“Do you feel like you never stop talking about Drive?” I ask Cliff Martinez, as I open my notebook full of questions about Drive, arguably my favourite film of all time. “You never hear the words ‘hit’ and ‘soundtrack’ together,” he replied with a smile. “But Drive is the exception. Film music is not that popular… but this one is.”
Read the full article at express.co.uk
Netflix announced today that Cliff Martinez (Traffic, Contagion, Solaris, Game Night), Peter Peter (Antboy, Over the Edge) and Julian Winding are composing the original music for the upcoming Danish Netflix neo-noir series Copenhagen Cowboy.
Read the full article at filmmusicreporter.com
Legendary composer Cliff Martinez talks about his score for Hotel Artemis; touches upon his work on Too Old To Die Young; elaborates on his Drive score; and shows how his craft has changed over the years, among other things.
Read the full interview by Aaron Vehlinggo at vehlinggo.com
El genial compositor Cliff Martinez, habitual colaborador de Steven Soderbergh (autor de Solaris, Traffic, Contagio o la serie The Knick) y Nicolas Winding Refn (autor de Drive, Only God Forgives y The Neon Demon) será galardonado con el premio a toda una carrera en el festival alemán Soundtrack_Cologne en su edición número 13.
Recientemente asignado al nuevo proyecto de Marvel, la nueva secuela de Wolverine, Cliff Martinez recibirá el premio en Colonia (Alemania), el día 28 de agosto, en un congreso, el Soundtrack_Cologne, que versa sobre la composición de música para películas, juegos y series de televisión, que reunirá a un amplio elenco de invitados, y que tendrá lugar del 24 al 28 de agosto.
The chemistry between the aural and the visual is so strong that The Neon Demon borders on synesthetic. Refn floods his frame with neon light, casting a glow on his vapid supermodels while lens flare cuts through bodies and faces like rainbow razors, while Martinez creates soundscapes that glow like stage lights and twinkle like glitter, only to butcher them with stabbing synthesizer pulses. The dreamy vision of LA’s fashion world is undercut with an intoxicating doom.
Read the full interview by Miles Bowe at FactMag
Cliff Martinez has been quietly dominating indie film scores for well over 20 years, starting out with Steven Soderbergh and his debut film Sex, Lies, and Videotape. He’s scored films as diverse as Pump Up The Volume, Wicker Park, and The Lincoln Lawyer, but he made his name with Steven Soderbergh. His scores are exquisite and precise. They form to the needs of the film and story. There’s never any grandstanding with Martinez. He serves the film and the film alone, but in doing that over the years he’s developed his own voice as a composer. By the time Soderbergh’s excellent remake of Solaris rolled around he’d found this unique way of serving the film, while at the same time creating a standalone piece of art in his music. That score is magnificent, dark, beautiful, and stays with you. I feel from that point on he’s become one of the most important American composers working today.
Back in 2011 Martinez started a working relationship with Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn. Martinez created the darkly lit, synth-driven score to Refn’s Drive that has since turned into a blossoming artistic partnership. He’s scored the aforementioned Drive, as well as Refn’s Only God Forgives and the short doc about Refn himself titled My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, directed by Refn’s wife Live Corfixn. Their newest collaboration is The Neon Demon, and I believe it’s their best collaboration to date.
Read the full review by J Hubner at BackSeatMafia.com
Soundtrack_Cologne CEO Michael P. Aust announced today that Cliff Martinez will receive the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award on August 27th, 2016 during the award ceremony of this year’s conference.
Soundtrack_Cologne CEO, Michael Aust and program director Matthias Hornschuh state, “Cliff Martinez’s talent is to contribute a very specific atmospheric frequency to movies through sound. Most recently this worked beautifully on Nicolas Winding Refn’s aesthetic masterpiece “The Neon Demon”.
Martinez’s music adds to the visual level and his sound therefore becomes part of the narrative. His next-level electronic film scoring doesn’t make you miss the orchestra, but makes you experience a new and different quality”.
BAFTA Award winning composer Cliff Martinez, and former drummer of the rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers, most recently received the Cannes Soundtrack Award for his work on “Neon Demon”, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, which marks the third collaboration between Martinez and Refn. Another director Martinez frequently collaborates with is Steven Soderbergh on over 10 projects including “Traffic” (for which he was nominated for a Grammy Award), “Sex, Lies and Videotapes”, “Kafka”, “The Limey”, “Solaris”, “Contagion” and the Cinemax series “The Knick”. His upcoming projects include “War Dogs” (directed by Todd Phillips), “The Foreigner” (directed by Martin Campbell), and “Wolverine 3” (directed by James Mangold).
