Gazelle Twin

Destabilizing Trauma & Musicalized Terror

published in The Wire online, April, 2025, London

Gazelle Twin’s (Elizabeth Bernholz) most recent film score is Bruce Goodison’s Black Cab (2024). A Shudder original produced by Blumehouse and shot in outer Manchester, it showcases its aesthetics via an ‘arty’ opening sequence of night forests and dark highways, all blurred, defocussed, textural, dense. It’s reminiscent of record covers by 4AD and Touch. The visuals frame an opening nightmare of a pregnant woman being ferried in car through a dark country road at night. The subsequent story follows a young woman in an abusive relationship who has to contend with a psychotic cabbie who may or may not be possessed by his own dead wife, and is seeking to abduct the movie’s heroine to take her in utero child.

Everything is set for Black Cab to be tagged ‘intelligent’ and ‘feminist’ within the subgenres of contemporary horror. In most respects, the story is engaging, the performances powerful, and the direction is solid. But it’s the score by Gazelle Twin that is worth noting—not because of its quality and effects, but because of the way her music has ultimately been disserviced by its editing, mixing and positioning within the film. Black Cab focusses on the gendered evergreen of the horror genre: a woman in distress. This staple is defined through terror, victimization, abuse, possession, subjection, infection—the list is as endless as the horror genre. As irksome as that is, the last few decades of the genre’s revisions have signalled new potentiality in scoring the female experience and perspective—to musically score and sonically underscore her body, her mind, her motivations, her interpretations.

Yet Black Cab does what so many films do with their revisionist horror/terror scores when depicting central characters subjected to horrifying and terrifying experiences: we get slabs and smears of indistinct, vague and uncommitted audiovisual gestures toward mental destabilization, neurotic encroachment, and environmental anxiety. Their artiness does not exempt them from insensitivity. On the soundtrack, that means a surfeit of rumbles, breathes, noises, scrapings, all put through excessive reverb and ancillary post-effects. Prison and torture are summoned but superficially so. While Black Cab is intent on examining the psychology of its heroine’s abject experience, it signals a lack of embodied comprehension of psychological trauma.

But Black Cab nonetheless is symptomatic of the multi-layered dimensionality of psychic malaise that mingles with the air we continually breathe. The pervasive state of anxiety for many people living their own private horrors and terrors is as invisible to be unregistered, yet as pervasive to be sonorized. We collectively recognize what these messy, blurry, dark soundtracks represent. Black Cab is thus less about Lovecraftian horror, Shakespearian terror or Pinteresque existentialism than it is about the numbing discomfort that the appraised ‘horror genre’ is incapable of confronting, let alone representing. The soundtrack release affords a far more affecting immersion into the psychic space Gazelle Twin conjures through her studio concocting, but layered into the movie the soundscapes come off ill-considered and unchecked, pushing it toward angsty cabaret. (Who makes these decisions in film music is rarely discussed, as the final ‘intermix’ of a commissioned composer’s music into the film soundtrack is beyond the composer’s control.)

Black Cab stands in marked contrast to an earlier score by Gazelle Twin: Zu Quirke’s Nocturne (2020). Black Cab visually riffs on the modern turn of the Nocturne tradition in painting (via its 4AD/Touch aesthetics). The movie Nocturne references music that evokes the night and the dark psyche of characters living a hidden hell—in this case, rabidly competitive twins pushing to succeed as classical concert pianists.

In Nocturne’s pre-credit opening, a female duet floats as a camera creeps at eye level down a narrow corridor toward a framed painting of young prodigy Mozart. The harmony of the piece melts into a solo violinist practicing; the camera turns left to enter the player’s (Moira) chamber. A grandfather clock ominously tolls, triggering a catatonic interruption to her practice: Moira places her instrument on a table, climbs to the balcony balustrade, and gracefully descends from view to her death. A single sine tone synchs to her exit. Hard cut to black: a female choral scream—rambunctious, quasi-Bulgarian—sounds over the film’s title card “Nocturne”. A family album movie montage in glitchy SD follows, capturing twin babies growing into teen girls, non-stop practicing and playing pianos. Schubert’s 6 Moments Musicaux replaces all synch audio, creating the sense of beautiful perfection being harmonically conjured by feminine youth dedicated to such glorious pursuits. As the piece progresses, so does their age, talent and precision. We watch their adolescent blossoming, despite it being trapped in the stultifying perfection of a performable meisterwerk.

Pause for a quick questionnaire. Are you, or someone you know, imaged by this opening sequence? Are you or someone you know the traumatized product of spending a childhood and youth following the strictures and scriptures of a musical cannon (classical, contemporary, jazz—it’s all the same in the pedagogic realm) only to fulfil those dictates and spend the rest of your life doubting their relevance to whatever is your own suppressed fumbling of musical self-identity? Yes, we champion all sorts of musicians and composers who, as per The Wire’s remit, are adventurers into the sono-musical spectrum. But what are the everyday effects of forging ahead this way, and what scars are collected en route to whatever ‘free’ domain of musicmaking one is supposed to enter?

