The sounds of Son Lux almost feel primordial. Somewhere in the cosmic gesturing of their music is the blurring of finality: Beginnings and ends erupt into flames as bright synths and apocalyptic broodiness collide. While initially a solo act, Son Lux grew into a trio when Rafiq Bhatia and Ian Chang joined Lott for 2015’s Bones. Their following albums, a sequentially numbered trilogy called Tomorrows, elevated the existential cyclicality of their work into something new and anarchic. These records seem to connect what would otherwise seem disparate: Ethereality becomes haunting, anger becomes plaintive, and sounds portend the infinite. Show Their sonic location, somewhere between creation and destruction, renders Son Lux fitting to score the swelling Everything Everywhere All At Once, a film by the Daniels—the duo of directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert—that, too, disavows the conventional limits of creativity. Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) is a middle-aged woman who is tired of her life: her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) scorns her, her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) is readying a divorce, and the IRS is on her ass. Evelyn is tired of watching laundry tumble, of filing her taxes, of a path that has seemingly spun her in circles. Explosively kinetic, Everything Everywhere All At Once seeks a dynamic score able to match its ferocity. Son Lux delivers. Their soundtrack becomes our conduit across the multiverse, transcending and melding worlds otherwise alien to each other: sci-fi and kung-fu, hot dog hands and Debussy, slapstick and sincerity, mothers and daughters. The thrill of Son Lux’s score is in its audacious range. As Everything Everywhere All At Once snaps between zaniness, hilarity, darkness, and hope, so too does its soundtrack. The dreamy piano theme of "Wang Family Portrait" foregrounds the film’s saccharine core, emerging in gentler moments: Evelyn’s family together, nostalgic gazes into the past, and visions of lives that could have been, in another universe. On the contrary, blustering tracks like “The Fanny Pack” are brash reminders that you’re watching a true action blockbuster, as strings tinged with adrenaline and held by an addictive bassline bring comic bravado to a fight scene set in an IRS office. Eeriness is also afoot in the score; Son Lux, better than most, knows how to make you shudder. Just listen to “I Have Been Watching”—Nina Moffitt’s vocals, so bare against saturated strings, are startling. Despite running an hour and 54 minutes, the score doesn’t lose coherence. It repeats and reworks the same few themes: “Clair de Lune,” for instance, can be heard in “Deirdre Fight” and “My Life Without You,” in addition to its eponymous track on the score. “Come Recover (Empathy Fight)” is the expanded version of “Come Recover” on Tomorrows III. The score is a total achievement of ingenuity. Speaking to Slash Film, Bhatia, Chang, and Lott divulged that this score took years to compose. They had to learn new instruments, like the Chinese paigu drums, and also learn new ways to fuck with the old, like the violin (which were “played with crazy things,” said Lott), and the trumpet, played by director Kwan, who—no virtuoso himself—deliberately butchers it. Son Lux are also joined by a wonderfully odd cast of collaborators: Mitski and David Byrne, who duet on “This Is a Life”; Moses Sumney, for whom Chang drums; André 3000, improvising with the Mayan flute he’s been learning in private; and Randy Newman, offering his voice to both “Now We’re Cookin’” and an anthropomorphic raccoon in the film. “This Is a Life” closes Everything Everywhere All At Once, and it endearingly captures its heart with unremitting sincerity. “This is a life/Free from destiny,” Mitski sings, and then with Byrne: “I choose you/And you choose me.” Both Everything Everywhere All At Once and Son Lux’s broader artistic ethos are rooted in the imperative of creation, so sprawling in its possibilities as to span an entire multiverse. Life, like music, is meant to be created. We can choose to fester in the bleakness of our unerringly chaotic world, or—like the Daniels and Son Lux—we can see chaos for what it is: an art of its own.
