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## telecode101 (Sep 28, 2020)

..


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## Simon Ravn (Sep 28, 2020)

I thought "Stranger Things" was highly original. As was the movie "Gravity". But maybe I just don't know where the inspiration came from. Music is rarely 100% original. But I have a lot of respect for both of those genres, their composers and how the music works in the show/film.


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## d.healey (Sep 28, 2020)

Birdman was pretty unique and Isle of Dogs. Both soundtracks are essentially just drums (but totally different to each other).


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## telecode101 (Sep 28, 2020)

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## ptram (Sep 28, 2020)

Utterly original: Johannsson's Arrival.

Paolo


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## thorwald (Sep 28, 2020)

Clint Mansel's The Fountain. It's haunting and intimate nature makes it really a one of a kind score. Thanks to the Kronos Quartet, I appreciate quartet-writing even more.


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## angeruroth (Sep 28, 2020)

The DEVS soundtrack shocked me at first. It is different and interesting for the most part, and IMHO its relationship with the picture and the story makes a better whole.


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## JonS (Sep 28, 2020)

telecode101 said:


> As the title states, name the last truly "original" soundtrack to a film or TV show you heard that you thought was truly original and different and a game changer to how soundtracks might get crafted in the future.


“Shine”


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## Simon Ravn (Sep 28, 2020)

telecode101 said:


> Hmm..? I think for those of us why grew up in the 80s, the soundtrack to Stranger Things was more of a homage to a time long past. There once was a time when John Carpenter bought himself a synth and started playing it with 2 fingers and said "Screw it, I don't need a composer"..




I know John Carpenters stuff, at least some of it, but I don't really think Stranger Things sounds like anything I heard.


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## Gerbil (Sep 28, 2020)

Uncut Gems or maybe Chernobyl.


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## CT (Sep 28, 2020)

ptram said:


> Utterly original: Johannsson's Arrival.
> 
> Paolo



Well, Stockhausen, Crumb... but "originality" to me doesn't mean that there are no obvious antecedents. That seems more or less impossible.


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## KEM (Sep 28, 2020)

Everything Ludwig Göransson does.


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## bryla (Sep 28, 2020)

Arrival


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## telecode101 (Sep 28, 2020)

..


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## robgb (Sep 28, 2020)

Mandalorian.


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## nickaloo (Sep 28, 2020)

I loved Hannibal (the series) - it seems to work somewhere in the space between music and sound fx, like an emotional commentary on it's own level - dangerously intense. You can say the same about the production design on that show.


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## nickaloo (Sep 28, 2020)

I also thought Under the Skin was terrific, not just horror-eeriness but otherwordly, very gentle but terrifying (like the main character)


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## bryla (Sep 28, 2020)

telecode101 said:


> Was Arrival a game changer and totally original or are we posting it because we are fans of the late Johannsson.


I remember I knew from the beginning. I’ve always admired his originality.


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## jeremiahpena (Sep 28, 2020)

Cristobal Tapia de Veer's Utopia score with heavily digitized pitch-bendy sampled choirs and voices, and absolutely next-level sound manipulation. I've never heard anything quite like it before or after.


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## Henning (Sep 28, 2020)

I think Bear McCreary's music for Black Sails and Outlander were game changers for me. Never heard such a perfect symbiosis of folk instruments and orchestra before. Really stunning mixes by Steve Kaplan as well.


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## labornvain (Sep 28, 2020)

jeremiahpena said:


> Cristobal Tapia de Veer's Utopia score with heavily digitized pitch-bendy sampled choirs and voices, and absolutely next-level sound manipulation. I've never heard anything quite like it before or after.



You beat me to it. Really great stuff and super original.


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## labornvain (Sep 28, 2020)

Wojciech Kilar's score for The Ninth Gate.


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## Trash Panda (Sep 28, 2020)

Awful final season aside, Game of Thrones had its moments of soundtrack brilliance. 

One standout moment was the Battle of Blackwater Bay with the drums in the "physical" world kicking off the music and slowly fading in more of a traditional cinematic score.

