Rather than speaking in musical terms, they’d describe their instrumental synth music with visual cues-a helicopter soaring over a waterfall, a high-speed chase down darkened Los Angeles alleys. Whether they knew it or not, with S U R V I V E, Dixon and Stein laid the groundwork for their future as one of the pre-eminent scoring teams of our time. As opposed to the laptop-based performances common in live electronic music at the time, S U R V I V E hauled a studio’s worth of synthesizers and amplifiers into dive bars for legendary live performances, achieving the ability to fill the room with crushing sound. Leading up to the formation of the quartet, Dixon and Stein experimented with field recordings, venturing down tunnels and ascending water towers around Austin, Texas, hauling battery-powered modular setups and field recording equipment out to the sorts of places the Stranger Things kids might explore on their bicycles. In 2009, alongside Mark Donica and Adam Jones, they formed the live synthesizer band S U R V I V E. While Dixon & Stein came to prominence composing music for a series that has become a cultural touchstone, Stranger Things, imagery and setting have always been central to the duo’s practice. Working in the lineage of predecessors like John Carpenter and contemporary peers like Oneohtrix Point Never, Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein use a lifelong obsession with synthesizers and electronic music as a vehicle for larger-than-life visions. In the meantime, Stein and Dixon compose music for feature films, documentary series and large-scale installations and play in the band S U R V I V E. But as the small town becomes the unlikely site for a supernatural battle within the hit series, Dixon and Stein’s soundscapes, too, have expanded in lockstep. The prolific Texan musicians Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein are responsible for a body of work that’s synonymous with the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, the supernatural everytown at the center of the Netflix hit Stranger Things. From the iconic whistle introducing Morricone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme to Tangerine Dream’s “Love On A Real Train,” memorable scores have the uncanny ability to sum up an epoch, an entire aesthetic. In the annals of film and television, certain musical themes manage to transcend the moving image.
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