Color is Korine’s primary weapon in AGGRO DR1FT, and AraabMuzik’s lush sketches provide deeper pigmentation to his infrared hallucinations. “The Summoning” sets the scene with morbid laser-beam synths that hover in a threatening mist; “17th Symphony” moves queasily between blurry pianos and aching chords, warbling like a ghost drifting through a graveyard. The gothic grandiosity of AraabMuzik’s church organs and bitcrushed Gregorian chants charges the madness onscreen with a bizarre sense of consequence. In one scene, the crackling loop of “The Abyss” circles round as our main assassin is telepathically tormented by a winged psychopath, imbuing the monster’s cries of “Why can’t you kill me?” with doomed gravitas.
Though AraabMuzik’s trance-y temperament contributes to the film’s clubby milieu, he pulls from far outside his wheelhouse to establish AGGRO DR1FT’s apocalyptically surreal environment. “En Route” slithers through a subterranean march that’s equal parts Jon Hassell and Lustmord, and “The Beloved” lifts everything skyward as he draws out a Constance Demby-worthy new-age drone (complete with angelic choir). The longer tracks, in particular, benefit from having time to sink deeper into the muck: The swelling brass of “The Apex” simmers with a science-fiction military suspense straight out of Metal Gear Solid, while “Theory,” with its alien sound design and distant, clanging percussion, captures an eerie tunneling feeling that anyone who’s gotten lost playing Metroid will know all too well.
Harmony Korine has built a formidable body of work out of playing in the garbage. You’d be hard-pressed to find another director with the audacity to premiere their film in a strip club, then follow it up by announcing a first-person thriller about baby-headed home invaders (with Burial supplying the soundtrack, no less). Testosterone is at war with itself in Korine’s movies, but he avoids coming off like a complete chud by knowing when and how to embrace sincerity. That’s where AraabMuzik’s lavish music comes in—not only fleshing out AGGRO DR1FT’s otherworldly tableau, but humanizing its emotions. When “King’s Arrival” appears in a late scene, it soundtracks our main assassin shooting a man in the head, who mutters as he bleeds out, “You fucking got me.” It might seem like mere video-game logic: murder taken to the point where even a victim can only shrug, as if they’d just been tagged ‘it.’ But when the hitman takes yet another life, his next target seems more crestfallen, whispering as they die, “I’ll see you in the next life.” AraabMuzik’s searing, funereal chants swirl in horror, turning what might otherwise look like nihilism into something more like a prayer for a way out.
