Indie composer Mica Levi was relatively unknown in the mainstream world when she got her big break. Levi, who created the music for the Scarlett Johansson film Under The Skin just won a European Film Award for Best Composer.
Levi, 27, was working on her third album with her band, Michachu and the Shapes, when she got a call asking if she wanted to work with film-maker Jonathan Glazer on a new project. The project was a film he was directing called Under The Skin.
“It was out of the blue. I didn’t know Jonathan. Peter [Raeburn], the film’s music producer, had played him some of my music, including a live recording of Chopped and Screwed, a collaboration we did with the London Sinfonietta,” she said. "Jonathan liked it and thought I would be the right person to compose his film’s score. It all felt a bit far-fetched. I went in to talk to them at the studio and we started working immediately. There wasn’t even time to think about it.”
Since then, Levi’s Life has changed significantly. Under The Skin, which features Scarlett Johansson as an alien predator who stalks the streets of Glasgow looking for men to seduce, became one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year.
Levi has been playing music almost all her life. Brought up in Guildford, Surrey, she went to the Purcell music school in Watford when she was nine, and later to Guildhall in London, which she dropped out of in her final year to pursue her dreams of being in a band.
Her atmospheric and eerie composition was undoubtedly crucial to Under the Skin’s success. Compared by critics to the work of avant-garde composers such as Krzysztof Penderecki and Gyorgi Ligeti, who were used frequently by Stanley Kubrick, the score brings together strings, percussion, distortions in speed and clashing microphones to create sounds that are seductive, perverted and compassionate.
Check out "Love" from Levi's score down below.
