Experimental · 8D · Drone
Drone, dread and sound design in cinema, television and games.
Japanese composer and sound designer whose industrial, ambient and noise textures defined the sound of the Silent Hill games.
Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow's 2018 score for Alex Garland's Annihilation, from folk guitar and waterphone to a vast electronic climax.
Jóhann Jóhannsson's 2016 score for Denis Villeneuve's Arrival, built from choir, throat singing and voices treated as texture.
György Ligeti's 1961 orchestral piece of slowly shifting sound clouds, made famous by the Star Gate sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Australian-Icelandic composer and sound designer of heavy, distorted drone records and of the scores for Dark and 1899.
Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch's 2017 score, built on Vangelis's Yamaha CS-80 and granular, tape-treated walls of sound.
The huge, low, brassy blast popularised by the Inception trailers of 2010 and later turned into a stock device of film marketing.
Hildur Guðnadóttir's Emmy-winning 2019 score for HBO's Chernobyl, made from recordings inside a decommissioned nuclear power plant.
Ben Frost's score for the German Netflix series Dark (2017–2020), built from slowed, smeared orchestral sound and drones.
Hans Zimmer's Oscar-winning score for Denis Villeneuve's Dune (2021), built on invented instruments, processed chant and ritual pulses.
Russian composer (1937–2022), pioneer of Soviet electronic music on the ANS synthesiser and the composer of Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker.
David Lynch's 1977 debut feature, whose soundtrack of industrial rumble and hiss, made with Alan Splet, foreshadowed dark ambient.
Icelandic composer and cellist whose sustained, slowly evolving music for Chernobyl and Joker won an Emmy, a Grammy and an Oscar.
Icelandic composer who carried drone, electronics and deep orchestral sound into the films of Denis Villeneuve.
Playdead's 2010 game, whose Martin Stig Andersen soundtrack replaces music with degraded, electroacoustic ambience.
English composer behind the sliding, microtonal strings of Under the Skin, Jackie and The Zone of Interest, formerly of Micachu and the Shapes.
The ambient sound of a location with nobody speaking, recorded on set so editors can fill gaps and keep a soundtrack from going dead.
Jóhann Jóhannsson's 2015 score for Sicario, built from processed low percussion, double basses and the deepest pipes of a church organ.
Konami's horror game series, launched in 1999, whose radio static, silences and industrial noise were shaped by Akira Yamaoka.
Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 Lem adaptation, whose soundtrack sets a Bach chorale against Eduard Artemyev's ANS synthesiser textures.
Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film, whose Eduard Artemyev soundtrack dissolves the line between drone, music and processed noise.
The music of Kubrick's The Shining (1980): Penderecki, Ligeti and Bartók recordings around a Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind main title.
Jonathan Glazer's 2023 Auschwitz film, in which horror is never shown but heard through Johnnie Burn's Oscar-winning sound design.
Jonathan Glazer's 2013 film starring Scarlett Johansson, scored by Mica Levi with sliding, microtonal violas and slowed percussion.