Another was the Rains of Castamere being played by the Frey's band during the wedding reception.

Then there's the piano-driven track, Light of the Seven, in the final episode of season 6.


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## JohnG (Sep 28, 2020)

Some people on this thread are mighty generous with what they consider original.

Besides, I think originality is overrated. In a commercial arena, you get to do what you get to do. It takes a strong producer / director / network / studio to actually ask for something original.

And then not reject it!

Most originality in soundtracks is pretty marginal -- sometimes it's the instrument choice, sometimes the "sound," sometimes the unexpectedness of a style of music with the time or place or look of the film.


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## cug (Sep 28, 2020)

Thomas Newman, American Beauty (1999) really hit me as new and different even though I think he had already been dabbling in this approach in earlier scores. When this came out, I was already scoring silent films with a marimba / percussionist and myself on keyboards. But this score brought those instruments into the mainstream. I still love all the quirky instruments his studio musician friends play. What better way to sound original than to make your own instruments? 

My second choice:
Tangerine Dream’s score for Risky Business (1983) also caught my ear as something new for a film in that genre (I.e., not sci-fi). I had already been listening to their spacey synth music for a long time but that was the first time I noticed it used in a film that way. I suspect that score and other T Dream scores influenced the music for Stranger Things, which is intended to sound 80’s retro.


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## Henrik B. Jensen (Sep 28, 2020)

I don't care if a soundtrack is original or not, as long as it does it's job well.


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## ptram (Sep 28, 2020)

Mike T said:


> Well, Stockhausen, Crumb... but "originality" to me doesn't mean that there are no obvious antecedents.


Also, maybe some Meredith Monk and a lot of Tangerine Dreams. Yet, with an original mixture*, a lot of lab work, that I'm not sure had been used before in a movie soundtrack (despite the antecedents of Johannsson's himself for Villeneuve).

Originality also coming from the plot and structure of the film, with its time jumps and spirals*, and a story made of linguistics theories. The music is not called to underline emotions, but to translate in a different media an unknown language.

Paolo


(* pun intended!)


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## ptram (Sep 28, 2020)

telecode101 said:


> Was Arrival a game changer and totally original or are we posting it because we are fans of the late Johannsson.


I admit having only discovered him as the author of soundtracks for Villeneuve.

Speaking of Villeneuve: I find him to be a grossly undervalued director, capable of innovative and shocking masterworks like Incendies, Sicario, Arrival or Blade Runner 2049. I find him to be one of the directors with the greatest ability of making music be a texture of his plots.

Take Incendies, another movie where music is part of the narrative. I admit not remembering the original soundtrack, but the choice of the modern stock songs was (at that age) very original, sort of diegetic music for a story of modern young adults, listening to non-trivial rock.

Paolo

(A personal note about Incendies: I always watched at it while abroad – and I'm not a frequent traveler. I saw the theatre piece at its premiere in Paris, with the hall filled; and the movie premiere while at Halifax, NS, in an empty theatre. Being a piece about how hard it is to know who you are, my experience seems to be absolutely perfect).


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## patrick76 (Sep 28, 2020)

telecode101 said:


> Was Arrival a game changer and totally original or are we posting it because we are fans of the late Johannsson.
> 
> I was considerig posting his soundtrack to Bill Morrisons The Miners' Hymns (2010) , but then thought better of it. When listening to it closely, even though its great music and one of my favs, it's music you have sort of heard in different forms done slightly differently in the past. It's more a continuation of a tradition instead of radically new.


Arrival was cool, but it's worth mentioning that at a critical moment in the film the music was by Max Richter.


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## ptram (Sep 28, 2020)

patrick76 said:


> Arrival was cool, but it's worth mentioning that at a critical moment in the film the music was by Max Richter.


It's a song that is part of the personal soundtrack of the sophisticate protagonists. The typical music we are forced to declare to appreciate when trying to date someone from the art or theatre scene...

