Going Inside the Music of ‘Sirât’: Radical, Experimental – and Maybe Even Comical?

It doesn’t make any sense. In a climactic moment of Oliver Laxe’s harrowing Spanish film “Sirât,” a group of ragtag survivors find themselves in the open desert in Northern Africa, grieving for the losses they’ve endured and facing a world that may be on the brink of collapse. As one of them walks across the sand, they suddenly discover that they’re not in a desert wasteland; instead, they’re in the middle of a live minefield.  

While the characters navigate the terrain, acutely aware that every step could be their last, the soundtrack suddenly comes alive – not with doomy, foreboding chords or ominous undercurrents, but with sprightly electronic arpeggios.

“It was one of the boldest moves I’ve ever done, to propose that to Oliver,” said French composer David Letellier, who uses the name Kangding Ray for his club and film music. “We were struggling with that scene. Because it’s such a tense scene, the usual reflex would be to increase the tension. Make it violent or dark. Instead of that, I was thinking, do we want to give hope? It’s quite unexpected, almost comical in a way. But it’s a relief.”

He laughed, and said that he was in the studio with Laxe when it occurred to him that he might use a piece of music he’d composed years earlier but rejected. “I never knew what to do with it, but maybe it was waiting for that moment. I found that music on a hard drive, played it with the scene and we were both like, ‘This is it.’”

That kind of unexpected film music helped Letellier (aka Ray) land on the Oscar shortlist for Best Original Score, one of a surprising five shortlists on which “Sirât” wound up. “It’s a really radical and experimental film, in a way,” he said. “So I took the same approach with the music.”

But that kind of radical process was familiar to the composer and deejay. “It feels like a very natural evolution for me, because I studied more in the ambient experimental scene,” he said. “Then I went on to develop a more intense techno sound. I also made a lot of music for sound installations in the contemporary art world. So it feels like an evolution that I can draw from all these experiences. The idea of immersion and direct emotional responses to sound informs a lot my practice in scoring.”

“Sirât” opens with an extended sequence set at a days-long rave in the Moroccan desert, where a man has come to search for his missing daughter. That was an easy way in for Letellier, who had played at a rave in Morocco in 2019, an experience he said “changed my life.” He began writing music for Laxe two years before the film began shooting, inspired by the rave culture but also aware that straight techno dance music wouldn’t work.

“The score is made out of the same fabric, but the score part is a sort of disintegration of the fabric of rave culture,” he said. “Because that music, especially the techno part, isn’t really fitting on screen all the time. Sometimes it feels a little out of place, so you have to work on it to make it subtle enough and make it more cinematic.”

But “Sirât” still stayed true to its setting. The opening sequence, Letellier said, “was an actual party. It was not a film set. They actually organized a real rave, and the people you see are not extras — they are actual people from that community. The rave was three days long, day and night, and we had to shoot in between. It was beautiful chaos. And then on the last day, I even played a long deejay set. It was a way to integrate the film composer into the culture, really.”

Over the course of his work on the film, Letellier composed a lot more material than he could use, with Laxe a perfectionist on all fronts. “Oliver wants the images to be loaded with meaning and intensity, and he makes the same demand of the music,” he said.

One particular challenge came when the handful of survivors take peyote in the desert and try to dance away the horrors they’ve been through. “It’s a weird moment, because the film is shifting in a psychedelic way,” he said. “They’re doing this slow dance, but it’s visceral after all the grief and pain from what has happened. It’s a ritual of cleansing with no dialogue, so the music had to suggest a psychedelic aspect, along with the pain, the grief and the violence. That was quite a lot to put into one cue – and it’s six minutes of uninterrupted music.”

And now that he’s accomplished that task and won a spot on the shortlist and a Golden Globe nomination for only his second film as a composer (the first being the 2022 German drama “Wann kommst du meine Wunden küssen”), is he ready to do more film work?

“People are interested, but I’m taking it slow because I want to enjoy this moment,” he said. “It’s interesting to crash through the door of Hollywood on my second film, but I want to choose carefully. And I also have other things to do.”

As he said this on a Thursday afternoon in December, Letellier was getting ready to introduce a “Sirât” screening, then head straight to the airport for a flight from Los Angeles to Thailand. By the time he landed, it would be Saturday, and he’d head straight to the sound check for a live electronic show he was doing at a festival in the jungle.

He laughed as he thought of his upcoming days, which put him in a similar position as European composers like Volker Bertelmann, Daniel Blumberg and Hildur Guðnadóttir, all of whom mix film composing with playing with bands and doing concerts on their own.

“They have an almost holistic practice of music,” Letellier said. “They can play in a band or in an orchestra. They can compose in different contexts, and film is one of them.”

“And I like this idea that different practices form your approach. For me, it’s my experience of physicality and spirituality or immersion. But I also know what it is to play guitar in a rock band. All these things, including film scoring, require a lot of experience and knowledge.” He shrugged. “I don’t think I would’ve been very good at it when I was 20. But I feel stronger now.”

The post Going Inside the Music of ‘Sirât’: Radical, Experimental – and Maybe Even Comical? appeared first on TheWrap.