Summary: There isn't a more gorgeously unsettling score this year than Mica Levi’s hair-raising soundtrack to Jonathan Glazer’s 2014 film, Under The Skin. Based on the Michel Faber novel of the same name, the film follows an alien in the guise of Scarlett Johansson -- a cipher and seductive predator who travels Scotland enticing men into a darkened building-turned-inky black void. It’s a perplexing and meditative film about feeling, well, alien within your own body -- enhanced and punctuated by Levi’s creepily atonal strings, and quavering electronic flourishes that flitter around the speakers. Best known for her work under the moniker of her band, Micachu and the Shapes, Levi has always had a fascination with jagged and discordant music. With her previous two Micachu records -- 2009’s Jewellery and 2012’s Never -- Levi crafted dense everything-and-the-kitchen-sink songs built around slack-stringed guitars, clangorous percussion and serrated beats, and Levi's vaguely androgynous voices. Mica Levi's soundtrack to Under The Skin is out now. (Steven Legere/Courtesy of the artist) But Levi is also a classically trained musician: she started writing music at age 4, studied composition and violin at the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and wrote a piece for the London Philharmonic in 2008. Now in her mid-20s and living in Camden, England, Levi recently won Best Composer for her Under The Skin score at the 2014 European Film Awards, and tied with Johnny Greenwood (for Inherent Vice) for Best Music/Score at the Los Angeles Film Critics Awards. And while Under The Skin's strangely skewed score recalls avant-garde composers Krzysztof Penderecki and Gyorgi Lygeti -- heard frequently in Stanley Kubrick’s films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining -- Levi’s startling, yet tender music is all her own, perfectly match to the otherworldly images on the screen. In a conversation with Soundcheck host John Schaefer, Mica Levi reflects on her process of working with Under The Skin’s director, Jonathan Glazer, and the challenges of scoring music to such an ambiguous and abstract film. Interview Highlights Mica Levi, on how her score helps carry the film with sparse dialogue: I didn’t know any differently, but everyone knew that was going on. I was coming to everything new, so I didn’t know. I wrote a hell of a lot of music during the process and loads of it didn’t get used. So I was just getting on with doing that really. I mean Jon [Glazer]… mainly made decisions about where music would be necessary and they were quite long cues. It’s very observant, you know, the way that he shot it -- and it's just happening as it's happening because it's the sensory way into your gut, that is abstract. On how she constructed the music's creepy sounds in the film: It’s viola, it’s false harmonics, and slowed down percussion. It’s just a kick made with a tom and hitting some wood in my room years ago and it ended up being used throughout. It’s sort of distorted through time as opposed to distorted through like [foot pedals]… It’s distorted, it’s too slow, it’s like uncomfortable you know. And it’s flute as well. Just the percussion is [slowed down] the rest of it is just playing harmonics… It’s very high strings and flute backing up. On matching the ambiguity of the film with ambiguous sounds in the music: I think it was just partly the way it was getting made. I was in really nice facilities… I had a nice studio and I had nice mics and everything I was doing in my usual way was getting picked up by better quality stuff. Well I was basically quickly recording bits here and there and then we rerecorded other instruments playing. The role of synthesized strings in the film is her kind of experience of love and that aesthetic of it being not real is very important. It’s the falseness of it; the mix of fake and real instruments and computer generated music is in line with the narrative. On working with director Jonathan Glazer, and finding moments of silence in the film: The way that Jon works, he's just always trying the boldest move he can. I really feel like he directed me. You know, he'd say he's not got a musical bone in his body, but he absolutely guided and made some of the best decisions about the music in this film. And the silence, all led by the narrative that he was so clear about, and him sort of following his gut. The fact that there's that gap in the middle -- from the music, or from much sound or whatever it is -- you're lifted with (Johansson's character). It focuses you in a different way.
