Known for his gruff voice and labyrinthine rhymes, Aesop Rock is easy to listen to but hard to rap along with. He weaves dense, captivating songs that beg for engaged parsing. He’s never stopped experimenting with his voice, which means that his production has often been overshadowed by his lyrics and his delivery. But in late 2015 a pair of filmmakers saw something in Aesop Rock’s beat-making and tasked him with scoring the action thriller Bushwick. His skill set turns out to be an excellent fit for the rapid-fire intensity of their film.
Spanning just a few hours and several blocks of embattled Bushwick, the film imagines civil war breaking out in Brooklyn. Rather than dystopian world-building, the filmmakers invest mainly in the immediacy of unrelenting violence, stringing together a series of exhausting, hyperlocal tracking shots. The gunfire is addling and constant, and Aesop Rock’s score is appropriately tense. “Corner Store” casts the opening fly-over scene of an apparently normally bustling Bushwick in an anxious light, with a sinister synth buzzing over plunked keys. Many tracks precipitate or accommodate the bewildering sounds of inner-city combat: incessant helicopters, unexpected silences, explosions that sound sharp when nearby and dull when far away. As an accompaniment to the film, the score accomplishes its assigned mood-setting role and even assists some sporadic character development. The eerie calm of “Mashed Potatoes” cuts against the energy of a revelatory fight scene to underscore a protagonist’s unusual poise under fire. But the isolated score also demands attention. The tracks come alive on their own; they sound, if anything, even more unsettling when left with room for the imagination to flesh them out.
Aesop Rock’s Bushwick score reflects the movie’s pace, going from uneasy (“Mashed Potatoes”) to frenetic and confrontational (“Ogres” and “Sharks and Minnows”). “Raiders” is a propulsive anthem on the prowl—less ducking for cover than rallying for the attack. “New Yule” is more sinister but less sure of itself, with fidgety synths that frantically drill for open space. Here and elsewhere, the score’s short tracks often feature glitchy mood-building before a prettier theme soars from the mix.
Most tracks are built from vibrating synths and rattling percussion—clanking, artificial sounds that erupt sporadically and burn slowly. Lonely, modulating synth leads function as interludes, buzzing like a disquieting electrical hum. It all makes a strategic backdrop for the movie’s shaky combat scenes, but many of these sounds were already in Aesop Rock’s arsenal. A number of tracks sound like meandering, toned-down siblings of the beats he designed for himself on his last album, The Impossible Kid. Shorn of vocals or DJ scratching, they amount to a kind of gritty, industrial-sounding trip-hop.
There are a few moments in the movie when the score slips directly into the scene instead of lying over it. When the protagonist visits her stoned and oblivious sister, “Chesterfield” thumps muddily through the wall from the apartment next door; here, on its own, the song’s lead synthesizers twinkle over a crisply defined beat, with a world of detail opening up in the empty spaces. Just like the artist raps, Bushwick is both busy and precise, commanding full attention. That his production blends in so well with the film is an accomplishment. Better yet that it holds up so well on its own. As always, Aesop Rock’s music flourishes under scrutiny.
