FOTW Audio Productions

It’s hard to get away from the fact that the soundtrack of a dystopian future, thanks to all the bio-disaster and post-apocalyptic epics of the seventies and eighties, has a pulsing, detuned, synthesizer involved: from The Andromeda Strain to Escape from New York, the synthesizer gives these films the hard, inhuman edge that’s needed, and is perfect for stories full of futuristic menace.

Drokk, composed by Geoff Barrow of Portishead, and Ben Salisbury, an Emmy-nominated film and TV composer, is one of these. With a mixture of well-known soundtracks, notably, Assault on Precinct-13 and Escape from New York, as well as Blade Runner, Drokk has all the key elements of a “dystopian-horror” synthesizer soundtrack: a heartbeat pulse, long sustained notes, drones, repetitive arpeggios, and sharp detuned stings.

The theme of the album is a tribute to Judge Dredd from the weekly British comic 2000AD.  “Drokk” was a curse-word frequently uttered by the comic’s staple character – a law enforcer and sentence-prescribing judge rolled into one, who would ride around the sprawling future American city, Mega-City One, on a hybrid motorcycle, dishing out penalties to lawbreakers everywhere.

Although 2000AD has never been as well-known internationally as the American comic-houses Marvel and DC, it is still a powerhouse of its own, creating a universe of vast worlds, distinctive stories, and memorable characters like Rogue Trooper, Strontium Dog, and Halo Jones.

Unfortunately the sore point for fans has always been the disappointing 1995 film Judge Dredd with Sylvester Stallone in the lead role, and the similarity, back in the day, of the movie Robocop to the much loved character of Judge Dredd. However, a new (and not a remake) film of Judge Dredd is due out September this year. Simply called Dredd, it has a screenplay by Alex Garland and a budget of 45 million dollars, according to IMDb.

In a meantime, Barrow and Salisbury are reinvigorating and reclaiming some of the mystique of the story, bringing it closer to its roots, with a soundtrack more of its time. There are also a few other influences on the album too: Barrow has acknowledged his love of the German Krautrock genre, and the track “Inhale” is very close to the sound of the band Neu!

The overall album has a few sharp-edged moments, where people will ask you what the hell you are listening to, and despite it sometimes sounding too much like John Carpenter (the heartbeat of the opening track is so close to The Thing) themes begin to emerge that stick with you, and the overall listening experience is pleasurable — in a dystopian kind of way.

Drokk: Music Inspired by Mega-City One is released through Invada.

This is some crazy proto-techno for babies, from Raymond Scott’s 1964 album “Soothing Sounds for Babies”.

Scott had been a great jazz orchestrator from the 30s and 40s, whose music was licensed by Warner Bros and used by Carl Stalling for many, many Looney Tunes cartoons, particularly his composition Powerhouse.

After a successful career in TV, he began inventing his own instruments, coming up with the pre-Moog Electronium, which his soothing baby sounds was composed on.

His vintage jazz music was re-introduced to the public in the nineties, when alt-kids cartoon creator, John Kricfalusi used Scott’s music for his brilliant Ren & Stimpy show.

Speaking of John Kricfalusi, he also used music from the Capitol Production Music library, some of which had already appeared in Image Ten’s Night of the Living Dead.

Anyway, visit the Raymond Scott Archives; or have a look at the documentary recently made by his son, Deconstructing Dad.

         Singer Kristina Brodowski basks in the warmth of an orange stage light

The expression biding your time is an important one to creative people; true artistic success isn’t always tied into youth, or being on the cutting edge of fashion. Often creative people spend a good number of years becoming good at what they do, perfecting their technique, and weeding out their imperfections.

The problem with music, though, as a creative art is that it is so tied into commerce and the “rock star trajectory”, that the only way to be successful is to capture the youth market — and that often means by being young yourself.  When you look at the bands that have had the biggest impact with a mass audience, they have often only ever been a few years older than the audience, and as they age, they take that audience with them, like the Rolling Stones have with the baby boomers.

German band The Sweeps, however, are a few years older than the average band and are working with the sounds they have grown up with, rather than a purely contemporary sound. A trio consisting of singer Kristina Brodowski, and Christoph Duwe and Niels Wesner, who both play synths; provide back up vocals; and add finishing touches with a glockenspiel and a melodica.

Their fourth self-released album, In the Night, showcases their affinity for analogue synthesizers like the Moog and the Italian designed string-synthesizer the ELKA. With many eighties elements in their music (think Cutting Crew, New Order and Clannad) they have acknowledged a love of Italian singer Valerie Dore and italo-disco, but also cite more recent influences like Röyksopp, Air and St Etienne. 

Falling into the same class, as acts like Sally Shapiro (who were also influenced by Valerie Dore) and Ontario’s Junior Boys, the Sweeps have a more mainstream pop range, reminiscent of, funnily enough, Phil Collins, and English band Talk Talk (Gwen Stefani covered their song “It’s My Life” a few years back).

They nail a particular sound that a lot of younger artists are trying to emulate — that cool, French Riviera, discotheque sound, their success lying in the fact that have grown up with it and have a natural infinity for it — and are not just fetishisizing it as generational outsiders.

The other thing that is very interesting about this album is that many of the tracks segue together, something often not looked favourably upon by big record labels who want something that they can market in distinct chunks.

But an album, as a whole, is often a programmed journey for the listener; musicians think carefully about how all the tracks fit together to tell a story — not always conceptually, but in the mood that the songs evoke, and what kind of  feelings the songs will stir in the listener. Major artists have often lamented about letting music executives make decisions about their track-listing in the final stages of their album, and wrecking the feel that they were looking for.

