Cult post-punk single of the highest order... you love your Magazine, The Fall. Wire, Homosexuals etc. well now you can add Autopilot to the list. Quite possibly the greatest one off post-punk single of all time out of Britain, it's so ace it's hard to believe it didn't become a chartbusting hit.
Incredible opening sequence and score to Forced Vengeance. Layers of spectacular thickly textured synthesisers, oriental vibes and anthemic drama. As previously stated in the post about William Goldstein's score to Eye For An Eye, many of the best soundtracks are for movies you don't know or care about.
More soundtrack-y goodness from legendary 80s bands. An instrumental of immense lyrical charm. Gorgeous profoundly emotional stuff. I dunno if it ever got used in a film or tv show...
On the evidence here New Order should have become massive soundtrack composers. Alas that was not to be. This track however has been used numerous times on soundtracks for 80s teen movies, video games, documentaries, cop shows and several Netflix series.
Elegia is Italian for elegy which makes sense as this sombre and mournful instrumental is dedicated to Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis, their former bandmate who killed himself.
I didn't even know a 17 minute version of this existed but apparently the five minute version on Low-Life (1985) is edited down from this lengthy original.
From the dude who produced 23 Skidoo's Coup (1984) and did the brilliant score to Richard Stanley's cyberpunk flick Hardware (1990) comes this slice of soundtrack gold. A sombre slow-crawling dystopian vibe here that is actually for an Italian telly movie directed by Mario Bava's son Lamberto.
Once again a soundtracks to a z-grade 80s horror flick that outshines all other contributions to the film. Rod Slane's The Ripper OST has never been released. This 11 minute suite extracted from the movie and edited together by Fish Man starts out eerily sad quickly becoming cinematic with compounding layers of suspenseful sound and soon enough alarming atmospheres are achieved. At 3:00 those incredible chiming synths enter rippling kaleidoscopically outwards eventually deforming. More sonic layers are insidiously added, the pile up reaching immense density and aural capacity. Thick textures of dramatic synthetic sound are deployed to great effect and by 6:30 some über-80s guitar tones arrive then it's back to dark tones before ending with a tropical neon nights synth jam.
It's a remake of his Zombie theme. More like a cleaned up, more uplifting version. Peak mellotron choir goodness. Creepy heroic.
Fabio Frizzi - Zombie 2 Main Title (1979)
I think I prefer this though. There's something a bit more grime-y, drowsy and unstable about it, quite torpid compared to the above remake. Funereal zombie stoner synth.
Fabio Frizzi - Paura Nella Città Dei Morti Viventi (1982)
It's pretty hard to go past this here, the original Beat Records soundtrack LP of City Of The Living Dead though. One of the all time great Italian horror scores. Amongst the gorgeously mournful analogue synths, epic ghostly mellotron choirs, tenebrous atmospherics, there's even some acoustic guitar and quite possibly the most emotional use of a fretless bass ever in the history of recorded music on the unbelievably poignant Paura E Liberazione.
The daisy-age gone sour. A deranged criminal tale set to sweet innocent music. So it's not the usual 90s Memphis underground horror movie samples, it's a lovely tranquil Isley Brothers sample of Highways Of My Life mixed with Graveyard Production's melodic chorus that has fermented into something off key sickly sweet and absurdly unsavoury. It's a bit of creepy fun, lo-fi used to delirious perfection. They tread a fine line on Grab My Mask: Always verging on satire of hip hop's glamorisation of nihilistic ultra violence and yet it's still often unsettling. "Don't make me get my OJ gloves" is a particularly menacing line that's probably also black comedy genius. I'm pretty sure there's also a conflicted Robin Hood-esque moral tale lurking in amongst this complex barrage of words too.
King Goldi - Strap Like An Army Tank (Video incorrectly titled) - [1996]
Insane underground lo-fi psychedelic horrorcore* 90s Memphis stylee with some rockin' guitar samples and screwed techniques. That cheap creepy synth is something else. The music here has more in common with Chrome or The Residents than say 1996's rising stars of rap Jay Z or The Fugees.
*I feel like 90s underground Memphis Rap with morbid, horror, satanic and dark psychological themes was never properly named or in fact given a proper sub-genre term to seperate it from other Memphis rap and Horrorcore from other geographical areas. Using the term horrorcore with 90s Memphis rap is somewhat misleading as it really doesn't sound anything like Esham, Gravediggaz or bloody ICP, only really overlapping in some dark psychological lyrical themes. The 90s Memphis flows and beats are an entire (aesthetic sound)world apart from these Northern counterparts.
If they can retroactively coin the term Mid-School Hip Hop they should have no qualms about a seperate genre name for the music I'm talking about here. Bloggers and aficionados refer to it as evil Memphis shit or devil shyt. Perhaps I should try to come up with one... then again I can't stand retroactively titled genres especially if it's for music created created more than 5 years previous let alone 30 years ago. I mean is anybody seriously really using the term Zolo outside of Rate Your Music nerds?
The kids are reading history in reverse. So some of these children who weren't even born in 1999 call this dubstep. Not something that inspired or influenced dubstep but actual dubstep. This temporal collapse is distorting knowledge. It's a particular pedagogical and epistemic problem that is being applied across the board as seen in debates about slavery where they conveniently leave out of the timeline how the British stopped slavery and poured immense financial and human resources into this incredibly moral endeavour... correct me if I'm wrong I think perhaps sociologist Frank Füredi addresses the problems with reading history wrong and its disastrous consequences... anyway sorry this is a tangent not relevant to this amazing track.
...this was the b-side of their hit 99 with the wibble wobble bass, crisp jittery beat and overall immense dubwise production.
