John Carpenter - Lost Themes - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

It's been a decade since John Carpenter recorded the material that would become Lost Themes, his debut album of non-film music and the opening salvoin one of Hollywood's great second acts. Those vibrant, synth-driven songs,made in collaboration with his son Cody Carpenter and godson DanielDavies, kickstarted a musical renaissance for the pioneering composer and director. In the years since, Carpenter, Carpenter, and Davies have released closeto a dozen musical projects, including a growing library of studio albums andthe scores for David Gordon Green's trilogy of Halloween reboots. With LostThemes IV Noir, they've struck gold again, this time mining the rich history ofthe film noir genre for inspiration.Since the first Lost Themes, John has referred to these compositions asInchsoundtracks for the movies in your mind.Inch On the fourth installment in theseries, those movies are noirs. Like the film genre they were influenced by,what makes these songs InchnoirishInch is sometimes slippery and hard to define,and not merely reducible to a collection of tropes. The scores for the greatAmerican noir pictures were largely orchestral, while the Carpenters andDavies work off a sturdy synth-and-guitar backbone. The noir quality, then, issomething you understand instinctively when you hear it, as in connected inan emotional way.The trio's free-flowing chemistry means Lost Themes IV Noir runs like a welloiled machine-the 1951 Jaguar XK120 Roadster from Kiss Me Deadly, perhaps, or the 1958 Plymouth Fury from John's own Christine. It's a chemistrythat's helped power one of the most productive stretches of John's creative life,and Noir proves that it's nowhere near done yielding brilliant results.

2016 from the filmmaker and musician. The musical world of Lost Themes II is also a wider one than that of it's predecessor. More electric and acoustic guitar help flesh out the songs, still driven by Carpenter's trademark minimal synth. This manifests itself brilliantly in songs like lead single InchDistant Dream,Inch which hitches a familiar Carpenterian beat to an expressive drum performance and rides it to a thrilling conclusion. The eerie InchAngel's AsylumInch let's an ethereal synth line command the first three-quarters of the song, before turning over the melody to an acoustic guitar, and InchVirtual SurvivorInch delivers a blast of the sci-fi menace that characterized his great scores for films like Assault on Precinct 13 and They Live. Lost Themes II delivers eleven compelling new tracks for which fans can continue to score the movies in their minds.

NBC Symphony Orchestra - Music of Alan Shulman [COMPACT DISCS] date 08/27/2002