Countdown to Zero (Original Motion Picture Score)

Lucy Walker’s often-unsettling HBO documentary about nuclear weapons proliferation is a much-needed reminder that more than one generation has grown up complacent and largely ignorant of the thermonuclear Sword of Damocles that’s been poised over its collective heads for 60 years. To musically underscore Walker’s dire concerns, journeyman composer Peter Golub creates a gently impressionistic soundtrack that becomes the subtle musical equivalent of a ticking clock. Using an intimate chamber ensemble seasoned with occasional electronic effects, Golub skillfully conjures a musical atmosphere of stem-winding suspense that variously weaves minimalist-influenced arpeggios, spare piano passages and ever-insistent rhythms and percussion effects into an intimately scaled tapestry of impending danger that’s as unresolved as the film’s disquieting subject matter.