Ludwig Göransson Brought Bronze Age Instruments and Travis Scott to Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’

For a story built on the power of sound, Christopher Nolan turned again to Ludwig Göransson. After Tenet and Oppenheimer, the Swedish composer now scores The Odyssey, weaving Bronze Age instruments into a 21st-century soundscape. Before writing a note, he sourced period-correct flutes, lyres, and gongs, then set about recording them in ways that felt alien to both eras. “I got a bunch of huge gongs,” he told Hypebeast at Sonus faber’s House of Sound in New York, “and then I had to figure out how to record them using modern techniques and play these instruments in ways we haven’t heard before.”

The aulos, an ancient reed instrument he calls the “rockstar” of its time, became a focal point for microphone experiments. That friction between old and new defines the score. A “Siren Song” stays grounded in Homeric text but refracted through contemporary production. The final bow contest sequence drops the orchestra entirely. And in a move that could only fit Nolan’s world, Travis Scott plays the blind Bard, spitting a rework of the epic’s opening lines: “A face… a fleet… a war… a man…”

The closing track, “When I’m Home,” is a three-part piece with Scott and James Blake—an unexpected duo that echoes Göransson’s earlier work with Scott on Tenet’s “THE PLAN.” It’s a reminder that the composer’s role here isn’t just period reconstruction. He’s building a bridge between Homer’s oral tradition and today’s studio, letting a rapper carry the weight of the Bard while ancient gongs resonate through a $30,000 speaker system. The result is less a historical artifact than a collision of timelines, and exactly the kind of tension Nolan’s epics thrive on.