The good thing about christmas is there are a few days after all the family mayhem when you can sit around and watch tv all day long and not feel like your wasting time. Actually watching old 70's sci-fi movies is not wasting time, especially when the music is purely electronic. The Andromeda Strain is a fantastic Robert Wise movie about an alien virus that comes to earth, and some geeky scientists have to camp out in a secret goverment bunker and defeat it. The soundtrack is by Gil Melle who was an experimental jazzer / film and tv composer who dabbled in electronics. He did a couple of early 70s episodes of Columbo [my favorite tv program] and Kolchak [cheesey 70s version of the X Files]
The Andromeda soundtrack is 90% electronic and is completely amazing. There is a wonderful vinyl version that came out in a hexagonal gatefold sleeve that I would love to get my hands on. As far as I can tell the electronic sounds he used came from home-assembled processors and sound generators as opposed to one of the modular systems that were around at the time [1970]
I agree that this film and its soundtrack are truly brilliant.Along with THX1138 it is one of my favourite film scores. I didn't realise that Melle had also worked on Columbo-I am a huge fan so must go through all my DVDs and check which episodes he worked on-thanks for the info!
I agree that this film and its soundtrack are truly brilliant.Along with THX1138 it is one of my favourite film scores.
ReplyDeleteI didn't realise that Melle had also worked on Columbo-I am a huge fan so must go through all my DVDs and check which episodes he worked on-thanks for the info!