Paolo


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## John Longley (Sep 28, 2020)

Gerbil said:


> Uncut Gems or maybe Chernobyl.


Uncut Gems was quietly and effectively PUNK AF. I love how passionately people hated it. It fit the movie so well.


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## NekujaK (Sep 28, 2020)

The music in Punch-Drunk Love totally twisted my brain around. Not only for the music itself, but how it was mixed into the film. Wow.


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## gsilbers (Sep 28, 2020)

haywire
looper


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## Henrik B. Jensen (Sep 29, 2020)

The soundtrack for Dunkirk is impressive. It matches the movie so well, it's like movie and soundtrack is intertwined so it really is one piece of art, not two separate elements put together.


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## Ndee (Sep 29, 2020)

I'm also a fan of the DEVS score, been listening to it quite a lot while writing & doing admin tasks. With repeated listens, it comes off much more balanced and conventional than at the first instance, which I think is a compliment. It's not gimmicky at all to my ears.

Uncut Gems was pretty nice, but nothing really struck out. Perhaps because I grew up listening to that kind of music, but maybe also because the film itself was so fast-paced, vertigo-inducing and in-your-face that the layered synths and extended drumming techniques didn't really do anything that wasn't there already vibe-wise.


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## ptram (Oct 3, 2020)

The music of Toru Takemitsu for RAN, by Kurosawa, can be considered, in my view, very original. It was a symphonic soundtrack, but not of the epic style, like in most war movies. On the contrary, it was a mix of traditional Japanese melodies, and thick mahlerian orchestra, sometimes going over the scene, making it like a distant nightmare.





Paolo


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## dcoscina (Oct 3, 2020)

Isle of Dogs was a wonderful score by Desplat but he was channeling Japanese composers like Akira Ifukube and more Fumio Hayasaka (Seven Samurai, Yojimbo). 

Everything comes from somewhere. Even something as innovative as POTA was a blend of Varese, Berg and Bartok with a touch of Stravinsky. But what Goldsmith did with narratively was unique.

I would say the way PT Anderson used Greenwood's score to There Will Be Blood was very inspired. He could have gone with the standard period styled music that featured bucolic pandiatonicism but instead had the music underscore the nature of Daniel Plainview who was a monster.


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## MA-Simon (Oct 3, 2020)

Loved this one for it's unique mood:


Isle of Dogs... I found some of the animation very nice, but the story did not click with me. I can't remember the soundtrack at all.

Not super original, but an awesome soundtrack I still remember and have on CD. ❤ Way more Star Trek then Discovery.


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## MOMA (Oct 3, 2020)

Gudnadóttir made a strong impression with the score of Chernobyl. Having a second go at the series now, and I must say that its contribution to the haunting feel should not be underestimated. This score with so many levels of sounds and subtle themes is remarkable in so many ways. Impressive production.

MOMA


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## Karl Feuerstake (Oct 4, 2020)

MA-Simon said:


> Not super original, but an awesome soundtrack I still remember and have on CD. ❤ Way more Star Trek then Discovery.




While the quality of this soundtrack is superb and the composer strikes me as very knowledgeable of this style, I think this inherently constitutes a lack of originality. It is music for a comedy show intended to make fun of space-faring sci-fis like Star Trek; so it emulates Star Trek music to a tee, to the point where it too is almost satire.

For what I've heard recently, I want to say Dunkirk was fairly original, mostly in its timbre. For the World-War 2 movie genre, it's rare to hear synthesized sounds or anything other than just a raw orchestra. I felt the sound design on the score was emulating things like air raid sirens or swooping aircraft, and the use of ticking clocks was used to highlight the gravity of the situation (time was running out).


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## ptram (Oct 29, 2020)

Re-watched the movie yesterday: _Naked Lunch_, by Cronenberg, with a soundtrack created jointly by Howard Shore and Ornette Coleman. Like the movie, the music is beyond original, going toward the lysergic. Great orchestral writing, great jazz trio improvisation.

Paolo


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