Everything Everywhere All at Once (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is the soundtrack album to the 2022 film of the same name directed by Daniels. The original score and music is composed by the Son Lux — a three-member band featuring Ryan Lott, Ian Chang and Rafiq Bhatia. The album and its musical score became popular as it featured prominent musicians, performing the tracks including Mitski, David Byrne, André 3000, Randy Newman, Moses Sumney and yMusic. Son Lux worked on the score and soundtrack for more than three to six years, with the band members individually worked on the score following Daniels' advice. The album was produced and curated simultaneously with Son Lux also producing their studio albums, Brighter Wounds (2018), the Tomorrows trilogy (2020–2021), and its reprised studio version Tomorrows Reworks (2021). In the process, more than 100 musical cues were created for the album, with over 49 songs were finalised in the soundtrack album that lasted for over 2 hours.[1] Before the soundtrack release, two songs: "This Is a Life" featuring Mitski and Byrne,[2] and "Fence" featuring Sumney, were released as singles on March 4 and 14.[3][4] The album released on March 25, 2022 by A24 Music,[5] and received positive critical reception for the composition, setting, instrument blending and collaboration of renowned artists. Production[edit]Background[edit]The band Son Lux was announced as the film's composer during January 2022.[6] Daniels were appreciative of the musical style and approach for the studio albums. They met the band through FaceTime by late-2019.[7] Daniels did not approach them as a band, instead articulated the importance of the band member's solo projects. The band's lead member Ryan Lott, said that "I think that the complete picture of not only who we are as a band, but also who we are as individuals and what we have accomplished and the places we’ve gone creatively individually, meant for them that there was a possibility that many of these universes of sound could be within reach with this particular trio [...] they gave us a lot of license to feel free to be ourselves. They guided us along the way in developing music for this film, and in some instances, there is some interesting kind of bleeding that happened."[8]
— Rafiq Bhatia, the band guitarist, in an interview to Rolling Stone, about scoring for Everything Everywhere All At Once[9] This film marked the band's third film as a composer, following The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby (2014), Paper Towns (2015) and Mean Dreams (2016). The band's lead guitarist Rafiq Bhatia had said that the creative process of scoring for a film was very different from that of their works in studio albums, as the difference is not serving another medium, or supporting what happening in the other medium, adding "Unlike scoring a film or, or creating music for dancers, or you know, any of the other kinds of collaborations that we might embark on with artists and other media, like making a record, all there is is the sound; the sound comes first."[8] The band said that scoring for the film was similar to working on five different films, being made into one.[9] Recording[edit]The music production went on for two to three years.[10][11] The band created the compositions while simultaneously working on Tomorrows, a trilogy of studio albums.[10] More than 100 cues were created for the film. On the creation of the score and sound, Rafiq Bhatia said that each piece of music "would have its own kind of tone where, you can just tell from the sound, color and all that sort of stuff, right away that we're in this world." They had created short themes with melodic cues as "it was about finding instantly recognizable melodic ideas, and then contextualizing them instantly with either idiomatic genre, nodding instrumentation, or orchestration, or doing the exact opposite, positing them in a world of sound that feels very strange, very alien, or flirting between sound design and score, where the particular 'instruments' involved are not really recognizable instruments."[10] They also blended various instruments, including paigu, gongs, foil violin, and Mayan flutes made of cedar, which they referred as the "unrecognizable instruments". Son Lux made samples of the paigu in their own studio during the COVID-19 pandemic.[12] They also sampled the tuned gongs and Chinese percussion instruments which were "chopped up and processed in different ways".[10] Ryan Lott played a version of Claude Debussy's "Clair de Lune" using tuned gong.[10] They used temporary music from film and television as an inspiration for creating the soundtrack. Bhatia also referenced the score for The Matrix while creating the song "Plug Fight," crediting The Matrix's composer, Don Davis, for one of the characters as a reference point.[13] They said the score for the first Matrix film was "absolutely brilliant" and helped them to find the "science-fiction palette for the film". Son Lux said that there were several "vision-specific music moments" including the use of "Clair de Lune" along with traditional Chinese music and opera.[8][14] Collaborations[edit]The album featured collaborations from several renowned artists. André Benjamin, also known as André 3000 played flute for five tracks.[15][16] The band liked his musical approach, and when they called Benjamin for the recording, he brought different kinds of flutes that had different registers, with some being double-sided so that the user might play two melodies simultaneously.[8] They recalled the recording sessions being a "surreal and crazy thing" and claimed their score work akin to a "professional recordist playing on field".[8] Randy Newman contributed for one of the tracks, "Now We're Cookin'".[a] The band said that the inclusion of Newman were "Daniels' dream" and had watched the rough-cut of the film during the pandemic, which Newman liked. Lott approached him for recording one of the tracks, and had also sang the theme with Newman.[13] David Byrne and Mitski contributed for two tracks, while Moses Sumney worked on the track "Fence". Chang was one of the drummer in Sumney's band, had sent a sample of the cues for the track, sampling one of them and Lott created a different cue for the track. Sumney also wrote a song in the same cue, which was finalised as the track from the album.[8] Actress Stephanie Hsu also sang the track "Sucked Into A Bagel".[17] Track listing[edit]Everything Everywhere All at Once (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)[18][19]
Chart performance[edit]Reception[edit]Writing for the music website Pitchfork, Annie Geng gave the soundtrack 7.5 (out of 10) and said "The thrill of Son Lux’s score is in its audacious range. As Everything Everywhere All At Once snaps between zaniness, hilarity, darkness, and hope, so too does its soundtrack. Despite running an hour and 54 minutes, the score doesn’t lose coherence [...] Son Lux’s broader artistic ethos are rooted in the imperative of creation, so sprawling in its possibilities as to span an entire multiverse. Life, like music, is meant to be created. We can choose to fester in the bleakness of our unerringly chaotic world, or—like the Daniels and Son Lux—we can see chaos for what it is: an art of its own."[24] Spectrum Culture's Holly Hazelwood gave a score of 80/100 "Everything Everywhere All at Once is a movie of rare beauty and immense magic, and the fact that this soundtrack doesn’t feel incomplete without the visual element is a testament to its quality. For those who have seen the film, though, diving into this soundtrack is a fantastic way to stay inside the film’s expansive, hyperactive world for just a little longer. In the end, that’s what the best soundtracks are supposed to do: help you hold onto the magic long after the credits have come and gone."[25] Debby Das of The Harvard Crimson praised Son Lux as the "perfect choice to compose the film’s jarringly primal soundtrack" and stated "Watching and listening to “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is the closest a viewer might get to being a kid in Willy Wonka’s candy shop."[26] Notes[edit]
References[edit]
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Everything Everywhere All at Once Clair de Lune
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