Kyle Dixon(II)

It’s a new golden era in film and television scores. Over the last 15 years, directors have increasingly searched for bold new sounds in places where they should have been looking all along, DIY venues, clubs, and the more adventurous corners of record stores. Even within this climate, the rise of the prolific, Texas-raised composer duo Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein is remarkable. With roots in the electronic, punk, and experimental scenes that rose up in the shadows of the Live Music Capital of the World, Stein and Dixon went from playing in the preeminent live synth act S U R V I V E to crafting timeless themes for the sci-fi series Stranger Things. Now maintaining respective studios in Los Angeles and Austin, they refuse to sit still, applying their relentless creativity to new scores, sounds, and records.While Dixon and Stein came to prominence through Stranger Things, imagery and setting have always been central to their practice. In 2009, alongside Mark Donica and Adam Jones, they formed the live synthesizer band S U R V I V E. Leading up to the formation of the quartet, Dixon and Stein experimented with field recordings, venturing down tunnels and ascending water towers around Austin, Texas, hauling battery-powered modular setups and recording equipment out to the sorts of places the Stranger Things kids might explore on their bicycles. As opposed to the laptop-based performances common in live electronic music at the time, S U R V I V E hauled a studio’s worth of synthesizers and amplifiers into dive bars, achieving the ability to fill a room with crushing dynamics. Rather than speaking in musical terms, they would often describe their instrumental synth music with visual cues, a helicopter soaring over a waterfall, a high-speed chase down darkened alleys.When the Duffer Brothers found the band and tapped Dixon and Stein for Stranger Things, the duo took on a workload typically handled by a team of composers and assistants. This began a decade-long journey that catapulted them from underground synth heroes to key composers in modern film and television. Over this period, they have earned a host of honors, including two Grammy nominations for Best Score Soundtrack in 2017, a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme, nominations from the ASCAP Film and Television Awards, and an Astra Creative Arts Award for Outstanding Original Score. The body of work Dixon and Stein created for Stranger Things will be cataloged and marveled over for years to come, but as of late, they've pushed into unexplored sonic realms via a myriad of eerie, minimalist scores. On their score for Mexican director Joaquín del Paso’s 2021 film Hole in the Fence, a brooding thriller set at an elite boys’ camp, they ratchet up tension using minimalist electro-acoustic techniques, a Tomita-informed textural approach in dialogue with similar efforts by Tim Hecker and Colin Stetson. The score was nominated by both the Ariel Awards and the HMMAs for Best Original Score, and their work with del Paso continues with El Jardín Que Soñamos, currently doing the rounds on the festival circuit. Dixon and Stein previously collaborated with another acclaimed Mexican director, Amat Escalante, on 2023’s Perdidos en la Noche, a well-received thriller starring Ester Expósito and Bárbara Mori that premiered at Cannes. These singular scores deepen a growing catalog that has also placed their sound behind VR explorations of the cosmos in Spheres, scenes from 1990s Silicon Valley in Valley of the Boom, and the story of an 11-year-old transgender girl in Butterfly, among others.The post-Stranger Things era has also seen Stein and Dixon immerse themselves in studio work. As longtime acolytes of Italian library music legends like Piero Umiliani, they recently spent time in the Museo del Synth Marchigiano, a repository of rare synthesizers on Italy’s Adriatic coast. The recordings they made will be shared soon, alongside a new album from S U R V I V E. Meanwhile, Stein and Dixon will spend the summer and fall touring the UK and Europe, playing venues like the Roundhouse in London and the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels. It has been a remarkable decade for Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, who have gone from band musicians in Austin to one of the defining composer duos of their generation.