At Entertainlens, we often analyze film scores that complement a scene, but rarely do we encounter one that physically becomes the environment. Oliver Laxe’s Sirât, currently shortlisted across multiple Oscar categories including original score, is one such rarity. It is a film where the auditory landscape is as unforgiving and vast as the Moroccan desert itself. At the helm of this sonic journey is composer Kangding Ray, whose radical approach effectively turned a script into a living, breathing electronic organism.
A Radical Vision in the Sands
The premise of Sirât is deceptively simple yet emotionally labyrinthine. We follow Luis and his son Esteban into the mountains of Morocco, searching for Luis’s daughter, Mar, who vanished from the rave scene months prior. As their hope dwindles, they trek toward one final party, a journey that tests the limits of their endurance and sanity.
When Ray first received the script from Laxe, he was struck by its ambition. “It was very clear that it was an ambitious project and also a radical one,” Ray notes, emphasizing that the film refuses to over-explain its narrative. Despite initial reservations about how far Laxe was pushing the envelope—venturing into territory Ray found extreme even by his standards—he placed his trust in the director’s vision. The result is a film that operates on visceral levels rather than purely intellectual ones.
Designing the Sirât Techno Score: From Rave to Void
The film opens with a bold statement: a 17-minute rave sequence. Here, the Sirât techno score acts as a character in its own right, with relentless beats dominating the speakers. For Ray, whose background is rooted in techno and experimental music, crafting this texture was the most intuitive part of the process.
However, the true mastery of the score lies in its transmutation. As the characters face mounting danger and emotional anguish, the thumping energy dissolves into an ethereal, ambient soundscape. Ray admits that nailing this shift—balancing aggression, violence, and grief—was his greatest challenge.
This transition mirrors the characters’ psychological descent. The pacing had to be precise, creating a gradual dissolution of reality. The turning point occurs when the journey turns into a nightmare: the characters stumble into a minefield, leading to the tragic death of Jade in an explosion. To capture this moment, Ray couldn’t rely on traditional cinematic crescendos. Instead, he layered sounds to create a “giant monster” of audio, implying the sheer, indifferent scale of the desert.
Weaving the Fabric of Sound
What makes the Sirât techno score unique is Ray’s refusal to use traditional instrumentation. Working directly with modular synthesizers, he treated the music as an abstract medium. “It’s like working with the fabric of the sound itself,” Ray explains. By mixing waveforms, he avoided the preconceived values of what constitutes “music,” allowing natural sounds to become sonic sources.
This philosophy allowed for a seamless collaboration with sound designer Laia Casanova. Casanova adopted a puristic approach, recording analog sounds of rattles and rave voices. Because Ray was working with raw waveforms, these organic recordings blended effortlessly with the electronic score, creating a unified auditory experience.
Scoring the Script, Not the Picture
Interestingly, Ray composed the majority of the music based solely on the script, before seeing the footage. This method, often risky, paid off immensely. Ray and Laxe found that 80 to 90% of the pre-composed material worked perfectly with the visual execution, requiring only minor tweaks. By keeping the concept of the desert in mind during the writing process, Ray ensured a continuity of atmosphere that permeates every frame.
“Music is for Dancing”
Ultimately, the score serves a narrative function that dialogue cannot achieve. A pivotal moment arrives when Jade tells Luis, “Music’s not for listening, it’s for dancing”. For Ray, this line bridges the cultural and generational divide between the father and his missing daughter. Luis, initially annoyed by the rave culture, realizes this was his daughter’s philosophy. It transforms music from harmless background noise into a tool for self-discovery and community.
The Sirât techno score is more than just accompaniment; it is the pulse of a universal story that is bigger than its characters. It proves that in the silence of the desert, the loudest sound is often the one inside our own heads.
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