The record was called Eskimo and it came out of San Francisco in 1979, released by the Residents — that masked and unplaceable art-rock collective who had spent the decade making deliberately estranged, anthropological records about parts of America that did not quite exist. Eskimo pretended to be field recordings from a fictitious Arctic tribe: wind-layered, wordless, scored for invented rituals and processed chanting, an hour of music that resembled ethnography in the way a dream resembles a day. Two decades later a teenager in Connecticut, obsessed with Primus and the Prodigy and still working out what kind of sound his bass guitar wanted to make, took that album title as a stage name and adjusted the spelling. Brendan Angelides became Eskmo. The lineage matters because it explains, more than any biographical headline, the particular shape of the ear he would eventually bring to Billions — an ear tuned to invented atmospheres, to sounds that suggest a place rather than describe it, to music that lives in the acoustics of rooms that the listener is not quite permitted to enter.
Angelides moved to San Francisco, then to Los Angeles, and through the late 2000s put out records on Planet Mu, Warp and Ninja Tune — that transatlantic archipelago of labels where the post-IDM diaspora ended up after the genre itself had stopped being a useful word. An NPR Tiny Desk performance in 2015, mostly built from objects he had gathered backstage — PVC pipe, crumpling paper, an empty water bottle — caught the attention of Brian Koppelman, who had heard SOL, Angelides's ambient solar concept record released on R&S's Apollo imprint that year, and sent an enquiry. Billions was Angelides's first proper scoring job. He stopped touring to take it. The show is, at some level, the sound of an artist leaving one life for another — the live-PA looper, the janitor-closet percussionist, the man on stage with found objects, going into a room in Los Angeles to figure out how a hedge fund should sound.
He went in expecting to write character themes. He had imagined, he has said, big identifying melodies for Chuck and Bobby and Wendy — the standard television scorer's brief. Koppelman and Levien said no. Their instruction was almost anti-thematic: no leitmotifs, no emotional guidance, nothing that told the viewer how to feel. What they wanted was tone. What they wanted was the room. Angelides, on record, describes it as churning, undulating, subtle — which are not the words of a composer doing his best work but a composer describing an environment he is trying to maintain at a steady pressure. The effort is not to write the scene but to produce the atmosphere the scene sits inside.
The palette is almost entirely electronic and almost entirely in-the-box: Razor, Serum, Imposcar, banks of Kontakt instruments, a saturation chain of UAD and Soundtoys and iZotope's Trash running on buses so that the whole mix has a faintly corroded edge. There are, across the first three seasons, almost no identifiable melodies. What there is, instead, is a kind of grey weather — a low-end hum that tightens and releases in ways the viewer registers physiologically before intellectually, a five-note synthetic pulse under the Manhattan aerial that opens every episode, and a repertoire of granular stabs and near-subsonic drones that appear whenever the show wants the audience to feel that something is being decided somewhere off camera. Eskmo's Billions is the sound of rooms where wealth is being moved around, and of the nervous system of the people moving it.
The discipline of this is harder than it sounds. Prestige television's defaults are the exact opposite — dramatic piano, string stabs, the rising motif that tells the viewer they are watching something important. Angelides avoids all of it, and the avoidance is the authorship. When Wendy Rhoades sits across from a trader and takes him apart, the score is not telling you anything about her power; it is generating the low atmospheric pressure that her power is extracted from. When a trading floor starts to break, the music does not rise; it thickens. Koppelman's refusal of thematic material was the right refusal, but it was also the harder brief, because it required a composer who could make pressure without melody — and here the Eskimo lineage is not incidental at all. The Residents, on that 1979 record, were making music that functioned as landscape rather than statement. Forty years later, a composer who had taken their name was doing something not dissimilar for a show about a different kind of invented climate.
What the score does not do, quite, is develop. Across three seasons the pressure is maintained superbly, but one notices, around Season Three, that the language is not widening. The palette that is perfect for the pilot — the hum, the pulse, the saturated sub-drones — is still the palette in Episode Twenty-Four and again in Episode Thirty-Six, with variations of degree rather than kind. This is partly a function of the Koppelman brief; a composer who has been told not to write themes does not get to expand the thematic vocabulary. But there is a point at which atmospheric consistency starts to become atmospheric repetition, and the third season is where that point begins to show. A real development — a genuinely new colour introduced, a texture the show had not yet earned — would have given the whole run more shape.
Placed alongside the television scores of its decade that also built their work from electronic atmosphere rather than melody — Cliff Martinez's submerged pulse for The Knick, Jóhann Jóhannsson's glacial synth clouds for Trapped, Reznor and Ross's Mindhunter — the Eskmo Billions score earns its place, and perhaps deserves rather more credit than it has received. It is not the most dramatic of these scores, nor the most memorable as music you might listen to away from the picture. It is the most successfully invisible, which is the hardest thing to be. The composer who named himself after a Residents record about a tribe that did not exist has spent three seasons making the sound of another invented climate: the climate of the room where somebody is about to lose everything, and the only one who knows it is the room.