Wax on Wax #12: Film Adjacent
Gasp! It's more of the same! This week we're continuing on a bit from last time and looking at a few more albums and their varying association to film. I never thought I'd write a music blog, but for the longest time I was convinced I'd start a blog or podcast for movies. Don't be surprised by a part three sometime in the future! These albums are all very electronic in nature and (almost) no songs from any of them were even featured in any particular movie. But each of these artists has a strong connection to film through other work, and today we're going to explore that.
The mustache eternal, the voice of Lynch, The Greek Gods of Synth, and a guy who's all outta bubblegum. Lets dive in!
I made a musical mortal sin when I was in high school. I made sweeping generalizations and blanket statements about entire genres of music I knew nothing about. On top of that, while doing zero listening, or research, I would proclaim, "I don't like 'X' genre." This sentiment became a problem for me because I started believing this story I kept telling myself. I'd hear music from the 80s, or maybe a country song I liked, and anger and insecurity about my taste would flare-up. "How could this be good, I'm not supposed to like this." Living in Spain for a year broke me out of a ton of bad habits like this. I told myself when I got there that "I'm here all by myself, and it's time for a complete reinvention." It became a time for me to be open to new things, experiences, challenges, and music. It was a monumental decision that, to this day, I still benefit from. One of the largest barriers I had up was my supposed dislike of electronic music. Since all of my friends at Berklee Valencia were DJs, I had no choice but to dive headfirst into the world of EDM and electronic music. What I found was that I loved it. I traveled with my friends to go to famous dance clubs in Berlin, Ibiza, Barcelona, Prague - you name it. The scene in Berlin, in particular, was incredibly eye-opening. The dance clubs there are like musical churches. It was a spiritual experience I hadn't shared with music before or since. It was special, and I cherish those memories and experiences. Returning to the states, I knew I had to do a deep dive. After all, I loved listening to and making dub music, which in many ways was the first kind of electronically manipulated musical art form. I knew I had to go way back and start at the beginning. Moroder.
From Here To Eternity is actually more of a new listen for me, as I kind of put it off for years. I didn't think I was quite ready for it, but I finally reached a point where I thought I was ready to understand it. It lays out the template for what a dance set should be. Tracks are long, tempos are tight and similar, songs fade in and out of each other, you never know where one starts, and the next one ends, and the voice behind the controls is unique and singular. From the moment I put it on, I knew that I'd made a mistake not spending years dancing around listening to it. It's everything that I loved about the new school EDM I was introduced to in Spain but done by a mustachioed, disco-daddy straight out of Studio 54. It's an incredibly fun and infectious listen, one that grows on you and reveals more and more of itself to you with each revolution around the turntable. The craft on display by Giorgio Moroder is so strong, and from what I know about the old instruments he must have been using, pulling this off would have been no easy feat. Full of pulsing drum machines, synths, vocoders, and the flair of someone at the peak of his powers - From Here To Eternity is truly a masterpiece.
Hey, wait, wasn't this blog supposed to have something to do with movies?
Right, I almost forgot. So last month, I bought the 4K remaster of Scarface, one of Brian De Palma's many triumphs as a filmmaker. Believe it or not, I was obsessed with this movie when I was about 12 years old. I have no idea how or why I was allowed to watch such an insanely violent movie, but I'm sure glad I did! Scarface along with The Godfather and Pulp Fiction were extremely helpful in developing my taste and love of film and music from an early age. On this most recent rewatch - as the opening credits revealed themselves, my jaw was on the floor when I realized who else worked on this film. "Holy shit, of COURSE, Oliver Stone wrote this movie..... wait... MORODER did the music??!" I screeched as my girlfriend nodded and ate more popcorn. What I realized was the seeds for my love of this music were planted so early, and I'd spent much of my teenage and adult years intentionally stifling my own interest in it. I watched Scarface through an entirely different lens. The fact that Moroder stepped up and delivered a score that equaled the magnitude of the picture on screen was remarkable to me. As soon as the film ended, I got on Discogs and bought an original first pressing of From Here To Eternity.
Needless to say, this record has been on an endless loop since I received my copy. If you are unsure about electronic music, this is where you should start. There are gems, and then there are gems and this is definitely in the latter category. While From Here To Eternity is wildly different from anything I heard while living in Spain, it still manages to capture the spirit of that music perfectly for me. Moroder's work with Donna Summer, Bowie, Daft Punk (RIP), and others further cements his mastery of this style, as well as the breadth of discovery left for me as a listener. From here, to an eternity of spins of my record player.
