Bleep

As if composing her own work, collaborating with the likes of Oliver Coates and Babyfather, producing for Tirzah and playing in Micachu & The Shapes wasn’t enough, recent years have seen Mica Levi prove herself to be a dab hand when it comes to scoring films. Her compositions for Under The Skin, Jackie and Marjorie Prime have all earned Levi acclaim in recent years. Now her fourth work for the screen, an OST for Alejandro Landes’s survival thriller Monos, is sure to win her even more plaudits.

This is hugely atmospheric music. Tracks rarely feature more than a couple of instruments, and those that are featured are generally used sparingly. Chilly synthesisers chug away, as if whipped by the wind; timpani drums undulate without ever reaching a climax; massed Bernard Herrmann-style strings occasionally saw through the texture before leaving abruptly. Even without the heightened tension of what is happening on-screen Levi’s Monos never allows the listener to settle.

Monos is set on a mountain in an unnamed corner of Latin America, and Levi makes a couple of concessions to the film’s setting in her music. The first is the way in which found sounds are incorporated into her score - the running water and squawking birds of ‘A La Selva’, for instance. Another is the flute that crops up time and again here, though the way that Levi deploys its cautious, stuttered blasts of air is a world away from the easy-listening pan-pipes one might associate with the region.

Mica Levi’s score for Monos is sparse, intense and gripping.