Snowpiercer

Snowpiercer: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is the album consisting of the original score composed by Marco Beltrami, for the Bong Joon-ho directorial Snowpiercer (2013). The album was published by CJ E&M Music, and released in South Korea on 21 August 2013, followed by an international release on 9 September. The soundtrack for the North American release, was distributed by Varèse Sarabande, and saw an official release on 11 June 2014. Production Macro Beltrami, who was interested in Joon-ho's filmography, contacted him on a possible collaboration and also sent him some musical pieces. Joon-ho then sent his script to Beltrami on Skype, about the idea of the project, and Beltrami later came with the pieces of music on what it could work with the script. When Joon-ho came to Los Angeles, during the film's pre-production in May 2012, he sent the storyboards of the screenplay to Beltrami and discussed about the musical approach, which became fruitful and Beltrami later agreed to be onboard for the film. Joon-ho, on Beltrami's inclusion had said that he really liked his musical score for 3:10 to Yuma (2007), who described it as an "impressive soundtrack". On reading the script, Beltrami said that Joon-ho was open to creative ideas, and added that the story was an allegory, and told it in a surreal way, the music had three functions: "It had to the momentum of the characters moving forward on the train; it had to have the personal, emotional aspect of their struggle; and it had to represent this outside world that wasn't a part of what they were and what they longed for [the rich passengers at the front of the train]. These ideas had to be tied up together, and everything else is just coloring on those ideas." While describing the setting as futuristic and also backwards, as "there are people in the train with not much technology", Beltrami used the old-fashioned musical instrument, such as cimbalom, a hammered dulcimer, which had an "antique quality". As certain scenes are synthetically achieved and processed, he used sounds that are acoustically based, but also blending electronic and classical music. For the second part of the axe fight, Beltrami used a non-instrumental sounding, recording from a storage container, as the sound had "metal and cavernous quality to this scene". The train cars in the sequence, have different thematic continuity, but also have their own synthetic sound.