Danny Elfman's WHITE NOISE (2022)

[Jay 37,352]

 

01 Waves and Radiation (1:21)
02 Me First (2:05)
03 Duel Lecture (4:59)
04 Airborne Toxic Event (0:30)
05 Toxic Chemicals (0:59)
06 Chew Gum or Smoke (1:31)
07 We're Late (1:03)
08 Highway Disaster (1:05)
09 Up There (2:08)
10 Teddy Bear (1:51)
11 Panic (1:07)
12 Terribly Sad Moment (4:38)
13 Trash (3:33)
14 Bad Dream (2:15)
15 Lost In The Kitchen (1:13)
16 Finding Mink (3:01)
17 You Shot You (1:45)
18 Sunrise (2:42)
19 Wrap Up (0:55)
20 Nebulous Mass (2:32)
21 The Cloud Is Coming (4:01)
 

https://music.apple.com/nz/album/white-noise-soundtrack-from-the-netflix-film/1652315684

[Disco Stu 15,495]

I haven't shut up about it in the general Elfman thread but might as well post here for posterity:

 

Everything I've heard from this score sounds amazing and like the best Elfman score in over a decade and I cannot wait to hear the full thing.

[Jay 37,352]

Fire up the VPN and you don't have to wait...

[Disco Stu 15,495]

Can't do that at the office though, and the evening is when I spend time with my family, not listening to albums, so tomorrow it is for me!

[Jay 37,352]

I won't listen until tomorrow either

 

Looking forward to it!

[DangerMotif 1,037]

What’s up with the title for track 3?

[blondheim 1,157]

I’m very excited. I’m reading Gravity’s Rainbow but after that I am going to burn through White Noise so I can see this movie and hear the score in context. I would just watch it anyway but I’ve had that Don DeLillo book on my list for a while now and I refuse to lose out on reading the book first.

[Disco Stu 15,495]

I will definitely not be seeing the movie, despite being mostly a fan of Baumbach.  Existential dread is just not a subject I particularly care to watch a whole movie about.

 

ANyway, here's a nice Tim Grieving profile of Elfman and this score.  I of course like reading that Copland was used as temp  

 

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/awards/story/2022-11-15/danny-elfman-brought-all-of-his-selves-to-the-white-noise-score

 

Quote

Noah Baumbach had never worked with Danny Elfman before, but he’d pegged the composer well enough to think of him for “White Noise.” He said: “Danny, I’ve got the perfect film for you. It’s all about fear of death and how we deal with it. It’s right up your alley!”

 

Based on the 1985 novel by Don DeLillo, Baumbach’s film stars Adam Driver as Jack Gladney, a college professor of Hitler studies, and Greta Gerwig as his wife, Babette, in an eccentric portrait of American culture in the 1980s. It’s a heightened, almost impossible-to-define story about the false promises of the modern supermarket and pharmaceuticals and the inevitable destruction of humanity. You might say it’s a romantic comedic apocalyptic midlife-crisis murder thriller dance party.

 

“It was so cool to come on a project like this that had no genre to define what it was,” Elfman says. “To me, nothing is more exciting.”

 

It wasn’t just death anxiety that Baumbach recognized in Elfman — he seized on every facet of the composer’s split musical personality: both the wild rock ‘n’ roller from Oingo Boingo and the zany, gothic music act in Tim Burton’s cinematic circus, but also the sweet and dramatic serenader of such serious films as “Good Will Hunting” and “Milk.”

 

“I felt like, well, we went for it here — we should go for it in all departments,” Baumbach says. “Because it has an elevated tone, the music only helps that, and I think Danny’s music situates the audience in important ways throughout the movie, because it is maybe surprising how it shifts in tones.”

 

Baumbach felt that Elfman’s own 1980s roots fit the story’s zeitgeist, and in his varied work for Burton the music is “both taking the moments very seriously, but there’s an inherent sense of humor, I find, in Danny’s work.”

 

The director temporarily used Aaron Copland’s music in the college scenes, and he proposed fusing Copland Americana with ’80s electronica scores by the likes of Tangerine Dream. Elfman giddily started composing pieces inspired by those ingredients before he saw a frame of film — and by the time Baumbach showed him a rough cut it already had nearly 20 minutes of his original ideas on the soundtrack.

 

Elfman then invited Baumbach and his editor, Matthew Hannam, to move into his Los Angeles studio.

 

“It was really cool,” Elfman says, “because I was coming up with ideas, and I would just go ‘knock knock knock’ and get instant input. It was a very fertile period of time.”

 

Echoing the film, the score is a madcap blend of tones. At first it’s an upbeat, classical ode to academia, conveying the idealized, larger-than-life college where Jack rhapsodizes about Hitler, and Don Cheadle’s character sermonizes on Elvis and the art of the cinematic car crash. Elfman’s cues are appropriately theatrical, without “getting too silly.”

 

Then it turns into a doomsday disaster film, and Elfman’s score goes huge and heavy to accompany the dark toxic cloud that appears in the area and causes panic along with a breathless car chase. The synthesized homage to Tangerine Dream — “where I just really got to cut loose and have such a blast” — drives much of the final act, as Jack pursues a mysterious man who has further interrupted the peace in his life.

 

But as wild and cataclysmic as the story gets, its heart also beats with the relationship between Jack and Babette.

 

“There was early on a scene of just the two of them in bed talking,” Elfman says, “and that was a very informative scene.” He responded with a love theme for clarinet and strings and “tried to keep it really simple and sweet — because, to me, their relationship really was.”

 

Baumbach says he was “struck by how beautiful and romantic that music was,” and how it then expanded to accompany a confession scene that threatens to break the heart of their relationship — where “Danny’s music was just very generous and beautiful.”

