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BRING THEM DOWN is a tense and gripping thriller about two warring families set against the harsh landscape of rural west Ireland. Composer
HANNAH PEEL creates a stark and brooding electronic landscape using percussive elements throughout the short, but intense, work.
The composer’s approach needed to be simple but effective as she describes the process –
“The stark and isolated lives of the characters needed a bold score that could match their raw energy. It had to be simple yet move like a hunter, shifting perspectives – equally bearing a heavy dosage of sadness and vehement dry humour.”
Starring
Oscar-nominee Barry Keoghan (Saltburn) and
Christopher Abbott (Possessor), the film details the ongoing rivalry between farmers Michael (Abbott) and Jack (Keoghan) which suddenly escalates and triggers a chain of events that take increasingly violent and devastating turns, leaving both families permanently altered.
From award-winning first-time filmmaker
Christopher Andrews and co-starring
Colm Meaney, Paul Ready and
Nora-Jane Noone, this is a fierce, muscular debut that signals a bold new cinematic voice.
For the composer, working with Andrews changed his approach to the film –
“It had always been the director’s intention to not have a score for this film. The change of direction led to a lot of open and exciting conversations about the intentions of the music; how to work with the raw and brutal inhabitants; the forlorn rural Irish landscape; the delicate balance of sound design; and to what extent could the music work with the twists and turns of the script.
I made the decision to introduce dry and high intensity skinned percussion: striking like a knife with the pulse pounding velocity of a thriller. The balance for me was always to react and leave space for breath for both humans and animals whilst maintaining tension.
★★★★ “Hugely impressive… a rural Irish revenge thriller with echoes of Kurosawa” – TIME OUT
★★★★ “A bruising neo-western” – Little White Lies
“The silence is loud in a different way”
How Hannah Peel and Christopher Andrews found the spectral sound of Bring Them Down
Read Crack Magazine’s full feature here >
About the composer
Hannah Peel is a Northern Irish artist, composer, producer and broadcaster. Often inspired by the connections between science and music, her solo record career includes the shortlisted 2021 Mercury Music Prize electronic album, Fir Wave; 2016’s Awake But Always Dreaming, which became an ode to her grandmother’s mind as she lived with dementia; and the space-themed Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia, scored for synthesisers and a 30 piece colliery brass band. In 2023 Hannah Peel won the Ivor Novello Best TV Soundtrack award for her score to Sky’s Midwich Cuckoos.
Following her Emmy-nominated Game of Thrones: The Last Watch, in 2022 Hannah released a new, critically acclaimed album The Unfolding with Paraorchestra – the world’s only disabled and non-disabled integrated orchestra which went straight to No.1 in the UK Classical Chart. She went on to play headline shows with the orchestra at the Bluedot festival and the Barbican. Last year she recorded further high profile film and TV scores including Scoop for Netflix with co-composer Anne Nikitin and was Artist in Residence at Kings Place, London where Hannah debuted a new project with Chinese virtuoso percussionist Beibei Wang. They are currently recording a new album together. Hannah is also a regular presenter on the BBC Radio 3 show, Night Tracks.
Tracklist
1. In The Beginning
2. The Mart
3. Massacre Act 1
4. Bring Me His Head
5. The Gate
6. Massacre Act 2
7. The Head
8. Decisions
9. Two Sides
10. The Mountain
11. In The End
12. Black Rain (Bonus Track) – Performed by Bigz
Other Silva Screen soundtracks by Hannah Peel
