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Feb 23, 2016 Ryuichi Sakamoto, Alva Noto, and Bryce Dessner By Charles Steinberg

The films of Alejandro González Iñárritu have been scored with keen awareness of the agency of sound design, to intensify atmosphere and to emphasize the physical experience of character. Given this philosophy, the presence of a film’s music can give it a role as integral as any other, an argument never more convincing than in The Revenant.

To surround this story of the will to survive in a merciless wilderness, Iñárritu entrusted seasoned avant-garde composer Ryuichi Sakamoto with the task of conjuring a soundscape of formidable magnitude, inviting Sakamoto’s familiar collaborator Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) and The National’s Bryce Dessner to join in. In finessed coordination, they lend their orchestral and ambient sensibilities to Sakamoto’s compositions of seismic gravity that mingle and hover with the natural acoustics of primordial environment.

Conveyed in its listening is the film’s immensity of landscape that makes no accommodation for man, its frozen, empty darkness unrelenting and inevitable. The grand spaciousness felt through Inarritu’s cinematography is impacted by dense ensemble instrumentation signifying the danger befalling those who have set forth into it. The filmic function of these bottomless arrangements is most powerful in pace with the wide angle lens as it pans, probes, and halts the scenic atmosphere. Multilayered timbres of wind and string instrument, compounded in chords of dissonance, rise and fall out of the echoes of nature’s movements, of water over rock, wind through branches, the distant echoes of lost birds. The deep exhales of rumbling upright bass extend to become low hanging clouds through a limitless canyon. The fluttering of Japanese strings and flutes release the black smoke and embers of a campfire up into the canopy. Throughout, something sub-terrestrial is felt, collecting tidal force and momentum as it continues. While there is an overarching pall that hangs over The Revenant, a will to persevere courses through the narrative, and this is delicately captured by Sakamoto when a lonely cello recurs, edging just above somber.

Recalling his work with Christopher Willits and Taylor Deupree as well as with Fennesz, Sakamoto gives voice to nature’s elements. The music of The Revenant tugs you into the abyss of human peril with instrumental textures as layered as the ruggedly garbed trackers of the expedition at its center. Sakamoto has sought opportunities for avant garde composition his whole career and with comparable enthusiasm, engaged collaborations with composers of like sensibilities. The Revenant satisfied both criteria for him and he delivered an epic score to Iñárritu. (www.sitesakamoto.com)

Author rating: 8/10