Read the full article by RJ Frometa at Vents Magazine
In a stylized, oft-poetic way, Demon portrays the competitive grind and sheer artifice of the modelling world, and probably Los Angeles as a whole to an extent. The emotions are intense and massive, even in the most sedated scenes. Martinez does an excellent job of using throbbing synthesizers, scattered guitar expressions, pulsating drum machines, and ambient textures to convey this.
However, this time around Martinez works less like a counterpoint to Refn than he has in the past, when he would have tempered ostentatious visuals that seemed to call for compositions as equally stylized. (Think of Drive – the infamous elevator scene has a delicate and crystalline ambient love theme that counters the crunch of violence between The Driver and a would-be assailant.) While Demon certainly has shades of this, more than ever in their three-picture-run-so-far Martinez plays the role of amplifying Refn’s bombast.
Read the full review
Cliff Martinez schreef geen traditionele score voor deze film. Dat komt misschien doordat hij ooit meedraaide in de punkwereld. Hij gebuikt moderne klanken bij vaak donkere en psychologische films zoals Pump Up The Volume, The Limey, Wicker Park en Drive. Hij is als muzikant bekend door het manipuleren van geluid, vooral dat van percussiewerk. Zijn techniek is geëvolueerd doorheen de jaren. Zelf omschrijft hij het als ‘rhythmi-tizing pitched, ambient textures’ die vooral in Narc tot uiting komen.
Wie vertrouwd is met het werk van Cliff Martinez, weet dat de componist een heel specifieke stijl heeft. Eentje die doorheen de jaren nogal repetitief was verspreid over verschillende films en soundtracks. De vraag is dan ook of Martinez nog muzikaal uitdagend uit de hoek kan komen? Terwijl “Neon Demon” uit mijn hoofdtelefoon weergalmt, durf ik ja zeggen. De beats bonken stevig tijdens dit nummer waarbij je allerlei kleurrijke taferelen inbeeldt. De soundtrack werd bekroond tijdens de Filmfestival van Cannes. De fans schaffen zich best zeker de plaat aan.
Didier Van Hoorebeke – supercalifragilistic.be
The Neon Demon actress, director, and composer exorcise the film’s themes.
A former drummer for Red Hot Chili Peppers, Captain Beefheart, and Lydia Lunch, the 62-year-old composer initially broke into film after scoring Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 breakthrough indie hit, sex, lies, and videotape, a partnership that’s continued ever since and ultimately led to his latest ventures with Refn.
The Neon Demon marks their third collaboration together — fourth, if you count Liv Corfixen’s My Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn — and Martinez’s compositions have certainly added a flavorful touch to Refn’s stoic ouevre. In a way, each score serves as a ghostly narrator, haunting the filmmaker’s trademark long shots with an ambient glaze that’s meditative and comforting.
Read the full article and interview by Michael Roffman at Consequence of Sound
Refn is quick to admit that he has no problem leaving many of the technical aspects of composing to Martinez. “I can’t play an instrument, I can’t sing, I can’t dance, I don’t have the confidence,” he admits. “That’s never stopped me!”, Martinez interjects with a laugh. Fearlessness in singing and dancing aside, he humbly credits Refn for helping him branch out and take chances. “I always tend to be really conservative because music just takes a long time to create so I don’t take that many risks, but Nicolas encourages risk-taking in the music. So that trust factor is a big deal and you kind of earn it, in our case, over three films. I seem to be getting bigger and bigger roles in Nicolas’ films.”
by Ari Drew at Dread Central
The Neon Demon Soundtrack is a must listen for any fan of Cliff Martinez … and any fan of film composition for that matter. Its the sort of music that you can actually see. And feel. Its the sort of music you’ll want to listen to over and over again. And you should. Much like a great movie, you will experience something different every time through. That’s as much ask you can as for from an album – let alone a soundtrack.
Read the full review by Patrick Phillips at Cut Print Film
If there’s one thing that composer Cliff Martinez shares in common with Jesse, the nymphet model of “The Neon Demon,” then it’s that both are soft spoken while rocking peoples’ worlds. For Jesse, it’s becoming a sensation that drives LA’s fashionistas wild with desire as The Next Big Thing. For former Chili Peppers drummer Martinez, it was creating a sound of alt. rhythmic minimalism that changed the face of indie scoring with Steven Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies and Videotape.” But if Jesse has the misfortune of attracting equally gorgeous, if far more twisted people who want to absorb the blonde essence of her corn-fed enchantment, Martinez’s sonic spell has had the far more fortunate result of attracting creative agent provocateurs – perhaps none more twisted than Nicolas Winding Refn.
