The annual music festival Coachella isn’t exactly the first place you’d expect to find legendary composer Hans Zimmer performing live, but indeed Zimmer took the Coachella stage on Sunday night and pretty much melted everyone’s faces off. Zimmer’s set ranged from Pirates of the Caribbean to Gladiator to even The Lion King as he and a full orchestra performed tracks from some of his best film scores, including yes, The Dark Knight. And now Coachella has made one of the full sequences available online: Inception.

Indeed, Zimmer and his orchestra performed two tracks from the mind-bending Christopher Nolan film: “Dream Is Collapsing” and “Mombasa.” Much is made of the fact that Cochella is basically an excuse to take drugs and watch live music, but seriously, R.I.P. anyone tripping while Zimmer performed this Inception score. Just watching the video here is pretty nuts, so one can only imagine the actual experience in person.

It’s great fun to watch Zimmer himself rock out on stage. Film composers often live pretty solitarily with their work, composing in closed rooms and only seeing their finished work as part of the overall film. But if you’re talented enough to create as many iconic themes and pieces of music as Zimmer, you get the full live treatment. And indeed, Zimmer is actually going out on tour for the rest of this month and into May, so you might get a chance to see this music wizard in person if you’re lucky enough—click here to see tour dates and purchase tickets.

Take a look at Zimmer’s Inception score live at Coachella below, followed by another unofficial videos with less-great audio quality of another portions of Zimmer’s set, The Dark Knight. And below that, watch Steve Weintraub's interview with Zimmer and fellow Batman v Superman composer Junkie XL.

 

hans-zimmer
Image via Hans Zimmer
inception
Image via Warner Bros.
inception-christopher-nolan-leonardo-dicaprio-cillian-murphy
Image via Warner Bros.
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Image via Warner Bros.