Under The Skin

The score opens with a locust plague of dry tremolos, the strings pressing down until the sound has reached a roar. It's a sound with tremendous menace and weight. From there, the roar shrinks into a whine, and enters a hazy nexus between digitally processed and live sound. It's an indeterminacy Levi worked hard to cultivate: "We were looking at the natural sound of an instrument to try and find something identifiably human in it, then slowing things down or changing the pitch of it to make it feel uncomfortable," she told The Guardian. Insectile, near-vocal sounds erupt across the tense, arid space of "Lipstick to Void," evoking either the Knife's berserker Shaking the Habitual or the processed strings from Britney Spears' "Toxic". It's an appropriate cross-section for the film, which veers between menace and sexuality and brilliantly cross-wires high-brain and low-groin impulses. Levi was recently named co-winner of the 2014 Best Musical Score award by the L.A. Film Critics Association.