Future Ruins is a first-of-its-kind music festival: a day-long event where the world’s most influential film and television composers step out from behind the screen and onto the stage.
Curated by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross — the Oscar-winning duo behind Nine Inch Nails and many of the most arresting scores in contemporary cinema — Future Ruins reimagines what a music festival can be. On November 8, at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center, a lineup of celebrated composers will step out from the shadows of the screen and into the spotlight, many for the first time.
Staged across three immersive spaces, the festival is designed to be thoughtful and atmospheric — a rare opportunity to hear this music on its own terms. Each composer is given room to reinterpret their work for a live audience, offering performances that span from orchestral grandeur to minimalist electronics, from unsettling ambience to pure cinematic catharsis.
The lineup is nothing short of historic. Among the performers: Cristobal Tapia de Veer, known for his surreal, genre-defying scores for The White Lotus, Smile and Utopia; Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow, the minds behind the eerie sound worlds of Ex Machina, Annihilation and Black Mirror; and Danny Elfman, whose iconic collaborations with Tim Burton shaped an entire era of fantasy and gothic cinema. Also appearing are Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin, the cult legends of Italian horror; Hildur Guðnadóttir, composer of Joker, Tár and Chernobyl; and a rare live performance of Howard Shore’s unforgettable score for David Cronenberg’s Crash.
Additional performances include Isobel Waller-Bridge (Fleabag, Emma., Black Mirror), John Carpenter (Halloween, The Thing, Escape from New York), Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein (Stranger Things), Mark Mothersbaugh (The Royal Tenenbaums, Rugrats, Thor: Ragnarok), and Questlove, reimagining the cinematic soul of Curtis Mayfield. The lineup continues with Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (Candyman), Tamar-kali (Mudbound, Shirley), Terence Blanchard (BlacKkKlansman, Malcolm X), and Volker Bertelmann (Hauschka), whose score for All Quiet on the Western Front earned him an Academy Award.
At its core, Future Ruins is about rebalancing the frame — giving composers the presence and recognition they’ve long deserved, and inviting us to listen more closely to the emotional language that has defined the stories of our time.
Future Ruins
📍 Los Angeles Equestrian Center, 480 W. Riverside Dr., Burbank, CA
🗓 Saturday, November 8, 2025 — Doors open at 2:00 PM
🎟 Get tickets here