Read the full interview by Daniel Schweiger at Film Music Magazine
“I was taught music should express an added dimension that isn’t apparent in the dialogue. Music needs to step in and fill in the blanks. But Nicolas takes it to another level,” says Martinez.
“A little bit goes a long way in film music – you try to get a few balls in the air, sculpt it and spin it out into a lot of other scenes,” said Martinez, who said the main advice along the way from Winding Refn was to “keep it cool”.
Read the full article by Tiffany Pritchard at Screen Daily
La bande-son est aussi une perle du genre qui renforce l’ambiance oppressante de ce milieu très prisé. L’univers sonore est riche, varié, contient des sons électros composés par Cliff Martinez. La bande-son permet de renforcer des situations déjà malsaines pour réellement enfermer le spectateur avec les personnages ; à noter qu’elle se base aussi sur le point de vue de Jesse. Pour ainsi dire, l’ambiance sonore devient aussi une esthétique à part entière et porte aussi le film. Elle paraît énigmatique et mystérieuse, parfois inquiétante et violente tout en surplombant les images et le récit. C’est cet ensemble de rouages qui donnent au film de Nicolas Winding Refn, une œuvre réjouissante, effrayante et expérimentale.
Lire l’article complet à LE GEEK CINEPHILE
Palmarès Cannes Soundtrack 2016
“Coup de Cœur” de la Meilleure Musique de Film Originale
Cliff Martinez pour The Neon Demon de Nicolas Winding Refn
Après Lim Gion pour The assassin de Hou Hsiao-Hsien, c’est donc Cliff Martinez (qui avait déjà collaboré avec Nicolas Winding Refn pour Only God forgives et Drive) qui a été récompensé cette année pour la musique très expressive de The neon Demon de Nicolas Winding Refn. Tantôt lancinante et ultra-rythmée, hallucinée et délicate, elle donne au film une identité sonore forte, entre étrangeté contenue et cauchemar anxiogène. L’apport de Martinez est d’ailleurs évidente dans l’esthétique choc du film et dans la recherche formelle quasi abstraite du réalisateur danois. A noter que la bande-originale du film sera éditée à partir du 3 juin prochain.
Through flashing prisms and mirror images, and underpinned by Cliff Martinez’s superb score – all subaquatic throbs and cascading, gem-refracted electronica – Fanning’s face becomes a kind of idolatrous icon, and we feel as if we’re bearing witness to a strange and occult ritual.
Read full review at The Telegraph
The Neon Demon continues Winding Refn’s collaboration with Cliff Martinez for the composer’s most evocative score yet — some of the music is dark electronica, some has a twinkling quality that alludes to the otherworldly fairytale feel. “Cliff Martinez was really important,” the director says. “At some moments in the script, I would just write, ‘This is where Cliff comes in.’”
Read the full article at screendaily.com
“With a laundry list of stellar moments, a ton of gravitas, and the best use yet of Cliff Martinez’s pulsing electric score, “Not Well at All” shows the potential that The Knick has to weave a series of great tales into a profound and involving whole, and why it is easily one of the best shows to grace the airwaves in years.” – Mike Worby
The Knick, Ep. 2.08, “Not Well at All” at popOptiq
“But the greatest triumph in the episode belonged to Herman’s favorite prostitute, Junia. In a scene shot in slow-motion, with only Cliff Martinez’s techno score on the soundtrack, Barrow came to Ping Wu’s house and swept away the woman whose freedom he had purchased with the graft from the construction of the new Knick. Before the hospital is even finished, it has accomplished its first successful cure.” – Mike Hale
‘The Knick’ Season 2, Episode 8: Victims All Around
“Few films do it better than Drive does, but no matter how mesmerising the performance of Ryan Gosling as the uprooted protagonist, it is the impeccable soundtrack of Cliff Martinez that steals the show.” -Jordan Low
The Sound Lounge – Soundtracked: Drive
Niegdyś muzyk Red Hot Chili Peppers, a od wielu lat uznany w świecie autor muzyki filmowej (Traffic, Solaris, Drive) – Cliff Martinez to ostatni gość specjalny Międzynarodowej Gali Seriali w ramach tegorocznej, 8. już odsłony Festiwalu Muzyki Filmowej w Krakowie. W sobotę, 30 maja w krakowskiej arenie kompozytor zaprezentuje muzykę stworzoną do jednego z najgłośniejszych tytułów 2014 roku, nominowanego do Złotych Globów serialu The Knick.
