"Oblivion" is a song by French band M83 featuring lead vocals from Norwegian singer Susanne Sundfør. It was released as part of the film soundtrack album Oblivion: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack to accompany the film of the same name. It was composed by Anthony Gonzalez.
M83 Oblivion Original Soundtrack
The song was released as a single on 26 March 2013,[4] and later as part of the film soundtrack Oblivion: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack on 9 April.[5] On the French SNEP singles chart, the song debuted at number 114 on the week of 20 April 2013, and lasted on the chart for three weeks.[6] M83 and Susanne Sundfør performed the song live on 17 April 2013 on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, making it Sundfør's television debut in the United States.[7] Along with M83 and Sundfør, it featured a drummer, bassist and string section. The performance was well received.[8]
As M83, Anthony Gonzalez's music has always had an epic, movie-worthy quality to it, whether on the soaring heights of "Midnight City" or the moody passages on Saturdays=Youth. For his first actual score, for Joseph Kosinski's dystopian sci-fi film Oblivion, Gonzalez collaborates with composer Joseph Trapanese (who worked with Daft Punk on the score for Kosinski's Tron: Legacy), and together they blend the M83 sound with more conventional orchestral elements. A handful of tracks here could have appeared on Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, most notably "StarWaves," where the sweeping synths and intense buildup are a distant cousin of "Midnight City," and "Oblivion," which closes the score with a dramatic ballad sung by Susanne Sundfør. For the most part, though, Gonzalez tempers his usual neon romanticism to fit Oblivion's post-apocalyptic action: the pulsing synths on "Odyssey Rescue" hark back to such classic sci-fi music as Vangelis' Blade Runner score, while the somber, slow-building orchestral epic "Waking Up" is far from M83's euphoric heights. With Trapanese, he moves from electronic to orchestral and back again with a minimum of effort, and finds eloquent ways to compose with both. "Tech 49" begins with turbulent brass and drums that are mirrored by deep arpeggiated synths as it closes, and "Earth 2077"'s strings are as lavish as the keyboards usually are in Gonzalez's music. Even if there are times when the score errs a little too far on the side of conventionality, Oblivion still has several standout moments, including the revved-up suites "Canyon Battle" and "Radiation Zone," both of which sound very different than any of Gonzalez's previous music and also bend the rules about what highly charged movie music should sound like. Similarly, the score's quieter cues also provide some of its most memorable tracks, including the elegiac "I'm Sending You Away" and "Undimmed by Time, Unbound by Death." That Oblivion resembles a blockbuster soundtrack more than an M83 album may disappoint some of Gonzalez's fans, but it means that he and Trapanese succeeded in making the film's music what it needed to be.
“I’m not afraid to do my first soundtrack on a big Hollywood movie, with a big budget and a lot of pressure,” Gonzalez told The Playlist last year. “I like challenges and it excites me more than frightens me.”
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Below you find the two original covers. The official soundtrack release (#14) and the Limited Edition vinyl release by Mondo. The artwork for the vinyl album cover (#15) and interior (#16) comes from Mondo artist Kilian Eng. Discussing his work, Kilian said the following:
When I was given the honor to create artwork for the Oblivion soundtrack, I wanted to convey the feeling of a world that was left behind; a place full of traces and remnants of a civilization long gone. An environment that truly makes the person exploring it feel small is a theme I often come back to in my artwork. For the front cover I wanted to describe this in a peaceful way. The warm colors of a sunset, or sunrise, adds an air of tranquility, providing the image a nice balance against the sharp, dark silhouettes in the foreground. 2ff7e9595c
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