While Ari Aster was writing his folk horror Midsommar (2019), he listened to The Haxan Cloak’s Excavation (2013) to set a mood for the story. This led him to commissioning Bobby Krlic (aka The Haxan Cloak) to score the film – the first of three Krlic has done for Aster so far.

Depending on your view, Excavation is either rote or definitive industrial-drone-witch-noise, booming with cinematic tropes of spookiness, pounding with death knells and enraged percussion. Ever since runes were employed for Led Zeppelin’s fourth untitled LP (1971), occultism in music has been fetishised in highly performative modes. Excavation plays like an imaginary soundtrack to a film that has been grown from the compost of 1970s flirtations with Crowley-esque sensations and Lovecraftian sonorities, tempered by digitally distorting plug-ins. Despite – or because of – its portentous aural world-building and psychoacoustic theatre of campy dread, Excavation forms part of an ecological looping that has seen cine-inspired music feed into the production of film scores, especially in the horror genre. An accomplished exercise in simmering terror and pervasive dread, Midsommar can be viewed as a seminal sign of this contemporary trend in ‘temping’ horror-tinged music during the pre-production imaginings of horror movies.

Midsommar follows US anthropology undergrads Christian and two fellow students who have been invited by a Swedish friend to witness the mid-summer festival in a remote village in northern Sweden. Christian asks his girlfriend Dani along: an inconsiderate act, as she is recovering from her bipolar sister having just died by suicide after murdering their parents. Dani’s relationship with Christian is on the rocks, and none of the troupe realise they have all been lured as sacrifices for the village’s death cult proceedings. A pall hangs over these characters as they attempt to relax in the bucolic fields of the Nordic terrain’s long daylight hours. Krlic’s brooding undertones and coruscating sheets of orchestral impressions illuminate the darkness of both the unlikeable foreigners and the manipulative cult within this beaming environment, exemplifying Midsommar’s delight in sounding its horror within beatific climes, subverting folksy naturalism by underscoring sun-drenched visuals with darkness.

In his four films to date, Ari Aster’s scenarios focus on familial frameworks threaded with simmering Bergmanesque tensions. The first act of Midsommar plays out like a claustrophobic indie relationship drama, but, true to its Swedish setting, soon devolves into a psychic/psychotic horror akin to Ingmar Bergman’s Hour Of The Wolf (1968). Both films centre on the psychological meltdown of their central character, affected by trauma which has been allowed to fester in a remote and disorienting environment. Hour Of The Wolf finds its characters emotionally stranded on an East Frisian island at the top of Germany, and puts Lars Johan Werle’s wonderfully terse chamber score to intimidating use.

Krlic is more a DAW collagist than a Darmstadt composer. Yet this technique fits Aster’s tendency towards montage. The director works less with music cues and more with sonic incidents from Krlic’s tracks, blending them into the film’s location sound and post-production sound design. Aster has deftly positioned and layered Krlic’s synth drones, virtual orchestrations and sampled instrumentation, stirring their musical palette amid the Swedish accents, tongues, glossolalia and screams. This tight integration signposts an audial mixage that heightens the soundtrack’s resonance with the psychological turns and collapses of Midsommar’s characters. Just as The Haxan Cloak traded in instrumental soundscaping time warped between 1980s industrial music and 2000s pseudo-soundtrack assemblages, Krlic and Aster have created an ‘imaginary soundtrack’ for an actual film: Midsommar is a unique acousmatic hybrid of aural sensations which seep into and from within the film’s compost of cinesonics.

Thus Midsommar’s score becomes a deconstructed psych-folk, turning inside out the melodiousness of Paul Giovanni and Magnet’s song score for Robin Hardy’s definitive folk-horror film The Wicker Man (1971), set in the fictional Summerisle, Scotland. As Midsommar progresses, actor Florence Pugh sounds Dani’s breath, utterances and gasps, dancing across Krlic and Aster’s soundscaping: her anguished screams amplified through a phone speaker atop harsh violin glissandi upon receiving news of her sister’s murder-suicide; her panting nausea over bass synth waves in the plane toilet en route to Stockholm; her accentuated breathing and panic attack slicing violin swarms after ingesting psychedelic mushroom tea at the commune; her urgent objections mixed with a ringing orchestral drone as she witnesses the elderly couple preparing to dive to their death from Hårga’s white rocky plateau. The cult’s congregation often functions as a stage chorus, providing sonorous support by either singing rich cycles and song lines reminiscent of Meredith Monk’s group work, generating atonal choral hums and foreign tongue murmuring.