Film Fest Gent & Brussels Philharmonic proudly present a new album combining the best film scores by Cliff Martinez.
Cliff Martinez is a key figure in our time’s film scoring. In the 80’s, he began spending several years drumming with such acts as Captain Beefheart, The Dickies, Lydia Lunch and The Weirdos, and then joining the Red Hot Chili Peppers. His career is exemplary.
His experimental electronic music highlighted many cinematic masterpieces. He has been Steven Soderbergh’s regular composer (‘sex, lies and videotape’; ‘Traffic’; ‘Solaris’; ‘Contagion’) and he has been making a name for himself for a few years now scoring the two last films of visionary Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, ‘Drive’ and ‘Only God Forgives’.
Cliff Martinez also scored the great ‘Spring Breakers’, ‘Arbitrage’ (Milan Records) and ‘The Company You Keep’ (Milan Records). We now hear about him as he has just scored the first Steven Soderbergh TV series ‘The Knick’ (starring Clive Owen), to be released by Milan Records as well.
This Film Fest Gent album combines the best film scores by Cliff Martinez (‘Solaris’; ‘Only God Forgives’; ‘The Company You Keep’; ‘Contagion’) arranged for orchestra and performed by the Brussels Philharmonic conducted by Dirk Brossé.
Read full article at World Soundtrack Awards – Cliff Martinez’ Film Fest Gent Album
… the director turned to the only person he thought could give The Knick a unique sound: his frequent collaborator, Cliff Martinez.
“I had some reservations about it at first,” Martinez says. “You’re trying so hard to place the viewer in this time and this place, and the music is really fighting something that everyone else in the show is trying to achieve. But as the episodes started coming in, and seeing that it had all this electronic stuff that was mine, I realized that it was working. So it gave me the confidence to do it.”
Ultimately, Martinez fashioned the most compelling soundtrack on television right now. A complete anachronism, the composer constructed a postmodern and curious through-line for the series with droning, minimalistic synthesizer and guitar lines, warbling bass and chimes that seem to swoop down from nowhere.
-David Mermelstein
Read the full article at Rolling Stone – Blood Brothers: Inside the Music of ‘The Knick’
If you were initially thrown by the modern, electronic music used to score Steven Soderbergh’s 1900-set medical drama The Knick, you are not alone: The idea also caught the show’s composer, Cliff Martinez, off guard at first.
“The most important thing that Steven usually does that outlines the approach is that he sends me a rough cut of the picture. The big curveball in The Knick was that temporary music [he used] as he was editing — he was using my music from Drive and Contagion and Spring Breakers, which was a surprise because it didn’t acknowledge the period whatsoever. In fact, it kind of went in the opposite direction,” Martinez tells TVGuide.com. “At first it seemed like a risk because the whole idea of the show was to try to put the viewer in 1900 in New York and everything was pulling in that direction except for the music. I had a phone call with Steven and then I just said, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ He said, ‘Yeah. It’s going to be all electronic. It’s going to be modern. That’s intentional.’ And after a few weeks, it had become the sound of the show.”
Read the full article at TV Guide
The brains behind the film music for Solaris, Drive and Spring Breakers on his newest bloody project with Steven Soderbergh.
A Conversation with Composer Cliff Martinez at Moogfest this year attracted a mix of curious festival attendees and die-hard fans – many of whom cared much more for Martinez’s dark, ambient scores than the actual movie plots. The regular Steven Soderbergh collaborator (“Sex, Lies and Videotape,” “Traffic,” and “Solaris”) has reached even more prominence lately since scoring critically acclaimed films such as Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive” and Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers.” Martinez, a soft-spoken and charming speaker, was surprisingly upfront about where he gets his ideas and how he executes them. Budding film score composers, take note: Martinez uses software synths like Omnisphere and u-he, arranging in Ableton Live, but calls himself a preset guy. However, you probably don’t own a gamelan metallophone or 17 baritone steel drums from Trinidad—the latter of which are prominently featured on the “Solaris” soundtrack, which Martinez cites as his all-time favorite score: “I wish I could roll out of bed every day and write another ‘Solaris.'” – Nara Shin
Cliff Martinez scores Refn’s ONLY GOD FORGIVES on his MacBook Pro in a hotel room in Thailand. Martinez often travels with gear in tow and is alarmingly productive considering how compact his setup truly is. Much of the score for Only God Forgives was composed in this very room using nothing more than what is shown here. -SCORE KEEPER
Read the full article at Birth, Movies, Death
Cliff Martinez received BMI’s Richard Kirk Award, which is bestowed on composers who have made significant contributions to the realm of film and television music. As the 2013 recipient of the Richard Kirk Award, Martinez joins a prestigious list that includes David Arnold, Rachel Portman (PRS), Alan Silvestri, David Newman, Thomas Newman, Christopher Young, George S. Clinton, Harry Gregson-Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Michael Kamen, Mark Mothersbaugh, Danny Elfman, Alan Menken, Mike Post, Lalo Schifrin, John Barry, Rolfe Kent, Charlie Fox and John Williams.