The Sweeps technical accomplishments on this album goes without saying; they have performed, recorded, and mixed the album entirely by themselves — and musically, its fantastic. Tracks like Days Gone By and Synthetic Lover are excellent; conjuring up an imaginative landscape, it would be great if at least a couple of these songs could make their way into normal radio airplay, or onto a movie soundtrack, the way that many neo-eighties songs were recently picked up by Nicolas Winding Refn for his Drive soundtrack.

Below is an extended remix by The Silicon Scientist of one of their earlier songs, Facing the Night, which was recently released on the fourth Radio Cosmos compilation. The original version appeared on their 2009 Missing Pieces album.

There is also a great video for another version of this song by Zak B, a dark trip through Laura Palmer country.

DISCOGRAPHY:

Electric Electric (2006)

The Great Lie about Eternity (2007)

Missing Pieces (2009)

Nostalgia for the Future EP (2010)

In the Night (2011)

*

Want to get social with The Sweeps?

Find them on Facebook, Soundcloud, Myspace and Discogs.

John Carpenter and Alan Howarth at work on Season of the Witch (scan courtesy of Mike Conway)

The growing interest in John Carpenter as a composer of electronic music, and not just a director of horror films, seems to be reaching a critical point at the moment: his music is celebrated in the Vision Sound Music festival in London this weekend; the latest issue of Wire magazine features an interview with his composing partner, Alan Howarth (who will appear at the festival); and French duo Zombie Zombie released an album late last year called “Zombie Zombie Play John Carpenter.”

A renowned hardworker, John Carpenter may not be aware of just how much of an impact he has had on a successive number of generations of electronic musicians. Regarded in the same league as Giorgio Moroder and Vangelis, whose soundtracks for Midnight Express and Blade Runner, respectively, have had a life of their own, Carpenter is often cited as a major inspiration by many electronic musicians.

The real interest in John Carpenter’s music began with his soundtrack for his 1976 film Assault on Precinct-13. For its title theme, he used a simple electronic riff that he had pinched from a Led Zeppelin song, and a spare percussive line composed on a drum machine, giving the film an unusual texture, slightly cold and synthetic, and pre-dating the new-wave/industrial sound of bands like Throbbing Gristle and Coil.

Of course it was the Halloween theme (and the film) that put him on the map, acting as a kind of surrogate audio cue for anything spooky over the last couple of decades (along with the Twilight Zone theme and “Tubular Bells” from the Exorcist).

But Carpenter had also composed a number of other exceptional horror soundtracks – The Fog was amazing, and so was the score to the third “Halloween” film, Season of the Witch, even though it was unrelated to the original. With each successive film, he seemed to go deeper into the music, and his elongated sounds – drones, and wide bending bass notes – toyed with parts of the brain rarely used outside of sleep.

              Zombie Zombie’s version of the Halloween theme live in Glasgow

John Carpenter’s music first started being covered by European groups who wanted to recreate what they had heard in Assault on Precinct 13. German producer Ralf Hennings, as The Splash Band released his own 12″ of the “End Theme” in 1983, near the height of John Carpenter’s influence on the film world.

Strangely, in 2003 – twenty years later – a limited edition CDr came out, entitled The European Tribute to John Carpenter, using the same pumpkin orange colour that the Splash Band had used. It was a compilation of different electronic artists from around Europe, covering and composing tracks in his style, but with a decided dark wave bent. This was at the height of the electroclash movement, where an interest in the origins of modern electronic dance music, in new-wave, EBM, New York electro, and Euro-pop (like italo-disco) was underway. This interest also bought synthesizers back into the standard band line-up, something that hadn’t really been seen since the eighties.

A number of musicians like Holland’s Legowelt, Germany’s Anthony Rother and Booka Shade, and Australian band Midnight Juggernauts have acknowledged Carpenter’s influence on their music. Although Carpenter rarely composes music for films now – the workload is just too great – he has left behind a considerable body of music to be enjoyed.

Most of his music is still available. Besides the bigger Varese Sarabande releases, niche labels like Record Makers (home of Sebastian Tellier) released his Assault on Precinct 13 for the first time back in 2003, while La-La Land Records put out Big Trouble in Little China a couple of years back.

Number 47 of 110 … Sleeve for European Tribute to John Carpenter

This is a recent interview with co-composer Alan Howarth:

For more information about John Carpenter and his music you can visit the Official John Carpenter site.

A student draws the Prophet-5 synthesizer at the Powerhouse Museum

If you live in Sydney, the Powerhouse Museum currently has an exhibition ‘The Eighties are Back’ dedicated to life in the 1980s.

Though sometimes people think of this decade with a groan, lots of great things came out of it, especially in the music department.

Primarily aimed at kids and nostalgic parents, with table top arcade versions of Pacman and Ghouls and Ghosts, and Masters of the Universe and Strawberry Shortcake figurines, the exhibition also contains a great wealth of Australian music history, with flyers, records and posters for metal and punk bands like Mortal Sin and I Spit on Your Gravy, the graf and electro scene, not to mention memorabilia for the whole RAT/pre-rave acid house parties put on at the Hordern Pavillion.

It also looks at how the latest generation of Australian indie-dance acts, groups like Cut/Copy, The Presets, and Empire of the Sun, have borrowed some of their look and sound from this often and unfairly maligned decade.

The exhibition finishes end of March 2011.

For more information, visit the exhibition micro-site:

http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/the80sareback/