Adrian Corker

★★★★

Tin Star: Liverpool SN VARIATIONS. DL/LP

Contemporary classical, field recordings, experimental noise all meet in third score.

Coming up for its third series, Rowan Joffe’s icy modern noir inhabits a strange middle ground between the conventional and absurd. Similarly, the scores for the series by London-based composer Corker combine elements of conventional Hollywood scoring with more atonal amorphous elements. Corker has come a long way from his first crime drama soundtrack (1997’s Face) and the minimal folk horror of 2011’s The Way of The Morris.

For his final score in the Tin Star trilogy (now set in Liverpool) he utilises a 12-piece string section alongside brass, percussion and inner-city field recordings by sound recordist Chris Watson to create an urban tone poem of drip-drip tension and creeping dread that moves from the slow-motion impressionism of Toru Takemitsu to the wintry string drones of Richard Skelton, simultaneously serving the demands of a mainstream TV drama while dismantling the tradition. Andrew Male