How can music capture the violence of war without turning it into spectacle? Grammy Award-winning composer Sam Slater talks about scoring documentaries like Chernobyl or 2000 Meters to Andriivka, blending frontline sounds, ghostly voices, and self-built instruments.

Last year saw the world premiere of two striking Ukrainian documentaries about the Russo-Ukrainian war. Mstyslav Chernov’s 2000 Meters to Andriivka (2023) is a hyper-immersive frontline account, while Dmytro Hreshko’s long-gestating Divia takes a poetic, Koyaanisqatsi-inspired look at war’s impact on Ukraine’s flora and fauna.

Both films are scored by Berlin-based musician Sam Slater, a Grammy Award-winning producer and sound designer, known for Joker (2019) and HBO’s Chernobyl (2019) alongside his partner Hildur Guðnadóttir. For these documentaries, Slater had to sonically capture the catastrophe of war without slipping into fetishization or sentimentality. Curious about how to sonically render violence without reproducing its spectacle, I sat down with him.

[Hugo Emmerzael]: How did you end up working on 2000 Meters to Andriivka?

[Sam Slater]: Through my work on Divia. Dmytro was looking for a composer who was familiar with the language of film scoring, while also being able to slip into more messed-up modern sound manipulation. One of the interesting things about documentary cinema is that it requires a very literal approach to traditional foley sound design. Just to illustrate: Frontline and Associated Press, the producers of Andriivka, adhere to incredibly tight journalistic rules. By no means are you allowed to take sounds from one bit of footage and apply it to anywhere else on the timeline. So, in both cases, the filmmakers were looking for a composer that would be able to blur the lines between sound design and music.

[HE]: Especially in Andriivka, you integrated sounds from the actual frontline – assault rifles as the basis for staccato percussion, explosions as sub-bass punctuating the score. Both films avoid fetishizing war, yet use these sonic elements for immersion. How did you work with such charged material without letting it dominate the score?

[SS]: That tension is what makes working on conflict documentaries so hard. In Andriivka you meet people, see them fight, and then watch some of them die. Mstyslav and I agreed: the worst thing would be to turn that into spectacle. My role as a composer is to surface truth – to help tell the story without exploiting people. But music is seductive, and one of the least sincere gestures is to put strings under a real death. That’s why I’m drawn to working with the sounds the world already gives us.

[HE]: What does that process look like more concretely? Can you give me some examples?

[SS]: In Andriivka we built ghostly ambiences, especially during the long drone shots over the forest. The film takes place in a two-kilometer stretch of forest where you constantly hear walkie-talkie chatter. I wanted to create ghostly artifacts of real voices, almost blending with the wind in the leaves – more an augmentation of reality than an embellishment. As for the rhythmic bursts of machine-gun fire, rhythms are everywhere. There’s a scene in the back of an armored vehicle: the door opens, and the soldiers are met with a hail of bullets. Rather than add new material, I transcribed this and translated it into more traditional percussion – a synthesis between reality and music.

[HE]: I’m curious how your work on the documentaries relates to your scoring of Battlefield 2042, as franchises like Battlefield or Call of Duty are known for their seductive simulacrums of war. I assume your brief there was quite different, even though the sonic material resembled what you had for Andriivka. How did you navigate that tension?

[SS]: I do not like the fetishization of war – it’s gross, and an inherent weakness of such franchises. When Hildur and I worked on Battlefield 2042, we focused on portraying a world destroyed by climate catastrophe. The music needed to drive the player forward without glorifying war.

[HE]: Earlier you said it would be too much to use strings in the most emotional moments. Yet in Andriivka the sustained passages with cello stand out – frail but powerful. Together with voice and percussion, the instrument seems to balance force and fragility, always on the verge of decay.

[SS]: That’s incredibly spot-on, as I like this binary extremity. There are two linked processes in Andriivka: the first-person GoPro scenes, where the music creates an energetic drive, and the more contemplative passages with cello and voice, which speak to a deeper human quality. Mstyslav and I discussed whether to use a single voice or many. For me, the voice of Ukraine is a loud, unison rejection of the Russian invasion. The only moment of real consonance comes at the very end, when the voices and harmonies you’ve heard finally rejoice. After spending time with these soldiers – even seeing some die and attending their funerals – that alignment of voice and strings makes you feel the depth of their duty. It gestures to our humanity, but without comfort.

[HE] : I would be remiss if I didn’t ask about your self-made instrument called the Kobophone. What is the Kobophone, and how does it work within the score of the film?

[SS]: I worked with score producer Jacob Vasak, as we love building instruments. The Kobophone is a small feedback device with drivers and microphones that creates chaotic growls. It felt fitting, since the Ukrainian army is often seen not as a high-tech force but as something self-made and resourceful. Mstyslav told me how kids assemble drone parts at school to send to the frontlines – a spirit we wanted to reflect. You could mimic such sounds using a synthesizer, but the synthesized sound often lacks a certain energetic violence.

[HE]: Compared to Andriivka, Divia has a completely different cinematic form, without human protagonists, voice-over narrations or intertitles. Here the images speak for themselves within the logic of a poetic and associative montage. Did this require a different approach to working on the score?

[SS]: Dmytro and I had long discussions, as the film took a considerable amount of time to realise – partly because he was conscripted. The collaboration was amazing, and the project offered a fascinating counterpoint to Andriivka. Where Andriivka zooms in on individuals, Divia takes the drone’s view of the world. Time unfolds differently too: decomposition runs through the film, from bodies to seasons. It was also challenging for me, as the film doesn’t have a clear narrative structure. That’s why music plays a significant role in how you engage with the story: in shaping how you engage with nature, death, decomposition, and regrowth – without slipping into sentimentality. Dmytro sees beauty in many things, something you can also pick up from his previous films, in contrast to Mstyslav’s more somber perspective. At times I had to push back, suggesting that too much sentiment would turn into a kind of nature propaganda.