brettworks

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, “Hand Covers Bruise” (2010). This four-and-a-half minute track is a gem of minimalist melody, orchestration, and form. The music is the opening theme of the 2010 film The Social Network, which chronicles the earliest days of Facebook and historicizes how Mark Zuckerberg invented a website that would go on to have some 2.9 billion users. The music uses just five sounds: a bowed string drone, piano, synth bass, and two pads. The drone, two parts panned in wide stereo with broken rhythms jumping from side to side, maintains a one-note pulsating tension throughout, over which a piano intermittently plays a simple descending 12-note melody. Soon a bass synth tone marks downbeats on the tonic, and the two pads fade in, one fluttering between the tonic and a semitone below it to create a psychoacoustic beating effect, the other holding the tonic. The track is study in using juxtaposition as tension: the plain piano theme set against four other parts that each oscillate and push against it. In the last minute (from 3:36) the second pad begins to quiver away from its tonic, as if torn from a plan. As “Hand Covers Bruise” repeats and builds, its parts create a sense that their dissonances are trying to resolve, but can’t. The music’s tonal, timbral, and emotional ambiguities fittingly soundtrack the momentous moment when a world-altering social media technology came into being. It’s an awesomely restrained musical construction.

In 2011 Trent Reznor described how he and Atticus Ross wrote “Hand Covers Bruise” by setting musical and procedural constraints as to which instruments they would use and how they would record them to achieve a synthetic yet imperfect sound:

“We did that by putting up restrictions to which instruments we would use, and we wanted to articulate this guy’s journey–an act of creativity and the pursuit of a great idea and the consequences that come from that. We thought we would create a very synthetic landscape, and when there was to be a melody, we would make it a very frail acoustic piano.”

[…]

“We set up rules. We will use these instruments. We will exist in this space. We don’t record anything as MIDI into a computer that can be fixed and quantized. Generally, everything is a live performance and treated as a performance. It’s treated as something that’s pulled out of the ether. Sometimes it’s off. Sometimes it isn’t tuned right. That was an example of the rules of this record. It feels synthetic, but it has to feel like people are involved. It’s not coming out of a laptop. It doesn’t sound like what’s on the radio. It feels like people, and it feels imperfect.”