Nocturne is a quietly fascinating reflection of this predicament. It is hard to find a movie about professional music making that doesn’t exploit the negative energy of competition to forge sordid dramatic arcs. Conversely, Nocturne addresses this through Gazelle Twins’ tissue-thin fragments, filigrees and fragrances, which render sono-musical skin flakes with the type of maddening sonority which rings like tinnitus within the heads of obsessive youths trapped in the forward momentum of careerist drives.

Early in the film, a sawtooth tonal chord sounds as Juliet’s finger hits play on her iPhone. She stares blankly into the camera as her parents drive to her new performing arts boarding school, the Lindberg Academy. Some rich Messiaen-like piano chords ring inside her head, rendering her opaque and inscrutable. Later, when Juliet first picks up the deceased Moira's music theory book, some slight synth and string throbs: part acoustic, part psycho-acoustic, like a single Psycho string stab slowed down to a dying gulp. The motif appears each time she comes into contact with Moira’s phantom actions, as if her ghost now controls Juliet’s progress and deviation (all superbly conveyed by Sydney Sweeney’s distinctive mix of doleful demeanour and doe-eyed defiance).

In the tense lead-up to her audition for the senior music showcase, Juliet visits the toilet, plunges her hands into ice water and pops a beta blocker to calm her nerves. She touches Moira’s note book: a feminised voice rings, rising in miasmatic congestion like an overloaded harmonic rumble atop an earth hum. It seems to fill her head: she returns to the auditorium, unable to hear any acoustic sound around her. The judges call her to the stage to play Camille Saint-Saëns’ Second Concerto (1868)—the piece with which her twin sister Vivian had just auditioned.

Whilst playing the concerto’s increasing drama, Juliet hallucinates walking down the afore-shown corridor, now coloured by prismatic beams as she feels beckoned by the Mozart painting. As before, she turns left to the golden-hued chamber where Moira suicided. An indistinct washing machine churn grows in intensity, punctuated by resonant spikes of subsonic thwacks. Juliet approaches the curtains glowing with sunlight; she pulls them back to witness herself far below on a grand stage, having won the competition to perform the end-of-term recital. The thick pink noise has filtered open to a wash of adulating applause. It’s a nightmare premonition of a crowning achievement in the world of competitive musical recitals. The shock-edit to the sound of the grandfather clock chiming marks her return to reality, wherein she has completed the piece and is now being tendered to, following her post-performance collapse.

What a psychic cocktail swirls inside the cerebrum of Juliet: stirred by sibling competition, weaponized pianos, beta blockers, possessive spirits, and subsonic noise-fields. This is the heady realm which Gazelle Twin evokes, parlaying those dramatic figures into sonic moments that effectively bypass musical control and augur mental destabilization. The score destabilizes the social order of music—its performance, reception, competition, rendition—and constructs a terrorizing production to sound the mania that controls that order.

Throughout Nocturne, the dogma of chord progressions, musical counterpoint and harmonic logic floats through the sound design of the Lindberg Academy: someone is always instructing, demonstrating, practicing. But at any such instance, a nauseating hum swells to suggest Juliet is deaf to the sound of all music and musicians around her. She is internally driven by a Machiavellian self, disconnected from others as an inchoate force that is beyond music’s normative capacity to describe human aspiration. Contrary to conventional operations of film music, this demonstrates how music can move into realms beyond emotional mimicry; beyond good and evil.

Over a slo-mo montage of various students at the academy practicing, socializing and hanging-out, Gazelle Twin’s first high-lighted track fades up. It’s an analogue electronic tarantella: a swirl of compound time ostinatos dressed in filter sweeps and Acid-ic rasping, nailed by rupturing single-beats and the distant extenuated vocal scream heard as a burst over the film’s opening title. A slow zoom into Juliet’s face indicates she, the film, and we are conjoined, sinking into the tunnelling penumbra of her will to succeed. A variation of this musical moment erupts when Juliet finds some bloodied tampons left in her student pigeon hole: percussive puffs of noise mark strident rhythms as a muffled voice chants in manic waltz-time “Come and get me!” over and over again. The vocal duet roar-chant, sighing breaths, and bass synth drones all combine to intensify the track’s drama. Gazelle Twin provides numerous sonic moments that venture into the dark dance of the psyche.

It should not seem strange that within the hyper-saturated economy of the horror genre that music is capable of doing things that are starkly adventurous despite the seemingly obviousness of their productions’ sameness and repetitiveness. Indeed, maybe it is music that is culturally aiding this particular development. Consider the various monikers prefixed in horror hipsterism: ‘intelligent’, ‘folk’, ‘body’, ‘feminist’, ‘indie’. Are they not similarly applied to currents in the production and critique of music? When considering the hybrid bestiality of film music, it can sometimes be more rewarding to imagine these films as music that has been visualised. Through her score for Nocturne—sustained with equal vim on the film soundtrack and the record release—Gazelle Twin has created a wonderful beast, intoxicating both mind and ear.

Text © Philip Brophy 2025. Images © Shudder / Blumehouse / Netflix