Glitch Score
Located in 2 routes
Screen scoring built on digital error as material — stutters, clicks, buffer glitches, granular fragmentation, bit-crushed textures and ruptured rhythms drawn from IDM and glitch electronica. Cues destabilize the ear with malfunctioning transients, smeared time and abruptly cut audio, using processed synths and mangled samples to evoke anxiety, artificiality and psychological fracture. Melody, when present, floats over a bed of controlled digital chaos; the aesthetic embraces imperfection, distortion and non-linearity. The mood is disorientation, dread and cold modernity.
History
Descending from 1990s glitch and IDM (Oval, Autechre, Alva Noto's Raster-Noton label), the idiom migrated to screen as those artists took scoring commissions. Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto's fractured minimalism, Amon Tobin's cinematic IDM and Ben Frost's corroded electronics pointed the way, but Oneohtrix Point Never's Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019) made glitchy, maximalist synth-collage a defining sound of nervy indie cinema. Clark's The Last Panthers and Mica Levi's ruptured textures extended it into television and art film, establishing glitch as a go-to language for unstable minds, digital worlds and modern paranoia.
Defining artists
Essential listening
- The Pure and the Damned(2017) — Oneohtrix Point NeverSpotifyYouTube
- Good Time(2017) — Oneohtrix Point NeverSpotifyYouTube
- Windows(2019) — Oneohtrix Point NeverSpotifyYouTube
- The Last Panthers(2015) — ClarkSpotifyYouTube
- Lipstick to Void(2013) — Mica LeviSpotifyYouTube
- Love(2013) — Mica LeviSpotifyYouTube
Sources
- Kim Cascone, "The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-Digital' Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music" (Computer Music Journal, 2000)
- Pitchfork features on Oneohtrix Point Never's film scores
- The Wire coverage of Raster-Noton and glitch