'Narcos’ Composer Pedro Bromfman Talks About His Spaghetti Western Harmonies

You may not have noticed, but Netflix’s cartel-driven drama Narcos tells the story of the 80s drug war within the veneer of a spaghetti western, with two outside-the-law cowboys joining the fight to take down a crime boss so powerful that he has become the law. And Pedro Bromfman, the composer tasked with scoring Narcos, is the person responsible for meshing those two elements — South America, and the archetypal cowboy struggle against evil — subconsciously for its audience.

“We tried to stay away from the electronics as much as possible, and the 80s and synthesizers, and really stayed with the organic sounding. So real instruments and real sounds that are brought into the computer, and then played around with or manipulated,” Bromfman said. “[Escobar] started going a little mad and a little paranoid and so we altered the music and started shifting it, distorting the elements. Getting his themes and his melodies and just making them a little weirder, so when he was in that mood the music was also playing that and hopefully helping the audience feel that.

Bromfman combined the harmonic Elements of spaghetti western scores with South American percussion to punctuate the score for Narcos, using a variety of latin string instruments — like the 4-string tiple or the 10-string charango and ronroco — that Bromfman grew up with to create the signature Narcos atmosphere.

“Sometimes even the silence between notes — you have a drum hit and then silence, and then another drum hit. This helps create the suspense, subconsciously tying it together with the westerns,” Bromfman said. “There were a lot of influences originally but I think they all combined to create something new and original, and hopefully something that hasn't been heard before. This has been really effective for the show”

The main challenge of scoring Narcos, according to Bromfman, was balancing the entertainment aspect of the show alongside the reality of Escobar, a see-saw problem possibly best seen in the scene splicing Escobar’s decision to kill an entire plane’s worth of people to take out one presidential candidate while genuinely enjoying his family’s company.

Bromfman calls wrapping your mind around this “a cerebral problem” — trying to understand Escobar in a human way that engages the audience, while remaining true to what happened and not trivializing his actions.

“[Escobar] originally . . . wanted to help the poor, and he just went into this egomaniacal spin that took him as he started getting involved with drugs and getting rich and more powerful. He just thought he could do anything he wanted, and he forgot what he originally wanted to do, or thought he wanted to do,” Bromfman said. “We tried to play it as real as possible. Of course, for entertainment and everything, you have to relate to the character, so when he's with his family we play the music more emotional — like when his family is going away, or when he has stay away from the country he loves. He's sort of our hero, but our anti-hero at the same time.”

Bromfman has worked with José Padilha and Wagner Moura (Pablo Escobar in Narcos) throughout his career, the trio collaborating on smash hits such as Elite Squad and Elite Squad: The Enemy Within. While both Moura or Bromfman are yet to be confirmed to take part, Netflix has already contracted Padilha to create and direct a brand-new international original series, this one set in Brazil.

Considering Moura’s imminent departure from Narcos — Escobar will die sometime during Narcos Season 2 — and that the new series will be touching on the recent political scandal that shook Brazilian politics down to its core, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine Moura, whom Bromfman describes as the Tom Cruise of Brazil, and Bromfman himself hopping on the project alongside Padilha, if only to give the proper credit where it's due internationally.

“I absolutely love working on Narcos, but I would love to tell the story of Brazil — and everything that's going on — like we did with Elite Squad 1 and 2,” Bromfman said. “[Narcos] has been a huge success, so we've proved the point that people are interested in what's happening, or what’s happened, in South America. But also that they're willing to — that sometimes it's even more interesting if it’s realistic, that it’s just not drug dealers speaking bad english but that they’re speaking in their native language.”

All three are Brazilian, with Moura having to learn Spanish alongside Japanese teenagers in anticipation of Narcos Season 1. Bromfman says Moura’s Spanish has come a long way, and that Narcos Season 2’s Spanish-speaking viewers will be impressed by Moura’s ability to adopt an accent that is as real to life as Escobar’s own.

Stayed tuned to iDigitalTimes for Narcos coverage as we get closer to the premiere of Season 2.