Dear Mr. Williams:
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I worked very hard to create a cohesive sound for the show that would not only have the dystopic “taste” of Alex’s world, but it also had to echo and support Burgess’s themes. The strongest element that I worked from was the strange dichotomy of Alex’s tastes: his profane appetite for destruction (tongue in cheek there) to his love of the sublime manifesting in Beethoven and the classical idea of beauty.
For contrast to the sublime I chose modern music (mainly percussive–no guitars) that would brutally drive the fights and reflect Alex’s lust for the old ultraviolence. The majority of this was comprised of Laibach, a Czech band that were seminal in industrial music. I also used a speck of Freight Elevator Quartet, a small section from Kronos Quartet, the piano bang at the end of the Beatles’ “Day in the Life,” and I myself composed the song that Carmen Aiello sings in the milk bar (and contains the only bit of guitar) as well as some other sections of incidental music.
