September 2025

In his latest Secret History of Film Music column, Philip Brophy considers the ways in which Bobby Krlic’s psych-horror scores trap the audience in Ari Aster’s protagonists’ terror

Michael Abels: Song Lines and Slave Songs

July 2025

In his latest Secret History of Film Music column, Philip Brophy considers Michael Abels’s musicalisations of Black aspiration in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Us (2020).

Irène Drésel: Full-Time, free-time, freetekno

July 2025

In his latest Secret History of Film Music column, Philip Brophy analyses the techno roots of Irène Drésel’s unrelenting score to Eric Gravel’s 2021 social critique Full-Time (À Plein Temps)

Cristobal Tapia de Veer: Screaming Smiles and Vocal Masking

May 2025

Philip Brophy analyses the musical rendering of emotional and cultural deception in Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s scores for Smile (2022) and season one of The White Lotus (2021)

Gazelle Twin: Destabilising Trauma and Musicalised Terror

April 2025

In the third instalment of his rebooted Secret History of Film Music column, Philip Brophy analyses two horror scores by Gazelle Twin – Black Cab (2024) and Nocturne (2020) – and considers how psychological turmoil can be expressed in sound

Issue 494

April 2025

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Essay

Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury: Sonorising War and Voicing Aliens

March 2025

In the second instalment of his rebooted Secret History of Film Music column, Philip Brophy analyses Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s scores for the Alex Garland films Civil War (2024) and Annihilation (2018)

Essay

The Secret History of Film Music: The Return

February 2025

Philip Brophy sets out his intentions for the return of his long running Wire column on film music

Issue 486

August 2024

+ The Wire Tapper 65

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Issue 447

May 2021

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Issue 437

July 2020

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Issue 370

December 2014

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Essay

A Sonic Reading of Visualised Space: A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness

September 2014

Philip Brophy listens in to the occultic meanderings of Ben Rivers and Ben Russell's experimental film and finds the secret power of audiovision.

Issue 363

May 2014

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Essay

Collateral Damage: Philip Brophy on digital sound and Neil Young's Pono

April 2014

Neil Young's Pono player is the latest entry in a debate over the fidelity of digital sound which simplifies the relationship between the medium of music and its experiential message. By Philip Brophy.