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Essay

Bobby Krlic: Occult Compost and Decomposition

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

Essay

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).

Essay

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)

Essay

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

Columns

Bell Labs: Shakuhachi In Crisis?

May 2020

In a sequel to his 2013 Bell Labs Flutes In Crisis column, Clive Bell takes a measure of the current state of Japan’s traditional bamboo flute