Daniel Lopatin has worked on a Safdie Brothers film before - indeed, his music for 2017’s Good Time was widely heralded as one of that year’s best movie scores. As such, it makes sense that Lopatin (better-known as Oneohtrix Point Never) was brought on board by the pair once again to create the soundtrack to their new flick Uncut Gems. Now Warp have issued a standalone edition of the Uncut Gems OST.
Lopatin’s music for Uncut Gems invokes the same balance of electronic prettiness and harsh, abrasive noise that he did for Good Time. At their lushest, some of these tracks read like an updated version of the classic scoring work of Vangelis, Wendy Carlos and Angelo Badalamenti. There is an inviting dreaminess to much of Uncut Gems that comes off like a more maximalist rendering of Badalamenti’s Lynchian aesthetic - although a track such as ‘Back To Roslyn’, with its nocturnal keyboards and ethereal saxophone, is more naked with this influence.
When the noisy tracks come in here they enter with a sense of dread at their core. ‘The Fountain’, for instance, whistles and screeches in a manner that sounds like a harsh take on a Johnny Jewel composition. Elsewhere ‘School Play’ brings the noise more slyly, its breathless bleep-bloop motif tripping over itself to eventually create an unsettling soundscape.
Uncut Gems is another impressive sojourn into the world of film scoring from Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never).
