Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024) opens with Silver Apples’ “Lovefingers” (1968) and closes with Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” (1979), each track unfurling over images of death – a bomb-stricken New York in the former; the US president in the latter. Both bands are notable in developing elegiac miniatures that meld reverberant vocals and swarming electronics, invoking hypnotic soul and orgiastic doo-wop respectively. Neither band stuck to their generic frameworks of reference; both induced hallucinatory flights of fantasy beyond their stylistic confines.

Were those songs temp tracked during the editing of Civil War? Accurate information about temp tracking is rarely made public. Its practice can stranglehold film composers’ contributions, as they are often tasked to make their ‘commissioned’ music sound like the track to which a director and editor have become emotionally attached. Changing it is like prying a lolly from a baby’s mouth. Yet composers have done great work, either despite these prescriptions or within their remit. Furthermore, many films redefine the act of ‘composing original music’ in an organically postmodern way, by forwarding music that grows molecularly from selected songs placed in a film. The score that Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury deliver for Civil War is just that.

The film often allows their music to play in complete silence over a muted image sequence – often to stress dissociation on the part of maniacal soldiers, or invoke pathetic desperation on the part of traumatising incidents befalling its team of rogue war photographers travelling across a hyper divided America to interview and photograph the president at the moment of his disposition. In such instances, it is like the score is an angelic force emanating from the source songs placed elsewhere in the film. Consequently, the score arches from delicate to detonative.

Minimalist electric organ chords bear a church like resonance when the troupe camp overnight at a repurposed college football stadium in West Virginia: liberal families and activists welcome the journalists. Harsh fuzz, screaming slide guitars and wailing feedback create a different organic drone when one of the rookie photographers Jessie falls into a mass grave of civilians murdered by psychotic renegade commandos outside Charlottesville. As the group arrive at the Lincoln Memorial, a lightly picked electric guitar rises atop electronic washes, recalling Francis Ford Coppola’s use of The Doors’ “The End” (1967), interpolated throughout many a mute battle scene in Apocalypse Now (1979). When heroine photographer Lee is shot, her death is presented as B&W stills to a rising sinewave chorus that rings like a Buddhist gong.

Barrow and Salisbury’s score ultimately defers to Civil War’s emotional beats, creating a murmured musicological ambience. While low-key throughout the movie, it is consistently attuned to the Silver Apples/Suicide voicing. Garland likely took some audiovisual cues from Adam Curtis’s HyperNormalisation (2016) and its impressionistic BBC docu-pondering. Curtis’s music performs like a DJ Shadow-styled aural palimpsest, trading in leftist conspiratorial analyses, globalist connections and political conjecture, by flagrantly mashing archival footage with a somewhat laboured choice of edgy music by Nine Inch Nails, Burial, Aphex Twin, Pye Corner Audio – and Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream”. HyperNormalisation blasts its politics onto the sourced songs like a spreadsheet of tags; Civil War allows its politics to grow from within the songs and their sono-musicality.

Barrow and Salisbury produce a more detailed score for Garland’s earlier film Annihilation (2018). Again, a sourced song is posited as an emotional marker for the narrative. Biologist Lena is mourning her MIA soldier husband, painting their home while playing their once cherished song, Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Helplessly Hoping” (1969). It first presents as self-therapy for Lena, but as husband Kane mysteriously returns home like a ghost in the doorway, the jangling 12-strings and cooing harmonies take on a strangely alienating tone as he, seemingly shell-shocked, behaves like a simulant version of himself. Soft wailing tones discreetly accumulate in the mix, granting the scene the feel of a dream. Kane suddenly collapses: cut to him being transported by ambulance to hospital; synth tones become harsh and aggressive as government officials overtake the ambulance to requisition Kane, sedating the protesting Lena, at which point synch-audio disappears to leave the synth tone to reverberate in silence. It’s a masterful metaphysical meld of song and score.

Annihilation’s narrative soon shifts to Lena teaming up with four other women to enter the Shimmer: a zone transfigured by alien occupancy of unknown form, purpose or impact. The zone is soundscaped as a textural sonorum of corrupted field recordings, overlaying molten larva flows with collapsing icebergs. Barrow and Salisbury’s music evolves as a series of breathing, hovering, ringing tones. Symbolically, they evoke initial cell formations just at the moment of sub-divisional growth: cellular mutation and propagation will be a central aspect of the alien and its encounter with the women venturing into the Shimmer. Influences become clear in the sonic topology of the score, as it echoes Ennio Morricone’s score for John Carpenter’s The Thing (1981) – an ur-text in regards to human molecular assimilation. Its employment of cascading timbrel shifts and subtle harmonic beatings of treacly keyboards is, amazingly, the result of Morricone simulating Carpenter’s distinctive monochordal synth drones.

