The sounds of Son Lux almost feel primordial. Somewhere in the cosmic gesturing of their music is the blurring of finality: Beginnings and ends erupt into flames as bright synths and apocalyptic broodiness collide. While initially a solo act, Son Lux grew into a trio when Rafiq Bhatia and Ian Chang joined Lott for 2015’s Bones. Their following albums, a sequentially numbered trilogy called Tomorrows, elevated the existential cyclicality of their work into something new and anarchic. These records seem to connect what would otherwise seem disparate: Ethereality becomes haunting, anger becomes plaintive, and sounds portend the infinite.
Their sonic location, somewhere between creation and destruction, renders Son Lux fitting to score the swelling Everything Everywhere All At Once, a film by the Daniels—the duo of directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert—that, too, disavows the conventional limits of creativity. Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) is a middle-aged woman who is tired of her life: her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) scorns her, her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) is readying a divorce, and the IRS is on her ass. Evelyn is tired of watching laundry tumble, of filing her taxes, of a path that has seemingly spun her in circles. Explosively kinetic, Everything Everywhere All At Once seeks a dynamic score able to match its ferocity. Son Lux delivers. Their soundtrack becomes our conduit across the multiverse, transcending and melding worlds otherwise alien to each other: sci-fi and kung-fu, hot dog hands and Debussy, slapstick and sincerity, mothers and daughters.
The thrill of Son Lux’s score is in its audacious range. As Everything Everywhere All At Once snaps between zaniness, hilarity, darkness, and hope, so too does its soundtrack. The dreamy piano theme of "Wang Family Portrait" foregrounds the film’s saccharine core, emerging in gentler moments: Evelyn’s family together, nostalgic gazes into the past, and visions of lives that could have been, in another universe. On the contrary, blustering tracks like “The Fanny Pack” are brash reminders that you’re watching a true action blockbuster, as strings tinged with adrenaline and held by an addictive bassline bring comic bravado to a fight scene set in an IRS office. Eeriness is also afoot in the score; Son Lux, better than most, knows how to make you shudder. Just listen to “I Have Been Watching”—Nina Moffitt’s vocals, so bare against saturated strings, are startling.
Despite running an hour and 54 minutes, the score doesn’t lose coherence. It repeats and reworks the same few themes: “Clair de Lune,” for instance, can be heard in “Deirdre Fight” and “My Life Without You,” in addition to its eponymous track on the score. “Come Recover (Empathy Fight)” is the expanded version of “Come Recover” on Tomorrows III. The score is a total achievement of ingenuity. Speaking to Slash Film, Bhatia, Chang, and Lott divulged that this score took years to compose. They had to learn new instruments, like the Chinese paigu drums, and also learn new ways to fuck with the old, like the violin (which were “played with crazy things,” said Lott), and the trumpet, played by director Kwan, who—no virtuoso himself—deliberately butchers it. Son Lux are also joined by a wonderfully odd cast of collaborators: Mitski and David Byrne, who duet on “This Is a Life”; Moses Sumney, for whom Chang drums; André 3000, improvising with the Mayan flute he’s been learning in private; and Randy Newman, offering his voice to both “Now We’re Cookin’” and an anthropomorphic raccoon in the film.
“This Is a Life” closes Everything Everywhere All At Once, and it endearingly captures its heart with unremitting sincerity. “This is a life/Free from destiny,” Mitski sings, and then with Byrne: “I choose you/And you choose me.” Both Everything Everywhere All At Once and Son Lux’s broader artistic ethos are rooted in the imperative of creation, so sprawling in its possibilities as to span an entire multiverse. Life, like music, is meant to be created. We can choose to fester in the bleakness of our unerringly chaotic world, or—like the Daniels and Son Lux—we can see chaos for what it is: an art of its own.
