Cliff Martinez - The Knick S02

Cliff Martinez has worked with The Knick’s showrunner, Steven Soderbergh, on eight films, including Sex, Lies, Videotape and Contagion. He was also a drummer for The Red Hot Chili Peppers, created the distinctive score for Drive, and collaborated with Skrillex for the indelible sound of Spring Breakers. There’s a pulse to this music that I can’t wrest myself away from. It has that effect on its own — perhaps more so — but it also has the effect on the show itself: It inscribes its rhythms on the narrative, to the point that I can’t think of the plot without also thinking of the way that the score shapes it.

When Martinez first began to work on the score, he set out to write themes for various characters and situations — “There’s the love theme, there’s a surgery theme, and a drug theme,” he said, “but they’re not all that precise and exact.” Plus, the themes themselves sometimes “end up getting slathered in, in places where I wouldn’t have expected — Steven did a lot of cutting and pasting, and when he’d send the edits back, I’d go, ‘Gosh, there’s the love theme while you’re pulling out somebody’s teeth!”

Ultimately, Martinez feels that the anachronistic score actually somehow fits: “I read something on RogerEbert.com that was really articulate — it said that one of the themes [of The Knick] is futurism, like modernity and the Industrial Revolution. It’s just not our future. But there was this great hope of science and technology in the air. And in that way, I was trying to do what sounded like primitive, early electronic music; I was trying to channel Kraftwork and early synthesizer artists.”