which evokes the mountainous terrain of the film’s setting, alongside glistening field recordings in ‘A la Selva’. Synths are used like air raid sirens, timpani like war drums, wind instruments as communicators; it’s probably their most orchestral ambitious score in her oeuvre, and it’s another ‘no one else could do this’ score.
If You’ve Got Time
Zola (Janicza Bravo, 2021)
Zola feels like a different beast to Levi's previous works, and it being in the ‘if you’ve got time’ section isn’t a slight on it at all. Their longest soundtrack work at 42 mins and 37 tracks, it accompanies the wild Twitter based story of a stripper’s road trip gone completely bonkers, and it practically shimmers: all harps, sweet synths, childhood jewellery box ditties, chirping phones, it’s a sonic delight, as per, and light as air (except when it’s not: ‘Wanna Trap’ feels akin to some of the sounds on Under the Skin, and ‘A Mess’ somehow implausibly has elements of trap about it). It’s still wildly experimental for a ‘mainstream’ film score - see the 80 second ‘Handgun that’s just made up of a repetitive single syncopated drum beat, which is followed by ‘Trusting U, 105 seconds of that same drum beat but sped up before disintegrating into something that resembles morse code, and ‘Mann’, which is 40 seconds more of the same frenetic beat. Hans Zimmer it it not.
That snippets of dialogue from the film are peppered throughout the soundtrack helps anchor the music in the spiralling story it wraps around, but it also takes you out of the essence of the music somewhat. I think their other soundtracks work beautifully on their own - you don’t have to have seen the film to appreciate the brilliant music, whereas here it feels much more tied to the actual movements within the film, and ultimately this makes for better listening whilst you’re watching the movie.
Scores settled. Cannot wait for more Mica soundtracks to come, but we won’t hold our breath: they’re picky in the best possible sense of the word. You just know that whatever they choose to get involved with next will be the most interesting film of that year though.
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