TOM HOLKENBORG
Having just scaled his personal ‘Mount Everest’ with a four-and-a-half-hour score for Justice League: The Snyder Cut, Tom Holkenborg reflects on isolation working methods, casting out his old kit and his enduring passion for boutique Eurorack synths
“This is definitely up there with some of the longest scores in history, it’s been intense,” explains an excited Tom Holkenborg (widely known as Junkie XL). Tom is delighted that the long-anticipated
Justice League: The Snyder Cut is finally seeing the light of day. This substantial re-edit of 2017’s superhero extravaganza
Justice League is a labour of love that culminates a relationship Tom has had with director Zach Snyder since 2013’s 300: Rise of
an Empire. “Zach and I have been talking about bringing this out for years,” the Dutch polymath tells us. “It’s really thanks to the power of the fans that this happened. They have not only been harassing Warner Brothers for the movie, but also to release the score. So, we really owe it to them and their tenacity that this finally got made. We felt it coming.”
One of Hollywood’s most in-demand composers, Tom’s acclaimed soundtracks have fused electronic music with classical approaches, cacophonous, relentless percussion and visceral rock elements. An ongoing love of modular synthesis permeates nearly all of his diverse projects, using the potential of a breathtaking modular ‘wall’. With this four-and-a-half-hour new score, Tom was given free rein to pull all the threads together. “This is movie number six that Zach and I have collaborated on. I decided to do this new score from the ground up. I listened back to what I had originally planned for it (before Tom and Zach left the project in 2017, replaced by Danny Elfman and Joss Whedon respectively) and felt that I could do way better. I’ve learned a lot from all the great directors I’ve worked with: Robert Rodriguez, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, George Miller; I learned so much from all these people. What I had originally planned wasn’t up to scratch. I called Zach late April last year and
“I explored some odd ways of thinking about sonics – like what would happen if I put a guitar on fire”
said, ‘Would you mind if I start over?’, and then he said ‘By all means!’. Zach said: ‘keep in mind, that the shackles are off’. That’s where the project began.”
Tom has still not seen any of his friends or family over the last 12 months: “I’ve been pretty careful. Making this score has been like climbing Mount Everest – it was a solo affair. It’s something you have to do on your own and no-one will carry you on your back. I finally reached the top of the mountain in the first week of January.”
A deep dive
Working in isolation, and without any studio or creative interference, Tom’s creative process was free and unfettered: “I could really explore everything that I have in me as a composer. So starting with the most conventional side, this was my moment to dive deep into my admiration for classic Hollywood movies from the 1930s to the 1960s, and at the same time my love of classical music between 1880 and 1925. On the more unconventional side, I decided to bring in some noises made using my modular wall and also explored some odd ways of thinking about sonics – like what would happen if I put a guitar on fire, for example.” Tom laughs, “So what you find in the score is a combination of modern sound design pieces that are really on the cutting edge of what you can do with sound design at this point. On the other hand, there’s an Adagio for one of the characters that is almost 12 minutes long. That piece is almost exclusively orchestral. Then there are sections that have stoner rock guitar sounds and other sounds that have a hip-hop approach. Other sections are a blend between all kinds of different styles. There’s a choir from hell in there that gradually detunes and gets more and more evil as it goes on,” adds Holkenborg, tantalisingly. Of course there is!
Lock and key
Due to the global pandemic, and its resulting lockdown, Tom was forced to tackle this mammoth project without his usual studio arsenal, and without his creative team. “For us to move everybody at home with their own computer setups and stuff was not that hard,” he tells us. “We started doing that from the last week of February 2020 – so we actually locked down early. For the process of it, things weren’t majorly different, but there were a few things that required rethinking. When I started working from home, I worked in my spare bedroom of 8x8 feet, so it was pretty limited. Normally I surround myself with all the gear and drum kits I can. I’m a ‘full-contact’ composer which means I love to touch things, play things, experiment with things, but here I had fewer options. I had just one guitar, one bass, a few percussion instruments and one or two favourite synths. I wrote the entire score with those limited options and some plugins. It was quite revealing. I was always thinking about how to get the most out of that one instrument, rather than switching between multiple things for different purposes.”
Limitation was what really forced Tom to explore every possible permutation of his reduced toolkit. “Every now and then, I’d throw one synth in the car, drive up to my studio house, and replace it with something else. It reminded me of doing my first four-track recordings back in 1981 and 1982, when I was 15 years old. One track recorder, one drum computer and maybe one guitar and a bass. I was not a singer, I was a screamer. So it was always really limited, it often led to baffling results. It had a magic to it though.”
The only contact Tom had through the entire process was with Zach Snyder. “Normally composing a film score is a team effort, with the director as the most important member – and a lot of cooks in the kitchen. I do like working that way. But the fact that I was able to work on my own with nobody asking me questions and not hearing other people’s music throughout the building was freeing. I was living alone, and getting groceries delivered and that’s it. It made everything SO intense. It was a very pleasurable experience though, I just missed human contact. On the back end of this – I’m not sure if we’ll ever