Audio: On the Score with Brian Reitzell and David Slade

ON THE SCORE is sponsored by La-La Land Records

Where network television had once been the bastion of easily digestible normalcy, the often NC-17 explicitness of cable has now pushed prime time to stretch the limits of sex and violence – or at least as much of it as they can get away with given the restraints of free television. But leave it to “Hannibal” to shockingly shatter that barrier when it comes to the latter sin. With the doctor having notoriously practiced his culinary skills for the cinema, Bryan Fuller (“Dead Like Me”) has re-imagined Thomas Harris’ sophisticated cannibal for the small screen, given even most ghastly bite in the suave, accented personage of Mads Mikkelsen, whos’s made it a point during the show’s first season to land his tormented, and seeming BFF Will Graham in the psycho ward for murders the doctor engineered with utter care.

Mostly following a “serial killer of the week” formula, “Hannibal” has shocked just as much in its creative methods of death as for its intelligence, food for thought as taken to a whole new horrific realm. But beyond being ingenious in its ghastliness, one thing “Hannibal” has excelled in is expanding the concept of just what constitutes television music – or even scoring for that matter. For in a realm where procedural shows are content to rely on “the drone,” leave it to Brian Reitzell to create a mesmerizing, tormented soundscape. Having last gone down the rabbit hole with a twisted TV anti-hero in “Boss,” Reitzell has elegantly crafted “Hannibal’s” bad vibrations from ethnic instruments, percussion, samples and brass among a foreboding wellspring of ideas. At times barely perceptible, and at others a bloody primal scream, Reitzell’s wondrously bizarre work offers scant traditional harmony – as far a cry as possible from his rhythmic work for Sofia Coppola on such scores as “Lost in Translation,” “Marie Antoinette” and “The Bling Ring.”

If “Hannibal” has an ancestor in Reitzell’s repertoire, then it’s doubtlessly “30 Days of Night,” a rampaging vampires-in-Alaska horror film directed by David Slade, who now serves as “Hannibal’s” executive producer and frequent director. Having gotten a truly terrifying and non-traditional with the grinding, unearthly atmospheres and claws-on-a-spinal chord cacophony of Reitzell’s work, Slade has helped encourage the composer to go even further into lightless evil – yet with a bizarre sophistication that’s the perfect wine pairing for the deceptively delicious dishes that Lector imparts on his unsuspecting guests, gourmand courses that titled the first season’s episodes.

Now that the second season is about to be served, Reitzell and Slade are going even further into the realm of musical sound design that’s unlike anything heard on either theater or television screens, and all the more nightmarish for it – as prepared in a studio kitchen that Reitzell and Slade now give the recipes for on a new episode of On the Score.

http://www.filmmusicmag.com/audio/fmr/ots/OTS211-Slaid_Reitzell.mp3

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Watch HANNIBAL Season Two, starting Friday, February 28th at 10 PM on NBC