Film Music Magazine – On the Score with Cliff Martinez

Martinez’s music is simplicity at its finest- melodies that don’t so much describe his characters’ emotions as opposed to hypnotizing them to open up their inner thoughts. Angelic percussion has provided the sense of “Drive’s” brutal getaway man seeking deliverance. Siren-like electronic wails became “Contagion’s” nerve-tingling alarms for viral Armageddon. Calming, pulse rhythms and icy strings were the anticipation, and anguish of modern relationships in “Wicker Parker,” while ever-tensing, ethereal melodies became a business kingpin trying to weave his way out of a murder rap in “Arbitrage.”

Now on a new episode of “On the Score,” the soft-spoken Cliff Martinez talks about how he’s kept a style that stood for a new wave of musical experimentalism into an approach that’s as fresh, and mesmerizing as ever as it makes bad behavior into a thing of strange beauty. -Daniel Schweiger

Listen to the full interview here.