When composer Atli Örvarsson began work on the Apple TV series “Silo” in 2023, he immediately felt at home in its isolated world of characters surviving underground after a calamity in the world above. “The show has a kind of Scandinavian melancholia that I think is slightly inherent in my music,” Örvarsson told IndieWire.
“I often joke that growing up in a small town in the north of Iceland was the perfect kind of upbringing to prepare for scoring ‘Silo,’ because it was a slightly lonely place, and it was very isolated and slightly claustrophobic as well — essentially, at the bottom of a fjord facing the North Pole.”
In the first two seasons of “Silo,” Örvarsson found the perfect musical language to convey the sense of loneliness and longing at the core of the series, leaning heavily on piano and strings as well as some more unusual sounds to establish the tone. “ It’s rather sparse, introspective music,” Örvarsson said. “One thing that intrigued me about the silo from the beginning was the role that technology plays in it. No one would be able to live in a silo if there wasn’t a generator and all the systems that make it work, but in the first few episodes you see the technology that’s being used by the people in the silo, and it’s it’s all very rudimentary. It looks like computers from the ’80s.”
Taking the technology as a starting point, Örvarsson incorporated sound design elements into his score. “The first things I worked on were just sounds and drones, what I imagined would be in the background if you lived in one of these silos,” he said, “which then led me to the themes and the bigger musical aspects of it. But it’s very hard for me to pinpoint the style because it ranges from really big, epic moments to a lot of passages that are really very intimate. It’s just two or three people talking, and so much of it is really about the inner lives of the characters.”
For Season 3, there was an additional component to take into consideration since the season follows parallel stories: one involving underground heroine Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) fighting to learn the truth about her situation after her memory is wiped clean, the other an origin story that finally reveals how and why the silos were built. The origin story takes place in present-day Washington, DC, while the material in the silos occurs 300 years in the future.
Örvarsson felt he needed something new for the Washington story, so he started thinking about technology again. “It dawned on me that our technology in modern times is more complex and complicated and intricate than the technology that people in the silo supposedly live with a few hundred years from now,” Örvarsson said. “So in a way, I felt like the music for modern-day Washington needed to be more techno. The music inside the silo tends to be weirdly organic in many ways. There are intimate emotional moments where there’s just a solo violin or solo vocal.”
Örvarsson went with music both more electronic and more austere for the Washington sequences, but he felt he needed to find a way to connect the two storylines; on top of which, the fact that Juliette has amnesia created a new level of mystery that he wanted to honor. “I was trying to come up with a theme that was off-kilter and slightly confused, a theme that could go across time between those two storylines,” Örvarsson said.
The fact that “Silo” continually evolves as a series has allowed Örvarsson to keep from repeating himself, which he says is one of the big challenges in working on an ongoing series. “The challenges and the pleasures of scoring a TV show are one and the same,” Örvarsson said. “The pleasure is that you get to keep coming up with new ideas, developing and broadening the world, but the challenge is exactly the same thing. How do you honor the original work while making it bigger and broader, introducing new ideas? How do you keep it whole and maintain the continuity while introducing new ideas, new geographical places and time periods?”
These are questions Örvarsson continues to ask as he scores Season 4. “I have a library of all my themes, and there are now dozens of different thematic ideas,” he said. “The danger is that it starts getting too spread out and too wide. But at the same time, having the luxury of being able to draw from all these different ideas is a real pleasure. It’s a luxury to be able to do that.”
“Silo” is currently streaming on Apple TV.
