Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein (US)

In the annals of film and television, certain musical themes manage to transcend the moving image. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. Dixon and Stein laid the groundwork for their future as one of the pre-eminent scoring teams of our time. 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.