Here’s a preview of the work Basement Jaxx is doing for the score for the upcoming inner city vs outer space thriller, Attack The Block.
Steven Price is credited with the soundtrack and Basement Jaxx with ‘additional music’. It’s Basement Jaxx’s debut as film score writers.
They describe their track The Ends, above, a s a “big brooding slice of bagpipe dubstep.”
The soundtrack follow recents electronic scores by Daft Punk (Tron Legacy), The Chemical Brothers (Hanna) and The Crystal Method (London).
It’s been a long time, though, since there’s been an electronic soundtrack on a par with Wendy Carlos’s A Clockwork Orange, the Vangelis score for Blade Runner or Brian Eno’s Apollo.
Who would you like to hear score a new film? And are there some electronic scores for recent films that you think didn’t get enough attention?
Recently I have been very excited for electronica’s breakthroughs in cinematic soundtracks.
My personal favorite soundtrack recently, has to be The Chemical Brothers, Hanna score. I think it shows not only how good The Chem Bros can be at making soundtracks, but how versatile they can be with that music. The sheer amount of Chemical Brothers music, that people hear daily, goes quite unnoticed to the untrained ears.
Depending on where you live, electronica may or may not be a common genre for the masses.
Recently big name electro has been showing up in every movie and commercial on TV, more and more, and it’s great to see the social acceptability of it grow.
The Crystal Method scoring the movie London, should be really great!
Anyway,
I’m excited to see how many more professional electronica producers start taking to the studio to score movies.
Will we miss the days of “techno” or synthesizer enriched music being an underground “nerdy/raver” exclusive activity?
There was a rumor back in the day about development on William Gibson’s Neuromancer for film. Apparently Aphex Twin was supposed to score the thing. Would have been perfect.
That would be wicked.
I'm not that interested in the Basement Jaxx score – sound like they are getting called on to add a couple of songs and not much more.
I'd love to see Steve Roach or Robert Rich do some soundtracks. Both can do propulsive rhythmic music and more melodic stuff.
Would absolutely love to see Vangelis do another sci-fi soundtrack, also.
Most scores contain some electronic bits, especially in TV shows it seems. Sometimes it's noticeable, sometimes it's a little more ambiguous or hard to spot. When I had to choose someone to score a good film or episode of a TV series I would pick myself. I'd probably fail miserably, but the whole idea of writing music or sounds to go with moving images and dialogue has had me fascinated for probably as long as I can remember.
They really ALL contain electronics, be it sample based, post production, or any number of sound fx. Adding soundtrack music to video, though, is a great way to add continuity, substance and direction to the electronic music. Something a lot of stuff on the web lacks. Soundtrack music really is the easiest to make, because the visual reference, which adds cues for transitions, and tempo, etc. I have recently been harvesting clips from the website archive.org, because of it's high public domain content. Just grab some clips, slap them together and do your best to make your recordings fit. You will be surprised how succinct it can get.
Some opinions: Vangelis have a tonne of soundtracks. The one for the film, 'The keep' still stands out for me, but maybe equally for the visuals as the music. Be sure to back track their library. The Aphex Twin doing a soundtrack, would be too awesome! ~ but for a movie adaptation of that shitty, overhyped, diatribe of a book, not so much. Maybe for the Difference Engine though…