Daniel Lopatin

Marty Supreme

published in The Wire No.506, London, 2025

Excerpt

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Daniel Lopatin’s score feels psychological attuned to this dimensional context for the Safdies’ compressed avatar of ruthless survivalism. Most reviews fawn over Lopatin’s ‘synth’ and ‘electronic’ music, but in Marty Supreme I hear a squirming desire to produce an embodied ‘human’ music through analogue means to simulate faux digitalia—specifically, to lament and celebrate the survivalist realm in which Marty is submerged. The score’s cues are all sumptuous, expertly crafted and entirely lacking in movie music cliché. The incorporation of Laraaji’s Afrosonic instruments with glassy digital simulations of the same creates a black hole into which real and unreal swirl. The orchestrated strings and choirs similarly bend their identity by blending with analogue pads and sampled or vocoded voice effects. Saxes, horns and flutes shimmer similarly. Reverb clouds italicise stabs, hits and points of chordal action, evoking Jan Hammer’s plastic punches of symphonica in Miami Vice (1984-1989). Elsewhere ghosted delays of arpeggiated runs trill like crystal glints, making connections with the same era’s New Age fantasias.

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Text © Philip Brophy. Image © A24.