The score for Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) was written by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch, brought in late in production; Jóhann Jóhannsson had originally been engaged for the film, and his music was not used. Zimmer worked intensively with Villeneuve and the editor Joe Walker before leaving on tour, while Wallfisch, suggested by Villeneuve, carried the work forward.
Rather than imitate Vangelis’s music for the 1982 original, the composers took its instrument as the link: the Yamaha CS-80, a 1976 polyphonic synthesiser prized for responding to touch like an acoustic instrument. Alongside software synthesisers, they ran recordings through a granular processor, then through tape delays and reverb, and processed them again, producing vast, slow-moving masses of sustained tone. A double bass played uncomfortably high adds strain to the texture. Echoes of the original are clearest in cues such as Mesa and Joi; elsewhere the music behaves as near-abstract drone set against the film’s empty, polluted landscapes.