Continue reading this article at BMI
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.
After he’d worn out the carpet in front of the slot machine for another three years, speeding along with persistent punkers the Dickies and scoring an episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse among other activities, Martinez lined up his lemons and broke the bank in 1988. He’d been making sound collages — “body noises, pots and pans, sound effects, played rhythmically. I was working the cracks between music and sound effects.” Mark Mangini, a sound designer who’d been asked while working on the film Alien Nation for “some sound effects that were kind of like music,” had heard Martinez’s stuff and asked him to give it a whack on spec. “They never used any of what I did, because the music was really pretty nutty,” says Martinez. Anyway, while Martinez and Mangini were listening to it, Mangini’s roommate butted in and started making suggestions. “We hit it off great. I could tell he was not a musician but had a great instinct about how to use music in films. He said, ‘This stuff would be perfect for my next film, sex, lies, and videotape. Would you like to score it?’” The roommate was Steven Soderbergh, then an unknown. You are correct: Martinez did not decline.
– Greg Burk
Great article from 2003, not to be missed. Read the full text at L.A.Weekly
Strings are muted and orchestration so subtle as to be almost non-existent (respect to ex-Zappa sidekick Bruce Fowler for this light touch). In other words the music perfectly captures the mood of the film. A brooding slow, meditative work that is never afraid to leave the viewer/listener to draw their own conclusions. And to be set adrift like Kelvin himself. Not in the vast emptiness of space, but in the infinitely more chilling abyss of the subconscious.
Like Soderbergh’s icily muted cinematic palette, Martinez’s textures are at once samey, yet never boring. Paradoxical? Yes. But to see the film is to understand what a challenge it was to convey the kind of existentialism that mainstream Hollywood is normally so bereft of. Just for once this is thoughtful stuff; music for adults. – Chris Jones
Full article at BBC.com
For Traffic, Soderbergh showed Martinez a rough cut of the film with a temp score. “Steven wanted a score similar in style to sex, lies, and videotape, which was slow, ambient and had a conspicuous absence of melody, harmony and rhythm. It was an unusual approach to take back in 1989, and I was a little surprised that Steven wanted to go down that road again with a $50 million dollar picture.”
Martinez estimates that about 60% of the music for Traffic was “recorded” via samplers in his studio. Pianist Herbie Hancock and guitarists David Torn and Michael Brook were recorded in their respective home studios, while Flea and percussionists Alex Acuna and Paulinho Da Costa were recorded at Media Ventures in Santa Monica. Because it was primarily an ambient score, Martinez and scoring mixer Alan Meyerson decided to add space and size to the sound by pumping the elements into a live space and recording the ambience. This enabled them to create a full, warm surround mix without using much in the way of electronic processing. They chose the famous Capitol Studios for the task with excellent results. The score was mixed by Meyerson at Media Ventures. – by Robyn Flans
Full article at MIX
When it came time to score Traffic, Soderbergh called on someone he’d already collaborated with six times, former Red Hot Chili Pepper Cliff Martinez. And according to Martinez, Soderbergh had a very specific idea of what he wanted. “He seems to prefer music that is somewhat emotionally detached from the film and perhaps is more atmospheric,” says Martinez. “For Traffic, Steven wanted to go even further in that direction. When we first discussed the concept for the score, it almost seemed like he wanted a score that might be just as well suited to a sound designer as it would a composer.” Martinez adds that he wasn’t very gung-ho about the idea. “My initial response was to rebel,” he says. “It was like he wasn’t allowing the score to play a very active role in the film. But I didn’t disagree because at that point Steven had given it much more thought than I had. Secondly, he’s smarter than I am. And three, he writes the checks.” – by Jason Foster
Full article at Film Score Monthly.
“To an extent, my score, which is sparse, tells you what the characters are thinking and feeling, but it mostly acts as a non-specific energy source. And sometimes the music goes in a direction opposite from what people are expecting.”
Cliff Martinez
Read the full interview by David Mermelstein
at Variety – Traffic’s’ Sonic Identity
