Tim Husom: “I remember how enthusiastic Jóhann felt being involved with a project that allowed him to try something new, in an environment that wasn’t a big film studio. Working on a crazy acid-trip horror film with one of his favorite directors placed him squarely in his happy place. After all of the awards attention in the previous years, it was a much needed energy to bring him some balance.”

Cosmatos: “I wanted the film to feel like a disintegrating rock opera. Not a literal one, with people singing and shit, but an emotional, larger-than-life sonic and visual experience. Jóhann got really excited when I told him that.”

Randall Dunn: “I think Jóhann was trying to get a team together that fit the film. A lot of Panos’ references were very rock influenced so Jóhann wanted to go in a direction that he hadn’t really gone before—more rock or heavy metal. This is a very familiar world for me, so he asked me to produce.

We had some wild ideas early on that would’ve been insane, like having a nine-piece band including Sunn O))) and a drummer. The idea being to do it in more of a live scenario, improvising to the finished picture and having synthesizers set up for anyone to jump on. Almost like a live score but in a studio. You then realize the budget and time frame for such a thing. Stephen O’Malley came in to do two tracks and was really involved in the writing of them. It’s such a specialized thing that he does, you can’t be like, ‘Do it like this.’ O’Malley was given a tremendous amount of room to be creative.”

(O’Malley declined to participate in this piece.)

Cosmatos: “Sometimes we would have oblique discussions, like I would say, ‘I want this scene to feel like you’re in the backseat of your big brother’s Trans Am and you’re with your girlfriend, and you’re kind of afraid. They’re smoking weed but the car smells like leather and air freshener.’ Generally he would say, ‘I know exactly what you mean.’ Jóhann seemed to innately understand where this film was coming from and was really excited about exploring this part of himself, musically.”

Dunn: “There was a lot of communication about which specific analogue synthesizers would be appropriate. We found a studio in Italy where we did a lot of the synth recording and it was phenomenal. We were really trying to stay away from any tropes or clichés, we wanted to subvert it into a whole new style.”

Cosmatos: “We both had the same attitude, which was: We want to explore and evoke these things from our past, but at the same time we don’t want to just be nostalgic. We want to turn the past into the future. We definitely bonded over Queen’s Flash Gordon soundtrack and bands like Venom and Celtic Frost.”

Dunn: “Panos was referencing a lot of early Van Halen too, and my role was to be a bit of a rock purist. Jóhann and I related on things that inspired us; like for the guitar and drum sounds on ‘Children of the New Dawn,’ we were referencing Marillion and the Alan Parsons Project—more progressive rock from the late ’70s. We were also trying to play a role; the film takes place in 1983 so we wanted the music to have a hue of that but not to be, like, electro.”

Caudron: “I was hired originally as a music editor for chopping up Jóhann’s stuff and making it fit the movie. But they were running a bit slow in post-production so I ended up writing a couple of cues too, mostly based on samples from Jóhann.