Jonny Greenwood on Soundtracking w/ Edith Bowman

Jonny Greenwood records this at 10am during a Radiohead tour, after emailing Edith Bowman out of nowhere to apologise for being slow to reply. Her case for the One Battle After Another score is that it opens the film and never stops mattering, and that everything he has done with Paul Thomas Anderson seems to lead to it.

Wanting the sound of period military drumming, he acquired the drums that reenactment societies use, then declined to hire anybody to play them. He built mechanical hitters out of solenoids instead, wired them to a laptop and wrote software to drive them, which left him with what he cheerfully calls a ghost percussion group in the next room, surrounded by cables.

The machines are clunky and drift in and out of time, he says, and that unsteadiness is why the result sounds more like people playing than a tidier approach would have.