But in a year like this one, it breaks your heart.
Heard at any time in the four decades since its making, “Echos” would be touching. Listening to “Echos” is as poignant as stumbling upon a roadside shrine of flowers, candles, and photos, but Ferreyra goes beyond creating a memorial to Mercedes: She defies death itself and resurrects her niece as an aural apparition. At other points, the melted murmurs and shimmered syllables feel soothing and psalm-like, as though the girl’s ghost is mourning herself. In places, the young woman’s voice flickers and trembles with playful delight, sounding impossibly alive.
Recorded in 1978 but released for the first time this year, the piece is woven entirely from the voice of Ferreyra’s niece Mercedes Cornu, who died in a car accident prior to its composition. Ultimately, a movie’s mix of genres, where it’s set, its characters, whose perspective it centers and more can influence a film’s music just as much as its composer’s own musical background, training and style.Īmid the release of a slew of horror films this year, eight composers behind 2022 films Barbarian, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Fresh, Goodnight Mommy, Pearl, The Black Phone, The Menu and Umma discuss how they tackled fear in their scores.Argentine composer Beatriz Ferreyra is renowned for the disorienting spatiality and shape-shifting abstraction of her electronic and tape-based work, but it’s the human scale and raw intimacy of “Echos” that startle.
In the specific case of horror movies, that most essential emotion composers are entrusted to both illustrate and produce is fear - an umbrella feeling that can encompass everything from dread and anxiety to painful distress and restlessness.īut with the wide range of horror films out there, how one composer imbues that terror and creates an aural soundscape for a story’s horrors that will equally get into the heads (and under the skin) of their viewers, can be quite different than the next.
That’s thanks, in part, to a film’s composer, who has an explicit ability to take both the social, physical, metaphorical and even unnatural and uncanny elements of a story and turn them into tangible, audible emotion. If this year’s horror movies are any proof, what you hear can be just as or even more terrifying than what you see.