Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, half of Austin band SURVIVE, completed their debut feature film score for Rashid Johnson’s Native Son, featured as the opening night film at Sundance. Dixon and Stein are most known for creating the score for the Netflix series Stranger Things.
The electronic band, SURVIVE consists of Stein, Dixon, Adam Jones and Mark Donica and is based in Austin, Texas. The group has been producing synth-heavy, horror-score-influenced compositions for almost a decade. Stranger Things series creators, The Duffer Brothers, fell in love with the band’s albums.
Dixon and Stein were nominated for the Stranger Things soundtrack, which garnered a Primetime Emmy Award win for Outstanding Main Title Theme Music, as well as two Grammy nominations for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media.
Film critic, Todd McCarthy said this about the Native Son soundtrack score, “Emphatically setting a different tone than expected, and beautifully so, is a jazzy, electrified score by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein that sets an internal, brooding, borderline mournful tone rather than anything confrontational. This alone puts the film on a different plane, just as it helps define Bigger’s inner journey and the path toward tragedy.”
Native Son is based on Richard Wright’s seminal novel and features a young African-American man who takes a job working for a highly influential Chicago family – a decision that changes the course of his life. HBO Films and A24 are releasing the film on April 5 with a debut on HBO that day, and Milan Records is set to release the score on April 5 as well.
After completing Stranger Things 2 in 2017 the two are now working on the third season. The duo have also explored the worlds of Virtual Reality, scoring the Darren Aronofsky produced VR series, Spheres, written & directed by Eliza McNitt. Spheres: Songs of Spacetime focuses on black holes and their roles in the universe, and won Best VR at the 2018 Venice Biennale Film Festival.
Dixon and Stein also scored Matthew Libatique’s short film A Different Beyond, and National Geographic’s Valley of the Boom, a hybrid documentary-drama chronicling the early days of Silicon Valley. The duo also scored the three-part British series, Butterfly which addresses the sensitive, contemporary issue of gender dysphoria and was recently picked up by Hulu in the US.
Native Son Original Soundtrack
Track List:
1. Anxious Man
2. Affluenza
3. Panem Et Circences
4. The Accident
5. Furnace
6. Pussy Oreo
7. The Dalton Collection
8. Not The People
9. They’re All Blind
10. Manhunt
11. The Tunnel
12. A Good Spot
Photo Credit: Raymond Flotat
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