The point is that these soundtracks were good to start with. Carpenter wrote and performed most of his scores himself, or with collaborators – The Thing was a collaboration between him and no less a luminary than Ennio Morricone. Zombie Zombie add beats and other signal flourishes that simply add to the drama of the originals. The main theme from Halloween still makes you hold your breath in anxious fear-induced excitement, but a track like 'The Bank Robbery' (from Escape From New York) is given an urgent beat and frantic synth breakdown at the very end, making it ideal for minimalist dance floors; like a remix of the Airwolf theme tune, only with more drama. The Escape From LA main theme becomes an hard-edged, industrial jack-booted synth-fest, not unlike Deutsch Amerikanisch Freundschaft circa 'Sex Unter Wasser' or Nitzer Ebb circa 'Let Your Body Learn', a sort of cinematic Electronic Body Music as that genre became known. Fans of Carpenter and electronic music generally should definitely look out for this.
Two highly limited edition CD-Rs, in hand-made packaging, from the Apollolaan label fell on my doorstep in the last week. The first, a 3", single-track CD-R from Space Weather (Alistair Crosbie, who has graced this blog before, on electric guitar; Brian Lavelle on electronics and Andrew Paine on bass) is entitled The Weather's Maiden. It was an edition of 100 and is now all sold out. This is a release that sounds markedly different at different volumes; at low volumes it sounds like a bleak, distant sonic landscape of hissing radio waves and transmissions from some frozen, desolate, abandoned world. For some reason it sounded to me like a soundtrack to the film Hardware, a British film from 1990 that painted a very bleak picture of the future, wherein savage death robots were unleashed on the populace to control the population growth. Listened to at louder volumes reveals other aspects of this sonic stew; heavily-processed, looped guitars (I think) dominate the background and deep bass tones and drones offset the spiralling, whining electronics. It is something constantly shifting, rarely static, and could have extended far longer than the fifteen minutes we have been gifted here.
The other Apollolaan release was Peter Delaney's live set from Amsterdam's VPRO festival in May 2009. This 5" CD-R is again an edition of 100 and comes in a cardboard Muji CD sleeve adorned with the white outlines of houses. I had never heard of Delaney before being sent this. He is an Irish singer-songwriter whose songs are frankly a delight for the ears. These are delicately-rendered acoustic folk ballads, occasionally dark and mysterious and evoking the vastness of the sea; but mostly these songs are uplifting affirming in nature. Delaney's perfect live set proves him to be an accomplished lyricist and his guitar playing is intricate and finely-wrought, gentle and enveloping, his voice having remarkable range and a subtle emotional intensity.
There is much that I could say about this, but to write further wouldn't ever come close to doing these songs justice. So I will just say that I honestly don't think I've ever heard a more beguiling record in my life. Higher praise than that I honestly can't find. There are a few copies left at apollolaan.co.uk; you would be wise to buy one quick.
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