Know The Score: Bob­by Krlic on Alien

Bob­by Krlic’s music, par­tic­u­lar­ly under The Hax­an Cloak moniker, is made for peo­ple who enjoy star­ing into the void and won­der­ing what lies on the oth­er side. On 2013’s still bril­liant ​‘Exca­va­tion’, a record that explores the jour­ney we go on after tak­ing our last breath, the British elec­tron­ic artist cre­ates an atmos­phere of dread, util­is­ing death­ly strings and dis­tort­ed bass that flick­er between vibran­cy and decay.

Speak­ing from his home in Los Ange­les, where he recent­ly relo­cat­ed as he steps up his blos­som­ing career as a film com­pos­er, Krlic reveals that his dis­tinc­tive style was part­ly inspired by Rid­ley Scott’s Alien, which he begged his par­ents to rent from Block­buster Video. ​“I was only nine, but I even­tu­al­ly ground them down,” he recalls. ​“My dad kept on warn­ing me about the chest-burster scene and when it final­ly hap­pened I ran away in tears. I was so dis­turbed, but there was some­thing about the film, par­tic­u­lar­ly the score, that I couldn’t stop think­ing about, so I watched it again and again.

“The way [the score] shifts between embrac­ing the romance of space to putting you in a posi­tion of unimag­in­able ter­ror was so inter­est­ing to me,” Krlic con­tin­ues. ​“Work­ing in those polar oppo­sites and jux­ta­po­si­tions, and find­ing ways to bring dis­so­nance and calm into the same song is hon­est­ly one of the big goals of my music, and that’s got a lot to do with expe­ri­enc­ing Alien at such a young age.”

Fresh from win­ning an Oscar for his work on The Omen, com­pos­er Jer­ry Gold­smith was hot stuff when he hooked up with Scott back in 1978. Gold­smith too want­ed Alien’s music to con­vey the end­less pos­si­bil­i­ties of space, but his vision was slight­ly dif­fer­ent to Scott’s, who was more inter­est­ed in bend­ing gut­tur­al tex­tures to sig­ni­fy the impend­ing bru­tal­ism of the Xenomorph.

Gold­smith was incensed when Scott blunt­ly chopped up his score and mixed it with cues from his pre­vi­ous work on John Huston’s 1962 biopic Freud, which he had pur­chased the rights to use with­out Goldsmith’s knowl­edge. But this splin­tered approach worked per­fect­ly for a film already built around abra­sive­ly shift­ing between the wide-eyed won­der of sci-fi and the sin­is­ter stalk­er the­atrics of goth­ic horror.

Films set in space in the 1970s were typ­i­cal­ly under­pinned by camp, angst-dri­ven orches­tral scores, but Krlic was impressed with Goldsmith’s more mod­ern approach. ​“Jer­ry was try­ing to nail the atmos­phere rather than cre­ate an icon­ic space theme peo­ple could hum on the way to work,” he explains. ​“Alien was such a non-tra­di­tion­al way of mak­ing clas­si­cal music. Jer­ry uses winds and strings, didgeri­doos, Indi­an Conch shells, and a ser­pent, a unique wind instru­ment that’s as snake-like as the Xenomorph’s tail. He was pro­cess­ing these sounds with tape echoes so they sound­ed real­ly alien.”

The shiv­ery scene where the crew of the Nos­tro­mo land on an alien plan­et, only to find the Xenomorph’s eggs, is famous for Goldsmith’s haunt­ing ​“alien wind” effect, which was cre­at­ed by run­ning an Indi­an conch shell through an Echoplex tape delay machine. It sounds like dis­tant ancient screams, slow­ly fil­ter­ing through the wind to warn the crew of the hor­rors that lay ahead. Accord­ing to Krlic, the music in this scene also has lots of sim­i­lar­i­ties with how elec­tron­ic pro­duc­ers work in the studio.

“Alien inspired a whole gen­er­a­tion of elec­tron­ic musi­cians. You can hear so much of it in ear­ly ​’90s drum and bass or jun­gle, basi­cal­ly any­thing reliant on tex­ture rather than melody. All those weird synth pads you heard in the ​’90s in clubs were all lift­ed from Alien, too. It’s chopped up like an Aphex Twin record.”

Krlic says that the way his score for Ari Aster’s 2019 folk hor­ror Mid­som­mar plays with con­ven­tions was direct­ly inspired by Alien. ​“I love the way it’s set up as sci-fi, but it’s real­ly a hor­ror. Sim­i­lar­ly, Mid­som­mar is set up to be a hor­ror, but it’s real­ly a twist­ed fan­ta­sy movie. Ari want­ed me to cre­ate a per­vert­ed ver­sion of The Wiz­ard of Oz. When you see Chris­t­ian being boiled alive in the bear suit, the music has a joy­ous choir that comes in and all this regal music. We want­ed it to be pompous and fun­ny as well as hor­ri­fy­ing. We both believe music is at its best when you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

Alien is now more than 40 years old, and Krlic believes that Goldsmith’s score is a big part of why it has endured. ​“Just think about the title sequence and the way the music goes from pure beau­ty to eerie strange­ness. It’s so hard to work out what instru­ments Jer­ry is play­ing, but great film scores should have that mys­tique. They should be cre­at­ed with the kind of mag­ic that’s hard to put your fin­ger on. A great film score cre­ates more ques­tions than answers, and that’s why Alien is one of the best.”