The Composers Who Build the Worlds We Travel Through
Some worlds are built in silence and resonance — a reflection on the composers who shape our inner landscapes and the places we travel when we close our eyes.
By Rafi Mercer
Some of the most astonishing worlds I’ve ever visited weren’t made of brick or earth or light — they were built in the dark, inside a pair of headphones, authored by people whose names rarely make it onto the front of anything. These composers, these architects of atmosphere, are responsible for the emotional weather we move through more often than we admit. They build landscapes we never see, yet instinctively know. And somehow, their work still gets overlooked, lost in the churn of whatever the culture machine has decided is fashionable this month.
I’ve been thinking a lot about them lately — the Zimmer school of scale, the Jóhannsson tide of slow-moving melancholy, the Greenwood tension, the Sakamoto clarity, the Mogwai crescendos, the Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow dread, the Hildur Guðnadóttir minimalism that feels like breath held between two heartbeats. These are not just scores. They’re soundscapes that alter the texture of the day.
Most mornings, I forget that film music rarely asks to be the centre of attention. It sits behind the image, nudging emotion rather than demanding it. But if you isolate it — sit with it, really sit with it — the thing becomes enormous. Close your eyes and half of what you thought was “music” becomes terrain: the rumble of mountains, the shimmer of distant water, the metallic cold of a forgotten future. These composers deal in geometry and atmosphere as much as melody, shaping entire worlds out of resonance and restraint.
And yet they can vanish from public memory almost as quickly as they arrive. A score lives for a season, for the run of a film’s life, and then drifts quietly out of view. It’s strange, considering that so many of these works feel built to outlive us. Think of Arrival, where Jóhann Jóhannsson opens a portal not through spectacle but through breath — long, bowed tones that feel like something ancient waking up beneath the earth. Or Hildur’s Chernobyl, where the low industrial hum becomes a character in its own right: dread made audible. Or Max Richter’s The Leftovers, whose piano notes feel like a lost prayer caught in the wind.
You listen to these pieces and realise: this is world-building. Not in the sense of fiction or cinema, but in the sense of interiority — creating a space within you that didn’t previously exist. A place you can return to. A room without walls.
It’s astonishing how many people never look at the name behind a score they adore. The music moves them, the theme stays with them for years, but the composer stays hidden — a ghost in the machinery. But these are the people who teach us how to feel scale. They remind us that silence is an instrument. That tension is architectural. That space is as expressive as sound.
If you close your eyes — properly close them — these scores become their own planets. You’re not listening to “background music”; you’re travelling. Zimmer’s organ turns into the vault of a cosmic cathedral. Sakamoto’s minimalism becomes a room made of winter light. Jóhannsson gives you foggy plains stretching out into eternity. Greenwood hands you a thread of disquiet you can follow through shadow.
And perhaps that’s why I’m writing this: because Tracks & Tales, in its own way, is also a world built from sound. And these composers are part of the same lineage — people who trust that the unseen, the quiet, the atmospheric can move us more deeply than most grand gestures ever will. Their work reminds me that listening is an act of imagination. That interior travel matters. That the best stories don’t always need words.
We talk so much about the albums that shape us, the bars that ground us, the cities that echo with a certain frequency — but the composers behind these monumental soundscapes deserve the same reverence. They shape how we feel time. They shift our emotional gravity. They remind us that music can still surprise us, destabilise us, lift us from one state of being into another.
They give us access to other worlds, and sometimes — on the right morning, with the right light — they give us access to ourselves.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
