In Aggro Dr1ft, Longlegs, Challengers, and others, music is just one aspect of a meticulous sonic design.
By Robert Barry
In 1996, Brian Eno reflected on his run of ambient albums for EG Recordings twenty years prior, writing that he recognized a desire among his friends “to use music in a different way—as part of the ambience of our lives—and we wanted it to be continuous, a surrounding.”1 I was reminded of these lines while watching Harmony Korine’s Aggro Dr1ft (all films 2024), a film characterized less by its plot or its performances than what Eno refers to as a “sonic mood.” The picture floats by on an ocean of sound that ebbs and flows but never breaks, never crashes.
Over the last few years there has been a slew of articles complaining about the lopsided sound of major blockbusters—especially since the pandemic provoked an escalation in the streaming wars. Netflix, Apple TV+, & co. are aware that many home-cinema viewers are only half-watching while scrolling through their phones or doing something else entirely. Sound has become a tool for needily grabbing audiences’ attention: whisper-quiet dialogue to get you reaching for the remote control followed by gunshots and explosions so loud they’ll wake up your neighbors’ neighbors.
Aggro Dr1ft is different. There have been a handful of theatrical screenings, but the idea strikes me as perverse. Everything about the film feels designed for home viewing, from its video-game cutscene visuals to the sound mix. I imagine Korine and his crew approach cinema much like Eno’s friends thought of sound back in the 1970s. This simple story of an assassin facing up to a quasi-supernatural crime lord, with its hallucinatory color palette and ruminative voice-over, is not really asking for your full attention; it's more like something you might have on in the background while you hang out. Korine and sound designer Fernanda Cardoso have everything more or less on an even keel, with brilliant music by AraabMuzik (né Abraham Orellana) pitched somewhere between the soundtrack to a Sega Mega Drive game and Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II—products of the early ’90s. It’s a score that is as compelling as it is subdued; it bumbles along throughout, but with few of the usual gear shifts that characterize mainstream film scoring: no sudden drops, no shrieking stings. Instead, it maintains a consistent emotional tenor, becoming—in Eno’s words—continuous, a surrounding. Even the gunshots are not so loud as to poke out from the overall aural wallpaper.
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