It’s been known for some time that the soundtrack to acclaimed heist movie Drive features music by Johnny Jewel. Now the mastermind behind Chromatics and Glass Candy has revealed that he’s a composing an original score for the forthcoming remake of Logan’s Run.

Drive, out in UK cinemas on September 23, stars Ryan Gosling (pictured) as an unnamed stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver. Its maker, Nicolas Winding Refn, picked up the award for Best Director at the 2011 Cannes film festival. The soundtrack features original music by Cliff Martinez (formerly of Red Hot Chilli Peppers), two Jewel productions in Desire‘s Under Your Spell’ and Chromatics‘ ‘Tick of the Clock’, plus Riz Ortolani‘s ‘Oh My Love’ (feat. Katyna Ranieri), College‘s ‘A Real Hero’ (feat. Electric Youth) and Kavinsky & Lovefoxxx‘s ‘Nightcall’.

According to an interview with Jewel in Box Office, he and his collaborator Matt Walker in fact completed an original score for Drive which was rejected; they now plan to release this music as a separate album, or even albums, under the title of Symmetry.

“It sucked because they liked the music, and Ryan was super pumped about it because he’s a fan. And Nic and Ryan had a real distinct vision, but this was his first Hollywood movie and he was used to having 100 percent control of the process. Honestly, because he’s super-intelligent and very professional, I don’t really know the story of why some things got used and other things didn’t get used. But I had a great time working on it. And for a movie that’s not even an hour and a half, I have 14 minutes of music, which is awesome. But I recorded three hours of music.

“I collaborated with Matt Walker who plays drums for the Chromatics and Desire, and we’re going to end up releasing some of that stuff on Italians Do It Better under like an imaginary film project called Symmetry. It was already in motion and we were working on kind of wallpaper, not like forgettable music, but sort of abstract mood music. You can only put so much abstraction on a pop record before it like tips the scales and feels imbalanced or possibly indulgent for what a fan of a rock or pop record wants, so for the last three years I’ve basically been piling up stuff that’s gone into the Symmetry pile, and we’re going to release different volumes of it, and my score for Drive is about half of the first one. So it’s really cool, and the music will be heard—I’m sure because it’s film-based, the score will probably end up in a ton of other movies. Because it’s perfect for film: it’s abstract enough, and it’s not locked into a pop structure, which is really good visually because I know editors have trouble with really strictly structured music.”

Did this soundtrack work delay Jewel’s work on the eagerly anticipated new LPs from Chromatics and Glass Candy?

“In a linear time sense, [working on Drive] stopped everything, things were pushed back, but the process was so intense and abstract that it was really what I needed. I was saying how I really wanted to take a break and do more abstract shit that no one’s going to hear. So now, coming back with Glass Candy and the new Chromatics album, which is finished now, it’s just like coming back with a vengeance, we’re really feeling the beat. Because it’s not like you don’t know what you’re hearing anymore, but sometimes it’s good to work on something else—which is why I do a lot of visual art, too. But I’ve never had to write for somebody else’s vision, you know, where Nic was like, ‘I want this, I want this, I want this,’ so I tried and that was like a really hard exercise. But then coming back to beats where I was in full control, this is my movie. So it was like wearing ankle weights and then taking them off-now things are really happening fast. It was a really good experience in that respect. But it definitely held everything up. I’m only one person, and I gave everything to Drive for the period I was working on it, so that means I didn’t do anything else.”

You can read the full, exhaustive – and pretty exhausting – interview here. In another interview, this time with Movies.com, Jewel reveals that he’s tentatively beginning work on a score for Refn’s projected remake of sci-fi classic Logan’s Run, which the Danish director is due to tackle after Only God Forgives, currently in pre-production, is completed.

“Nick talked to me a little bit about Logan’s Run,” Jewel said. “He mentioned it and was just trying to feel out if I was interested, and I was telling him about how on my 30th birthday, I had a party and I had a blinking stone in my hand, because I was super into that movie and obsessed with the idea of turning 30 or whatever.”

There seems to be a renewed thirst for synthesizer-driven scores in big Hollywood movies, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1980s, when Tangerine Dream improbably became tinseltown’s most in-demand soundtrackers  – take Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s incredibly effective treatment for The Social Network, or Daft Punk’s rather less subtle Tron:Legacy.