While we're on another blog about movies, it seems inevitable that we'd have to feature a sequel of sorts this week. The Voice of Love by Julee Cruise is the follow-up to Floating Through The Night which sees returning collaborators David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti once again providing only the dreamiest of tunes for Cruise to croon over. Floating Through The Night is a perfect album in many ways, and to return to that sound with the same collaborators is bold, to say the least. It's not often that lightning strikes twice in the same place, and that is most often the problem with sequels, be they film, music, or otherwise. Lynch and co., more or less nail it once again with The Voice of Love, and it's hard for me not to keep this one spinning on my turntable. I may prefer Floating Through The Night overall, but I have listened to The Voice of Love almost constantly since my copy arrived.
If you enjoyed the first set of songs, you can find much of what you loved here as well. This song suite is slightly less dreamy and a bit more somber and wistful, but if you're looking for the perfect soundtrack to your Twin Peaks fantasy life - look no further. Once again Lynch writes all the lyrics and produces, while Badalamenti composes all of the music. There are almost no instances where these two get together for a collaboration that doesn't find its way onto the screen one way or another, and The Voice of Love is no different. Here we have several songs as the bedrock for much of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Where that film feels like a major departure in tone from Twin Peaks the series, the music here is what remains a near-constant between the two. Without these two Julee Cruise albums, I wonder how much more discordant the series and the film would feel. Having this music as the tie that binds them both is perfect.
I mean it when I say I've just about played this one out the last few weeks. It's not often that I return to an album over and over again anymore. There is so much incredible music out there to discover, and keeping up on this blog requires me to always keep searching - but The Voice of Love has found its way to my turntable more times than I can count. While this record has fewer recognizable songs and earworms than Floating Through The Night, what it does have is an incredible ambiance wholly its own. Each track bleeds into the next seamlessly, and it goes far in making your life feel like it's being shot at 24 frames per second no matter what you're doing. If you like David Lynch, dream pop, and this trios blend of nightmare jazz - you can rest assured that this is every bit as worthy a listen as anything they've done together before or since. My only hope now is they give us one more and finish out a trilogy. I can dream, can't I?
Phaedra is the first release on Virgin Records by seminal electronic band Tangerine Dream, released in 1974. If you're curious as to what this album sounds like, look no further than the cover. Twisting, turning, slithering white noise - washing over Moog synthesizers and early 70s sequencers. The music evokes being adrift in whatever fantasy setting you choose. Close your eyes, and maybe you're floating through space, flying through some Kubrick-ian wormhole. Maybe, you're stuck on a boat - choppy seas nipping at your heels with no respite in sight. Maybe, you're baking in the sun, lost in the desert of Frank Herbert's Dune. This music is fertile soil for the imagination, and it surprises me not one bit that this group became so in demand for film scores after this released. Tangerine Dream would later produce music for William Freidkin's film Sorcerer (excellent, underrated film), Michael Mann's Thief, and many more excellent 80s fantasy films that were no doubt made better by their involvement. Phaedra is one of kind, sort of terrifying, and essential listening. My dog thought it was weird. Take what you will from that.
Famous eccentric-billionaire Richard Branson is somewhat responsible for this band's early rediscovery and giving them their first major record label deal. Phaedra was the first album produced by the band that introduced the sequencer/synthesizer-driven sound that made them famous. Sessions for this album typically lasted 10-12 hours a day due to the band having to tune these early machines as they were very susceptible to temperature changes. The title track is 17 minutes long and takes up an entire side on the record. "Phaedra" shifts and squirms in and out of key during its long runtime; by the end, it sounds much different than when it started. The sessions were mired by almost every kind of technical issue imaginable - compounded by the analog nature of all of that era's equipment. Tape machines went down, the console had constant problems, and tuning the synths could take hours out of each day. After two weeks of recording every single day, they had merely 6 minutes of music finished on tape. I honestly can't imagine how such a frustrating situation could have resulted in something so incredible. Plus, Richard Branson was probably there, which I'm sure didn't help a single thing.
The title of the album is in reference to the ancient Greek myth of Phaedra, which going into this listen, I had little knowledge or familiarity. The best and most succinct explanation I found was from the website GreekMythology.com. Go figure!
Phaedra was the daughter of King Minos and Queen Pasiphae of Crete, in Greek mythology.
She was the wife of Theseus, but she fell in love with her husband's son, Hippolytus. According to a version of the story, Hippolytus had mocked Aphrodite by telling her to be a virginal devotee of Artemis; so, Aphrodite made Phaedra fall for him, but he rejected her love. Bitter, Phaedra lied to her husband saying that Hippolytus raped her. Theseus cursed his son; so, a bit later, Hippolytus' chariot horses were scared by a sea monster and dragged him to death. In another version, Phaedra lied to Theseus, who killed Hippolytus; out of guilt, Phaedra committed suicide.
So there are (at minimum) two versions of the story, both resulting in your typical incestuous, back-stabbing, dramatic, suicidal Greek bedtime tales. I swear these stories were just the soap operas of their time. Who needs Twin Peaks in ancient Greece when you've got this stuff to chew on? I digress. What the band takes from this myth seems open to interpretation. As I said in the beginning, I get a lot of things from this music, but Greek tragedy does not spring to mind. I'll leave those connections to the smart bloggers.
