Bob­by Krlic aka The Hax­an Cloak on scor­ing Midsommar

With a stage name steeped in occult folk­lore – ​‘Häx­an’ being the Swedish word for ​‘the witch’ – it is per­haps no coin­ci­dence that British com­pos­er Bob­by Krlic’s work is well suit­ed to the hor­ror genre.

As The Hax­an Cloak, Krlic has spent the best part of a decade carv­ing out a niche as a pur­vey­or of com­pelling, qui­et­ly unset­tling exper­i­men­tal sound­scapes. It’s a rep­u­ta­tion that has led him to col­lab­o­rat­ing with of a diverse array of musi­cians, includ­ing Björk, HEALTH and Goldfrapp.

In film­mak­er Ari Aster, how­ev­er, Krlic appears to have found some­thing of a dream part­ner­ship. The pair first met in 2017, before the release of Aster’s acclaimed debut fea­ture, Hered­i­tary – but by this time Aster had already writ­ten the entire screen­play for Mid­som­mar, while lis­ten­ing to Krlic’s 2014 album, ​‘Exca­va­tion’. When it came to mak­ing the film, he wasn’t going to have any­one else score it.

Fol­low­ing col­lab­o­ra­tions with Atti­cus and Leopold Ross on Black­hat, Triple 9 and Almost Holy, Mid­som­mar marks Krlic’s first fea­ture as a solo com­pos­er. It is the per­fect accom­pa­ni­ment to Aster’s strange, unnerv­ing film, deft­ly tread­ing the line between uncon­ven­tion­al genre chills and unex­pect­ed beau­ty. Here Krlic tells the sto­ry of how the score came together.

“We just hit it off straight away. We talked a lot about our love of film and what scores we liked and it was so clear that we shared so many of the same sen­si­bil­i­ties… On top of that, to have some­body who has actu­al­ly writ­ten their film while lis­ten­ing to your music means that half the bat­tle has already been won.

“He gave me the script and even on page three, there was a lit­tle note that said, ​‘At this point, play this track by The Hax­an Cloak from this record, and read with it play­ing until the scene is over.’ I could tell just how much of a music fan he was and how deeply he had con­sid­ered the place­ment of every­thing in his film and that just made me real­ly want to do it.”

“We spent a week in my stu­dio, work­ing eight hours a day, and it was great. I sat down at the piano and we’d watch scenes and I’d play. Ari is not a musi­cian, but he’s able to artic­u­late him­self mirac­u­lous­ly well in terms of how some­thing should be. I would play some­thing and he’d be like, ​‘That motif is great, but let’s look at where the cam­era moves in the next sequence and how can we help that with music…’ What bet­ter way to help you tap in to the emo­tion­al qual­i­ties of a film than sit­ting with the man who wrote it, telling you exact­ly how he imag­ined it to be.”

“There’s a lot of elec­tron­ic tex­tures that I made with tape loops and I want­ed it to have echoes of musique con­crète. Then there’s a 16-piece orches­tra with dou­ble bass, cel­lo, vio­la and vio­lins and we record­ed all of that at AIR Stu­dios. They would take all of these exper­i­ments that I’d been doing with tape. I was tak­ing strings that I’d made at home and putting them to tape and kind of bend­ing all of the pitch­es of them to the pic­ture and they would take it and replay it and they’d also replay a lot of the elec­tron­ics that I’d done with strings. It was a real­ly amaz­ing process.”

“There’s a lot of diegetic music that was writ­ten in to the script. The Swedish mem­bers of the Hår­gas have these songs and kind of word­less aton­al singing that takes place around the vil­lage. I did a lot of research in to tra­di­tion­al Nordic, Scan­di­na­vian and Ice­landic music and through instru­ment libraries, I was able to write for these very spe­cif­ic old instru­ments. A lot of it was kind of root­ed in ancient Swedish folk music – reli­gious music – and I took that as a start­ing point.

“I worked with a real­ly incred­i­ble vocal­ist called Jes­si­ka Ken­ney. She did her degree in the inter­pre­ta­tion of sacred texts in to song. She was real­ly instru­men­tal in devel­op­ing this vocal lan­guage for the char­ac­ters to sing, which was a com­plete fab­ri­ca­tion. It was made out of dif­fer­ent parts from ancient lan­guages that she put together.”

“This is some­thing that Atti­cus [Ross] drew my atten­tion to on the first cou­ple of things that we did togeth­er. Peo­ple often write a bunch of music and that music gets hand­ed off in stems to a music edi­tor who then goes through and re-arranges it. He want­ed to be the per­son that writes the music and puts it to pic­ture, because that’s the way that you real­ly suc­cess­ful­ly con­vey the emo­tion of the music that you’re writ­ing and know that it’s work­ing. When you’ve got a piece of music, know­ing how to take that and edit it and move it to pic­ture, I think it’s a real­ly impor­tant skill that you can’t over­look as a composer.”

“I didn’t want it to be just 20 cues from the film as they appear in the film in sequence. What I want­ed to do was be able to tell the sto­ry and offer some insights in to the film that you might not get from just watch­ing the film alone. I had all these high string sounds and gongs and cym­bals that I’d record­ed and put them all to tape and slowed them down and it’s this sort of strange, unset­tling kind of ambience.

“That was some­thing that I cre­at­ed to be the kind of hive mind of the cult in the film. You feel it per­me­at­ing sub­lim­i­nal­ly all the way through – there are pieces that extend longer than they do in the film, there are extra melod­ic pas­sages and the whole thing is mixed dif­fer­ent­ly. I want­ed the sound­track to take you on as much of an envelop­ing jour­ney as the film does.”

Mid­som­mar is released 5 July. The Orig­i­nal Score for Mid­som­mar is released dig­i­tal­ly on 5 July via Milan Records, with a vinyl edi­tion set to fol­low lat­er this summer.