In Midsommar, Dani slowly begins to see her personal trauma in the context of the socially maintained horror of the cult world in which she is trapped. The terror of entrapment is amplified to the point of breaking in the next Aster/Krlic collaboration, Beau Is Afraid (2023). Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) is an amalgam of every dishevelled transient one sees on any urban streetscape. Such figures disturbingly populate countless fictional films in an attempt to claim ‘realism’ in their depiction of social ills, but more often than not there’s something insensitive in their portrayal as ‘crazy people’. Beau Is Afraid is arguably the first film to not cosplay ‘craziness’ but to embody it. While the film’s visuals always place Beau in a staged environment to integrate him into dreadfully pressured situations, the soundtrack either splits, detaches or bifurcates voices – those inside and outside his head, and those pretending to be either. The film opens in blackness with an aural POV of Beau being born to the crackling of a foetal doppler; the scope is there to prove the existence of life, not its quality or its potential. Cut from baby Beau’s first airborne scream amidst his mother’s ranting, to his low energy articulation in conversation with his analyst some 50 years later. Phoenix’s high-pitched perplexities and protestations perform similarly to Pugh’s vocalised shocks: his tone rides atop the swirling and engulfing sonorum of the film’s sound design.

Krlic’s score is strangely yet effectively submerged within the film mix. Even when it rises high in volume, it is always in competition with impinging and opposing sounds and voices. The score results from Aster and Krlic choosing not to attempt to convey Beau’s debilitating headspace, but instead aurally state that such psycho-territorial divisions collapse in the experience of devastating paranoia. Beau Is Afraid vehemently denies any social external reality to the inner turmoil of Beau’s mental churning. Its seemingly surrealistic, nightmarish settings are neither arty nor pretentious: they are incontrovertible evidence of how a neurotypical world is a cruel and torturing illusion, one that metastasises in the existential state of Beau’s day-to-day tribulations. The audience is trapped inside the ‘fear space’ of Beau’s mind, where his audiovisual processing of the socially engineered world is distorted into an endless delirium.

Visceral intimations of Beau’s state of mind are introduced once we see him at home in his sparse apartment. As an unseen neighbour flicks notes under Beau’s door, accusing him of playing loud music while Beau is sleeping in silence, screechy over-pressured flute squeals flit atop a dissonant whine and shaker rattles, describing a communication breakdown between one crazy and another (“Notes”). This culminates in an inter-apartment music war, as calypso techno pumps from upstairs, rattling all the aluminium and plastic trims of Beau’s cheap furnishings. Once Beau wakes up late for the airport, his increasing panic is conveyed by tense violin gulps, rising violas, and tingling clarinet lines, all smeared over clunky heart palpitations (“Always With Water”). It might be another Penderecki-aping film cue, but it presents as indistinct implications of orchestral statements that go nowhere. These misshapen gestures coagulate into instrumental gashes as Beau’s anxiety is flooded with terror: from when he runs the gauntlet to cross the road outside his apartment into the downtown Boschian hell of unmedicated and self-medicating denizens, to when he is mistaken for being a naked psychotic killer by an inexperienced cop who threatens to shoot him (a sequence involving around five discrete cues).

As the film unfolds its many layers across three hours, it becomes apparent that the conventional task of a film score to register emotional shifts is inappropriate for Beau Is Afraid. A type of ‘decomposition’ that refutes emotional rationality characterises the score’s cues and placement, which total around only 40 minutes: from the ‘NYC drop dead’ noisescape, to the upstate suburban pastorales, to the dark utopian paeans of the forest theatre troupe, to the unsettling soprano arias of Beau’s return to his mother’s house, to the tormenting courtroom stadium and its Wagner-on-downers rumblings. The overall effect results from a director-composer collaboration of tight and even uncomfortable fusion, one that never veers from the unfixable state of being continually afraid.