Eerie sounds from out of this world
Under the Skin Royal Festival Hall
Evoking the emotional life of an alien has to be the toughest challenge a film composer can face. The default mode is to create an atmosphere of all-purpose electronic spookiness, as in the hilarious moment in that Fifties shocker I Married a Monster from Outer Space when the “husband” eventually fesses up. “I’m from Alpha Centauri,” he announces, while a primitive synthesizer wails tremulously in the background.
It’s a cop-out, because these musical moments don’t express the alien’s state of mind – they express ours, when faced with the scary thought of such a creature. Mica Levi, composer of the score for Jonathan Glazer’s much-praised sci-fi horror film Under the Skin, was determined to go beyond the clichés. She composed a score for a largely string orchestra, augmented with flute and synthesizers, which the London Sinfonietta played live at the Festival Hall, while the film was projected above them.
The film portrays an alien serial killer in the unlikely form of Scarlett Johanssen, in fake fur, black wig and blood-red lipstick. She drives around the back streets of Glasgow in a white van, looking for men she can seduce for the most cold-hearted reason imaginable. As the victims pile up, she develops a curiosity about these very ordinary, inarticulate men, and even manages to sleep with one without killing him. Levi’s ingenious response to the challenge of conjuring the inner world of an alien was to make a virtue out of inarticulacy. Just as Johansson’s character struggles to understand the feelings stirring to life within her, so the music keeps groping towards expressivity, without ever quite making it. Johansson herself is pictured in a wan three-note phrase, glassy, cold and with a hint of glamour. During the seductions/murders the sound becomes harsh, with dense chords punctuated by doom-laden thuds. At one mo moment, a major-chord radiance, cold likel winter sun, suffused the hall. The orch orchestra under Jonathan Berman seizeds what few chances Levi’sL score gave them to play expressively.ex The Sinfoniet Sinfonietta’s sound engineers, Sound Intermedia, did a wonderfulwond job of blending the li live music with the film’sfilm’ own soundtrack, so good that one sometimes forgotforgo there was a live band there at all. That might seem ana odd way to praise a live performance,per but the presencepresenc of the band did at least ma make us focus on Levi’s extraordinaryextraor and unprecedentedunprec achievement.achiev