So much movie music sounds like just that: movie music. It's rare these days to come across a score with character that really makes you sit up and listen.
One musician who consistently manages to pull that off is punk drummer-turned-composer Cliff Martinez, whose work can be heard in two places this month: trippy supermodel horror film "The Neon Demon" and Season two of Cinemax's turn-of-the-century hospital drama "The Knick." These are just about the coolest electronic music scores to grace the screen since Tangerine Dream and Vangelis were active in the 1980s, and the recent synthwave trend — see "Stranger Things" and "Mr. Robot" — seems to be playing catch-up.
Martinez first caught my attention with his hauntingly beautiful score for Steven Soderbergh's 2002 sci-fi film "Solaris." I'm not alone; although his collaborations with Soderbergh date back to the director's very first film in 1989, "Sex, Lies, and Videotape," check out online comments and you'll find that "Solaris" is the soundtrack people rave about in "music I want to hear when I die and go to heaven" terms.