 

The director has had an evolving relationship with music in his films, from the subtle, naturalistic days of “The Squid and the Whale,” to using retro French film music in “Frances Ha,” to inviting Randy Newman to write an unabashedly romantic score for “Marriage Story.”

 

He believes it’s all trended toward this — the most outrageous, theatrical and, at times, absurd film and score of his career.

 

“It’s all very complex,” says Baumbach. “And I love that it has this really great combination of orchestral and synthetic — which was the thing we talked about throughout the movie. The movie essentially plays in all of these different contrasts, you know, the natural world versus the commercial, plastic world. And Danny really embraced that musically.”

 

Both men said they would love to work together again, although Baumbach notes, “I probably will never have a movie with such varied tones.” Which means he’ll have to confine himself to just one of Danny Elfman’s personalities next time.

 

Says Baumbach: “We’ll find creative ways to get around it.”

 

[mstrox 6,651]

I’d rather watch any movie than read any more DeLillo in my life.  Not sure if we’ll watch this one or not.  The Elfman score is the main selling point for me.

 

No problem with some good existential dread here though.  One of my favorite sleeper movies of last year was Silent Night, an extremely grim existential Christmas movie.

[fommes 153]

Will this get a CD release?

[Jay 37,352]

There's no reason to expect one

[Thor 7,495]

Listening to this now. What an anti-climax! I had built up all these expectations about a largely electronic score in the vein of Tangerine Dream, based on Baumbach's own words. Something a la Elfman's old WISDOM or the wonderful THE CIRCLE. There are certainly electronics here, but more as colouring, and most of it is rather non-descript and all-over-the-place. Maybe I'll appreciate it more once I get over the disappointment of idiom.

[Disco Stu 15,495]

"Sunrise" is a glorious cue, my early favorite.  Really digging this OST after one listen.  It's a little scattershot, but brimming over with cool ideas.  I'll listen again in the afternoon.

 

 

[crocodile 8,006]

8 hours ago, Disco Stu said:

"Sunrise" is a glorious cue, my early favorite.  Really digging this OST after one listen.  It's a little scattershot, but brimming over with cool ideas.

My thoughts exactly. But because it's a nice tight 45 minutes means it won't ever be a problem.

 

Karol

[HunterTech 991]

Gave this a spin now, and boy do I miss this Elfman. It's effectively proof that he's been seriously handicapped by the strict guidelines modern blockbusters can have, as it just oozes so much personality throughout. Sure, it's a little hard to pick up on the thematic core with the amount of stuff it throws at you, but quite frankly I'd rather that than a score that sort of wastes decent themes (which is how I perceive Dr. Strange 2 currently).

 

Current favorite track is Trash, because man does it have that propulsive and detailed energy I liked from the late 90s to early 2000s.

 

 

I will say that I think I preferred the live performance of the section from Duel Lecture, as the choir drowns a bit too much out of the string work here. Makes it lose a bit of that classic Elfman touch, even if it's absolutely still present for it.

[Jay 37,352]

New poster for the film

 

[Jay 37,352]

And a new trailer

 

 

[Jay 37,352]

Finally listening to the score album

 

I was not expecting what I'm hearing.  I'm up to "Up There", and it sounds like it could have fit into Mars Attacks!

[Jay 37,352]

I finished the album.  It's pretty good.

 

Is it anything special compared to Elfman's own entire fimography? No, not really.

 

But compared against the new scores we are getting in 2022, I'd say it's one of the better ones!

[Disco Stu 15,495]

And compared against Elfman’s own scores of the past 10+ years.

[Thor 7,495]

6 minutes ago, Disco Stu said:

And compared against Elfman’s own scores of the past 10+ years.

 

If you say 10 years, there have been some good things that I like far more than WHITE NOISE: THE CIRCLE (2017), THE UNKNOWN KNOWN (2014) and PROMISED LAND (2012). But I have issues with most of the other scores in that period.

[Jay 37,352]

On 17/11/2022 at 2:20 PM, Disco Stu said:

I will definitely not be seeing the movie, despite being mostly a fan of Baumbach.  Existential dread is just not a subject I particularly care to watch a whole movie about.

I dunno anything about the book its based on, but FWIW a new trailer came out the other day, and based on the trailer: This film is a comedy.

 

 

[ddddeeee 247]

 

[TSMefford 1,509]

6 hours ago, ddddeeee said:

 

 

Interesting. I'm fascinated about the editing room set-up in Elfman's space and working that back and forth in that way. That's pretty cool - to be a fly on the wall during that.

[Jay 37,352]

I watched the film the other night, and now I totally get why the score is the way it is!

The film is an utterly absurd comedy, but in a pretty unique way.  It's not necessarily that it has funny dialogue or situations (most of the time), but the way all the actors deliver their lines, and the way the scenes are shot and edited are primary ways Baumbach makes it funny.... along with the score!

 

The score is deliberately over-the-top at many times to be one of the ways to make many scenes funnier.  The score is actually quite awesome in the movie, many cues give the proceedings a great pace and energy.

 

I can't wait to listen to the score album again now that I know the context!

 

 

Oh, and the film ends with a brand new LCD Soundsystem song, that isn't even on the album, even though the album ends with some other song (that was probably in the movie somewhere I suppose, but I don't even remember where)

[Jay 37,352]

Just listened to the score album this morning and yep, I like it even more now that I've seen the movie.

 

And at 41 minutes it really doesn't outstay its welcome.  Definitely one of my favorite scores of 2022!

 

I don't like the song at the end of the album though.  The album would be stronger if it ended with that LCD Soundsystem song!

 

 

It carries the same over-the-top-ness as many of the film cues, would fit right in.  Oh well.