All in all, Phaedra is one of the best electronic albums I have ever heard. I've loved Tangerine Dream's film scores for a long time, and I've always found that they add an immense amount to any film, but their traditional studio albums have always eluded me. I have their mid-80s album Tyger which was a bit of a letdown, and their catalog is so vast that it's hard to know where to even begin. Even including their film work, Phaedra is the best piece of music I have heard from this band so far, and if you're looking for the shallow end of the Tangerine Dream pool to take a dip in - start right here. Trust me, the water is warm, and you won't regret listening to it. There are dozens of Tangerine Dream albums, but none that I have heard match the cosmic brilliance and utter majesty of Phaedra.
If someone had a gun to my head and said, "Pick between David Lynch and John Carpenter," I think I would be in major trouble.
Both Lynch and Carpenter have the uncanny ability to bring a chill down your spine via your eyes and your ears alike. There are very few auteurs like either one of them; in that the totality of their creativity is what makes their work excel. Every part of the process, every piece of the puzzle - has their shine on it. However, the biggest difference between the two is how they go about their respective creative mandates. Lynch is a visionary - closer to a painter than a filmmaker. Seeing his vision come to life on screen is the draw; to meddle with that is to court disaster (see Dune, 1984). Carpenter, on the other hand, requires creative control out of necessity. The producers for Halloween couldn't afford a composer - so Carpenter stepped in. It's cheaper and easier for him to write his movies than to wait for something he liked thrown his way. Same goes for sets, makeup and all kinds of things in his movies. In another universe, Carpenter is just another journeyman director making B-movie genre films, but his imagination, vision, and creative autonomy make him a unique standout among many of his 80s counterparts.
John Carpenter has long been one of my creative heroes and a massive source of inspiration. I remember the first time I saw The Thing it arrived in my mailbox via Netflix's now ancient DVD delivery service. I put it on in the middle of the night, knowing I was in for something gross and scary, but I watched anyway. Immediately as the credits started rolling, I restarted the film and watched it again. Not only did that movie blossom into a full-blown Carpenter obsession I still have not let go of, but it solidified my love of horror and genre films. Ironically The Thing had a score by Ennio Morricone - granted, it was unlike anything he'd done before and was no doubt filtered through Carpenter's lens. Halloween, Assault On Precinct 13, The Fog, Big Trouble In Little China, In The Mouth of Madness, They Live, Escape From New York, and countless other films of his are a mainstay in my blu ray library. I watch them all the time, and his scores are, no doubt, an integral factor in their rewatchability.
I was lucky enough to see Carpenter live, two years in a row, on Halloween night at the Pantages Theatre while living in LA in 2017 and 2018. The 2018 show was particularly noteworthy because Halloween (2018) was in the middle of its massive theatrical run and the entire event felt like a special celebration. Nick Castle, the man who portrayed Michael Myers in the original film was in the audience, the classic 1958 Plymouth Fury from Christine was in the lobby of the theatre, and there were tons of b-list celebrity nerds throughout the crowd. It was Halloween night, so everyone dressed up as horror/sci-fi characters (my girlfriend and I went as Rick Deckard and Rachel from Blade Runner). Adding to the celebration was the fact that Carpenter was back. His son Cody, an excellent musician in his own right, was in the band, as was Daniel Davies - son of The Kinks Dave Davies (himself a Carpenter collaborator). The trio had just come off of yet another fantastic collaboration with the Halloween (2018) score and the world had finally recognized how essential John Carpenter was to the history of horror and filmmaking in general. The set was littered with classic themes from his movies, as well as pieces from his recent non-film score albums Lost Themes and Lost Themes II. It was a night to remember and one of my favorite concerts I've ever seen.
Lost Themes III is merely a continuation of the party. It's yet another well-deserved victory lap for a man who I hope manages to take ten more. The songs are slightly less guitar-heavy and very synth-focused. These songs, more than anything on I or II, resemble his 80s work to a startling degree. He's still got it, and Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies helped him unlock this side of himself after being dormant for nearly a decade from the industry. The only downside to this set of songs is, it makes me desperate to see just one more film from John Carpenter. Everyone says he's too old, but the guy regularly goes on tour with his band and records incredible music in the studio constantly. For someone as prolific as he still is, I believe the only thing holding him back from getting behind the camera once again is himself. Lost Themes III is a firm reminder that this guy is the cornerstone of modern horror. Michael Myers can rightfully take his place alongside Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolfman on horror's Mount Rushmore. John Carpenter can do exactly what he wants at this point in his life, and lucky for us, when he's not playing X-Box he's making incredible music. Long live John Carpenter!
Check in next time, we’ll be covering Late Career Gems.
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