Utopia [Original Television Soundtrack]

A sometimes overlooked side of the flood of money into “prestige TV” for streaming services in the late 2010s and early 2020s is the free rein it gave to some incredibly advanced composers and sound designers. While movies were all too often becoming “Zimmerfied,” TV series like The Last Panthers, Severance, Black Mirror, Dark, DEVS, True Detective and — yes — Stranger Things all brought refined, strange, detailed electronic music to mass audiences. And right in the heart of this landed the Chilean-Canadian composer Tapia de Veer’s score for the British sci fi conspiracy thriller Utopia. Completely aside from its function in the series, it’s an extraordinary piece of work, full of wit, weirdness and a lightness of touch that runs completely counter to the portentousness of so much drama soundtracking. Tinkling percussion creates a kind of futuristic fourth world atmosphere, while there’s musique concrète sound manipulation that sometimes comes close to Matthew Herbert or Mira Calix, even Coil’s later, more rarefied work. It’s constantly weird and unsettling — with voiceovers that don’t shy away from narrating the extreme violence of the drama — but for all that it’s bizarrely joyous too.