It’s the end of the world, and everyone is fighting for loot drops. The chorister singing the requiem is Harmony Korine, who since Gummo has found increasingly kaleidoscopic ways to depict the beauty and horror of a society eating itself. If Spring Breakers vaulted his perverse visions into the mainstream bacchanal of red Solo cups and multi-floor EDM ragers, his latest film flips the script for a more isolated age. AGGRO DR1FT, shot entirely in eye-dilating thermal vision, is a nightmare of few words: Miami assassins hunt each other down, praying for an end to the violence as motion-capture demons haunt the skies above them. Cartoonish side characters dispense assignments with the mechanical exaggeration of Grand Theft Auto NPCs. Pole dancers spark firecrackers up and down their bodies while dissolving into a quagmire of robotic A.I. slush. Travis Scott shows up. Either you’ll think the whole thing is mind-numbingly tasteless, or you’ll find a sick truth in its garish absurdity.
AraabMuzik’s voided-out score is key to the film’s hypebeast ego-death aura. Tapping the Rhode Island producer for a project like this may seem like a throwback—he hasn’t really seen the spotlight since his days sharing festival billings with Zedd and Clams Casino (even if his trance-meets-trap 2011 debut, Electronic Dream, still sounds as euphoric as ever). But listening to his music for AGGRO DR1FT, it’s hard to fathom that he and Korine didn’t link up sooner. AraabMuzik’s bottle-service transcendence clearly inhabits the same universe as Spring Breakers, a molly-fueled fantasy reaching longingly toward the heavens. Rather than sliding his usual rapidfire MPC finger drumming into the picture, however, AraabMuzik ventures into new realms, luxuriating in a pure synth soundscape that renders Korine’s dystopian hellworld one tone at a time.
Drawing on the language of gaming and experimental film, AGGRO DR1FT deals mainly in impressionistic texture (it has more in common with one of Phil Solomon’s PlayStation elegies than the shoot-em-ups it pretends to be). AraabMuzik’s soundtrack similarly hits on the most basic sensory levels. Apparently texted to Korine in bits and pieces without seeing the movie, AraabMuzik’s score is collected as a series of loops often lasting a minute or less, alongside a handful of slightly longer tracks that take more room to stretch their legs. In the film, Korine slows these snippets down, speeds them up, and stretches them out until they glow like magma. Perusing them all at once creates the same sensation as scrolling through levels on a mission select screen.
Color is Korine’s primary weapon in AGGRO DR1FT, and AraabMuzik’s lush sketches provide deeper pigmentation to his infrared hallucinations. “The Summoning” sets the scene with morbid laser-beam synths that hover in a threatening mist; “17th Symphony” moves queasily between blurry pianos and aching chords, warbling like a ghost drifting through a graveyard. The gothic grandiosity of AraabMuzik’s church organs and bitcrushed Gregorian chants charges the madness onscreen with a bizarre sense of consequence. In one scene, the crackling loop of “The Abyss” circles round as our main assassin is telepathically tormented by a winged psychopath, imbuing the monster’s cries of “Why can’t you kill me?” with doomed gravitas.
Though AraabMuzik’s trance-y temperament contributes to the film’s clubby milieu, he pulls from far outside his wheelhouse to establish AGGRO DR1FT’s apocalyptically surreal environment. “En Route” slithers through a subterranean march that’s equal parts Jon Hassell and Lustmord, and “The Beloved” lifts everything skyward as he draws out a Constance Demby-worthy new-age drone (complete with angelic choir). The longer tracks, in particular, benefit from having time to sink deeper into the muck: The swelling brass of “The Apex” simmers with a science-fiction military suspense straight out of Metal Gear Solid, while “Theory,” with its alien sound design and distant, clanging percussion, captures an eerie tunneling feeling that anyone who’s gotten lost playing Metroid will know all too well.
Harmony Korine has built a formidable body of work out of playing in the garbage. You’d be hard-pressed to find another director with the audacity to premiere their film in a strip club, then follow it up by announcing a first-person thriller about baby-headed home invaders (with Burial supplying the soundtrack, no less). Testosterone is at war with itself in Korine’s movies, but he avoids coming off like a complete chud by knowing when and how to embrace sincerity. That’s where AraabMuzik’s lavish music comes in—not only fleshing out AGGRO DR1FT’s otherworldly tableau, but humanizing its emotions. When “King’s Arrival” appears in a late scene, it soundtracks our main assassin shooting a man in the head, who mutters as he bleeds out, “You fucking got me.” It might seem like mere video-game logic: murder taken to the point where even a victim can only shrug, as if they’d just been tagged ‘it.’ But when the hitman takes yet another life, his next target seems more crestfallen, whispering as they die, “I’ll see you in the next life.” AraabMuzik’s searing, funereal chants swirl in horror, turning what might otherwise look like nihilism into something more like a prayer for a way out.
