The music in Marty Supreme is a central character, one as freewheeling, in-your-face, and impossible to resist as Marty himself. Though the ’80s and its attendant commercialism and sci-fi cheese have always been of particular fascination to Lopatin, his previous Froese-flavored scores only reflected the surface shades of his craft. Where his work as Oneohtrix Point Never has blurred boundaries, his scores have often leaned more toward pastiche. But for Marty Supreme, Lopatin meets the larger-than-life film on its level, building the palette he’s honed over the years into a totalizing prism of sound.
Lopatin delves into his longtime concerns over media and memory by constructing a lush, time-drunk soundscape that echoes the chintzy Fairlights, DX7s, and Synclaviers of the film’s pop songs. The arpeggio is once again the grounding current, and he draws on everything he’s learned to do with it since his Rifts days. New-agey R Plus Seven flutes chirp through the iridescent romance of “The Call” and “The Apple,” before “Endo’s Game” brings Marty’s high plummeting down with the dark, throbbing bass of Garden of Delete. “Holocaust Honey” reinterprets Constance Demby’s “Novus Pt. 2: The Flying Bach” as a circus of spiralling organs, strings, and choirs, blowing up one the film’s most dreamily haunting flashbacks to Koyaanisqatsi proportions. If Lopatin has increasingly pushed his solo music into a more over-the-top, dramatized mode over the years (with the refreshing exception of this year’s mellow Tranquilizer), all that theatricality finally finds a good outlet here, lifting the material to grandiose and otherworldly places.
As the story of Marty Supreme traverses nations, Lopatin’s score follows suit. With Japan standing in the way of Marty’s quest to assert American dominance in table tennis, Lopatin weaves in motifs reminiscent of the country’s own colorful history of electronic music. The pompous bouncing-ball stomp of “Marty’s Dream” and “Pure Joy” recall Yasuaki Shimizu’s classic Music for Commercials, while the fluttering, Midori Takada-like marimbas of “Motherstone” come topped with sax and fretless bass straight off an old Prism record. Those mallet instruments continually reappear throughout the soundtrack, providing a ricochet that carries the film through its many white-knuckling escalations (in a Q&A for the film, Lopatin spoke of drawing specific inspiration upon realizing the instrument also consists of a ball and a stick—just like table tennis).
