The latest collaboration between MovieScore Media and Spanish composer Arturo Cardelús (Altamira: The Origin of Art) takes the viewer and the listener to the seedy underbelly of the backroom dealings of the oil trade. Co-written and directed by Esteban Crespo, Black Beach tells the story of Carlos (Raúl Arévalo), the CEO of an American oil company whose latest commission takes him to a dangerous confrontation between his own company and a former friend. As Carlos must choose his alliances carefully, his fall from grace is scored with a suitably dark, psychologically charged score that favours experimental cello writing and deep strings blended with contemporary hybrid electronica in the vein of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Sicario or Hildur Gudnadottir’s work for Joker and Chernobyl.

“Director Esteban Crespo wanted the music to reveal the pain of the characters and to create an ominous atmosphere, where everything felt like a threat and where no one could be trusted” explains Arturo about the score. “In terms of sound, we decided the music shuld mix acoustic and electronic elements, but in a subtle way. We wanted to have a blurry line between the two worlds. To do that, we spent months recording different effects from a cello, a double bass, and a prepared piano. The idea was to create sounds and textures that sounded electronic but weren’t. There is a cello motif that is a constant in most tracks. We treated it as the main theme, and it gets presented in many different ways: as a canon for multiple voices (‘Black Beach’), as a disparate element (‘Carlos’), and as a tremolo cluster (‘Elena’, ‘Fix It’).”

Spanish composer Arturo Cardelús is a rising talent in the film industry. He studied film scoring at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where he graduated summa cum laude. Naxos, a leading classical music label, released an album of his chamber music in 2015. Cardelús has scored the internet sensation In a Heartbeat, the Netflix miniseries Call Me Francis and Frank Marshall’s The People’s Fighters. His most recent score, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles, was called “stunning” by Variety’s Peter Debruge. His scores for Altamira: The Origin of Art and Swimming in the Desert have been released by MovieScore Media.

MMS20022 BLACK BEACH (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Music Composed by ARTURO CARDELÚS
Release date (digital): October 2, 2020