The Shimmer visually references the Louisiana swamps – the US version of the humid meltdown of flora in Amazonian rainforests. Due to alien terraforming, it bears inexplicable overlays of inter-species aberrations of flora and fauna. In these pastoral moments, Barrow and Salisbury’s music merges with the sound design to create a sweaty meld that calls back to the prelude and breakdown moments of junglist soundscapes (jets, gunshots, crickets, birds, sirens) in early 1990s tracks by Acen and Hyper On Experience – not to mention the contemporaneous likes of The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld (1991) and FSOL’s Accelerator (1992). The further the team ventures into the mutating terrain, the more unreal their sensory world becomes. At one point, a two-string acoustic guitar line is vamped gently over digital synth pads. Combined with visuals of the strange terrarium jungle, the vibe is not unlike the hallucinogenic atmospherics again of Apocalypse Now (whose original double LP release in 1979 retains this sono-spectral fusion avant le lettre of Fourth World music).

When the five women watch a video of an earlier military crew investigating the deeper reaches of the Shimmer, the synthscape builds in intensity. But things change dramatically when they discover another video which shows a soldier’s abdomen being opened (by Lena’s husband, Kane) to reveal squirming serpentine organs. At this unsettling moment, a duo of female voices – acoustically dry and unprocessed – sounds wordless pitches, frighteningly loud in the mix. Their presence and effect is oppressively unnatural despite the raw human appeal of the female vocal grain. It’s a powerful moment where Barrow and Salisbury ‘de-electronicise’ the score to evidence how the alien overtakes the human.

Similar voices return as a low dissonant shimmer when Lena finds the dead body of team member Sheppard after she was mauled by a mutant bear. She lies lifeless with eyes wide open; Lena gently holds her arm; the music expresses a last rite. In the most chilling scene of Annihilation, Sheppard’s pained groans are sounded from the mutant bear, who, as in Carpenter’s The Thing, is caught in a transformative morph of bear and human, visualised as a genetic mess of recognisable and unrecognisable parts. Yes, it’s a human voice, but it comes from something entirely unhuman. Does such a figure not call to mind those disembodied female arias which create the digital divas of so much jungle music and its lean into a type of ‘diva ’n’ bass’? In this respect, the whole score to Annihilation is like a transfigured de-mix of jungle, voiding all Amen breaks and leaving the music to hang like flayed human detritus.

But it is the climatic encounter between Lena and her alien double-to-be that atomises Annihilation into multiple spectacles of breakdown – cancer, dementia, hallucination, decomposition – and allows Barrow and Salisbury to build their score’s highest plateau. In a prelude where ‘final girl’ Lena heads toward the lighthouse (the site of the alien’s terrestrial impact) we hear bowed cellos breathe atop a chordal drone, mimicking the beach’s undulating high tide waves. Once inside, she enters the dark basement chamber created by the alien explosion on earth, into which team head Dr Ventress has ventured, only to be overcome by the alien. Its lifeforce roils within Ventress’s being, shooting upwards from her mouth as she arches back in a mix of final and primal screaming. The cellos have now risen in pitch to marry with swirling, looping violin motifs, like a fractal mash-up of Giacinto Scelsi and John Barry.

Dr Ventress ejaculates molten globules throughout the underground chamber, which coalesce into a pulsating sphincteral/wombic form that turns itself inside out in circulatory cycles, all to the sound of reverent choral thrumming. The form hovers in front of Lena: a string synth motif is sounded like a heraldic trumpeting. It is rough, abrasive, thick. It sounds like a muscular, saw-toothed symphonic phrase from classic dark junglist warping a la Sub Love, Noise Factory, et al. It is as if the film itself has been taken over by a simulative force, which in its embryonic state is attempting to project emotive ‘film music’.

An amazing sequence follows where the suspended molecular form births a bipedal mannequined shape of Lena, faceless and skinless, yet mimicking her movement with mirror-like precision. All room tone is suppressed; the only audible sound is Lena’s breath, crowning a synthetic female vocal chorus. Lena escapes by attaching a phosphorus bomb to the being of the alien as it attempts to morph into a copy of Lena. It immolates unknowingly, moving around the lighthouse interior like a dazed public sculpture of degraded human form. As it crawls back to the basement’s terraformed interior, it ignites in a forest of magnesium flares. Strings, keyboards and voices – real, unreal, either both or neither – swell in a droning cacophony. Lena watches it in disbelief.

The end credits feature a vocal chorus reminiscent of Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna choral schisms, combined with piercing, phased violins lines, squirming like sparkles of half-formed Bartok forest sprites, detached from their fulsome European orchestration. The music dissolves into the slow breathing cello lines and tones earlier associated with the throbbing atmosphere of the colonised lighthouse. Intimations of voice are glimpsed in this drone’s distended swells: a new equilibrium of molecular existence has been achieved. It musically summarises the final interrogation of Lena after she was found to be the sole survivor of the mission. She acknowledges the alien: “It wasn’t destroying anything; it was changing everything, making everything new.” Not only does it sound like a sample from a lost jungle track, it also metaphorically describes how Barrow and Sainsbury forged their score for Annihilation.

The duo also provided the score to Garland’s films Ex Machina (2014) and Men (2022) and the limited series Devs (2020). Whenever a director develops a long term relationship with a composer, it’s a win-win situation. And when the composer hails from the wider sonic world of recorded music production and performance, the soundtrack is more liable to be flexible, fluid and expansive in the ways it contributes to audiovision. Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury tick all these boxes and more.

Wire subscribers can read Philip Brophy's original Secret History of Film Music columns online in the digital archive. Previous instalments of this column published on The Wire website can be found here.