The film is directed by Denis Villeneuve and stars Benicio Del Toro, John Brolin and Emily Blunt
This is what he had to say about the soundtrack:
“Denis didn’t use temp music while editing, so I began writing the music with a completely blank slate. This was both daunting and exhilarating,” said Jóhannsson. “Like Prisoners, it’s quite tense and has a certain sense of dread, but the instrumentation is very different. While Prisoners had practically no drums at all, there is a lot of percussion in Sicario; I recorded 5 different drummers and did a lot of electronic manipulation of the recordings.”
“I was partly inspired by the spectral writing of composers like Gerard Grisey and Horatiu Radulescu while the percussive aspect of the score was partly inspired by the group Swans – I wanted to capture a kind of relentlessly slow and mournful but still ferocious and brutal energy,” Jóhannsson described. “I used a combination of 65-piece orchestra and individual soloists, combined with extensive electronic manipulation of the recordings, to create the score. The orchestral writing is textural rather than melodic”
Featured players on the SICARIO score include Hildur Gudnadottir (cello), Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (vocals and modular synthesizer), Skuli Sverrison (bass) and Shazad Ismaily (guitar and percussion).
We’ll be talking with Jóhannsson about the soundtrack, but in the meantime here an interview we did with him last year.
