‘Kinds of Kindness’ Composer Jerskin Fendrix Delivered Four Hours of Unsettling Piano and Choir Music for Yorgos Lanthimos

variety.com:

Jon Burlingame Just as he did for Yorgos Lanthimos‘ “Poor Things,” English composer Jerskin Fendrix has supplied an offbeat, musically provocative score for Lanthimos’ new film, “Kinds of Kindness” — except this time it’s all piano and choir instead of the strange, electronically processed sonorities of “Poor Things.” “Kinds of Kindness” was even more challenging, Fendrix tells Variety.

Instead of a science-fiction drama about a reanimated corpse with a child’s brain, this was a trio of weird, decidedly absurdist tales featuring the same cast with only the most tenuous of connections between them.

The assignment came at the end of 2022, while he was still doing final recordings and mixes for “Poor Things.” He was invited to visit the New Orleans set, do a cameo in one segment, then return to England armed with just a casual suggestion from the director: “Maybe just piano and choir.” But finding a way into the story was difficult. “I generally write from a very emotional point of view, whether it’s my own emotions or those of a character,” he says, “usually quite a big feeling, and then working out the best way of expressing that, very concisely or very exaggeratedly. “I read the script and really struggled with what the emotions of the characters were, what their motivations were,” Fendrix said.

He even talked with co-star Jesse Plemons while on the set, about his interpretation of the characters “and how he was trying to navigate this really bizarre psychological landscape.” Failing at his attempt to ascertain the emotions of the characters, Fendrix went in a new direction. “I was trying to think about the space between the emotions.