Tutorials Audio

Mica Levi: From Guildhall Composition Student to Under the Skin's Unsettling Score

Profile · ~14 min

Overview

Mica Levi (born 1987) studied composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London while also fronting the experimental pop band Micachu and the Shapes, going on to score Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin (2013) and Pablo Larraín's Jackie (2016), earning an Academy Award nomination for the latter and becoming one of contemporary film's most distinctive experimental composing voices.

What You Need

Where to Start: Under the Skin (2013), Jackie (2016), Monos (2019)

Steps

Formal composition training at Guildhall alongside experimental pop

Levi studied composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, one of Britain's leading conservatories, while simultaneously fronting the experimental pop and noise band Micachu and the Shapes. An unusual dual track that combined rigorous formal composition training with hands-on experimental sound-making well outside conservatory convention.

Building a reputation through experimental music before film work

Levi built an early reputation through Micachu and the Shapes' unconventional, texturally abrasive pop music and solo experimental composition work, developing a distinctive sonic identity built on deliberately imperfect, unsettling textures well before any film scoring commissions arrived.

Under the Skin: a genuinely alien string score

Levi's score for Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin (2013), about an alien entity inhabiting a human body, used deliberately dissonant, sliding string textures and unconventional tuning to create a genuinely unsettling, non-human sonic identity, bringing her widespread critical acclaim and establishing her as a distinctive new voice in film scoring specifically because of her lack of conventional Hollywood scoring habits.

Jackie and Academy Award recognition for experimental scoring

Levi's score for Pablo Larraín's Jackie (2016), portraying Jacqueline Kennedy's psychological state in the days following President Kennedy's assassination, used similarly unconventional, emotionally raw string writing and earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score, a significant recognition for a composer working well outside conventional Hollywood scoring idioms.

Pro Tips

Deliberately dissonant, sliding, and imperfectly tuned string writing used to create genuine psychological unease, most fully realized in Under the Skin's alien sonic identity.
Bringing an experimental pop and noise-music background directly into film scoring, resulting in textures and structures distinct from conservatory-trained Hollywood scoring conventions.
Using score to convey a character's interior psychological state directly (Jackie's grief and dissociation) rather than simply underscoring a scene's surface emotional content.
Maintaining a dual career across experimental pop music and film scoring, allowing techniques and textures to move fluidly between the two practices.

Knowledge Base

What You'll Learn

Levi's Guildhall composition training, combined with a parallel career in experimental pop music, produced one of contemporary film scoring's most deliberately unconventional and psychologically unsettling voices.

Awards & Recognition

Levi received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score for Jackie (2016), and Under the Skin (2013) has been widely cited by film critics and composers as one of the most influential and distinctive film scores of the 2010s.

Why Levi Still Matters

Her willingness to bring genuinely dissonant, conservatory-rule-breaking textures into mainstream film scoring, drawn directly from an experimental pop background, expanded what a psychologically effective film score could sound like beyond conventional Hollywood orchestration.

Where This Fits

This guide covers one specific part of scoring for picture. The wider picture, spotting, tempo and sync, orchestrating around dialogue, and delivering stems a dub stage can use, is in Scoring for Picture: A Composer's Workflow, which frames the discipline as a whole and links out to the detailed guides underneath it, including this one. If you are starting from scratch rather than solving a specific problem, read that first and come back here.

FAQ

Q: What is Mica Levi known for outside of film scoring?
A: Levi fronted the experimental pop and noise band Micachu and the Shapes, building a reputation for unconventional, texturally abrasive music before moving into film composing, and continues to work across both experimental music and film scoring.

Q: Why is the score for Under the Skin considered so distinctive?
A: Levi used deliberately dissonant, sliding string textures and unconventional tuning to create a genuinely alien, unsettling sonic identity for the film's extraterrestrial protagonist, a sound widely cited by critics and other composers as one of the most influential and unconventional film scores of the 2010s.