A ten-year-old cellist playing weekend restaurant gigs beside her opera-singer mother in Iceland became, in 2020, the first Icelander to win an Academy Award and the first solo woman to win Best Original Score since the category’s branches were merged in 2000. This episode traces Hildur Guðnadóttir from a Reykjavík childhood saturated with professional musicians, through the Reykjavík Music Academy, the Iceland Academy of the Arts and the Berlin University of the Arts, to the 2006 debut album Mount A, recorded under the alias Lost in Hildurness with a strict rule of zero collaborators so she could strip away the echoes of her training and hear her own voice.

The story then follows her into the underground with Pan Sonic, Throbbing Gristle, múm, Animal Collective and the drone metal band Sunn O))), where she mastered the halldorophone, a cello-like instrument built to control acoustic feedback. Sharing a Berlin studio with Dustin O’Halloran and Jóhann Jóhannsson led to Mary Magdalene and Trapped, then to solo cello work for Denis Villeneuve on Prisoners, Sicario and Arrival, and finally to Chernobyl and Joker, which earned an Emmy, a BAFTA, a Grammy, a Golden Globe and the Oscar. The episode closes with Battlefield 2042, Tár, Women Talking, A Haunting in Venice, Joker: Folie à Deux and upcoming projects including 28 Years Later and The Bride.

• Why total isolation was the only way for a prodigy from a musical family to find her own sound
• How the halldorophone turns feedback screech into an infinite, haunting drone
• Scoring texture instead of melody: why you feel her music in your chest rather than hum it
• Recording a decommissioned power plant in Lithuania to turn the building itself into an instrument for Chernobyl
• What it means that directors have hired her to replace Patrick Doyle and Jonny Greenwood