Rick Deckard is a familiar name to all fans of science-fiction cinema, as he is the main character of one of the most emblematic SF pictures of the 80s, Blade Runner. Harrison Ford played the role of this former policeman forced back in service to track down replicants, androids barely distinguishable from humans. The film was freely adapted from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a book written in 1968 by Philip K. Dick – whose reputation in this genre is legendary. In the sequel (also produced by Ridley Scott, but directed by Denis Villeneuve), it’s Ryan Gosling, silent hero of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, and more recently, romantic jazzman in Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, who’ll take on the lead role. Harrison Ford/Rick Deckard will also feature. The movie is set 30 years after the events of the first film, which took place in 2017.
For the score the director first called upon Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson with whom he had already worked three times: in 2013 for Prisoners, in 2015 for the thriller Sicario, and in 2016 for Premier contact. At just 48 years old, the composer has already made his name in film music, authoring for instance the original score for Stephen Hawkins’s biopic, The Theory of Everything (James Marsh, 2014). However he doesn’t limit himself to composing for the big screen. Most notably he is the co-founder of a surprising project that gave birth to numerous sound installations and melancholic pop songs: Kitchen Motors – a kind of collective/label based in Reykjavik. He is also the founder of the band Apparat Organ Quartet, and produced tracks for numerous artists such as Marc Almond (for Stranger Things) or Barry Adamson (former member of Magazine, Visage, Birthday Party and Bad Seeds). In terms of solo albums, Englabörn (2002) – an album in which electro stands alongside acoustic elements such as a string quartet – and Orphée (2016, released by Deutsche Grammophon) are worth mentioning.
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