ribonucleic
12-30-2012, 07:42 PM
Howard Shore's third collaboration with filmmaker David Cronenberg represents the composer's most tautly atmospheric work to date. Created largely via Synclavier, Videodrome's eerie electronic effects and subtly ominous melodies brilliantly evoke the film's hallucinatory eroticism while at the same underscoring the media manipulations that galvanize its narrative. Like Cronenberg, Shore is fascinated by the physical interrelationships of man and machine, and while Videodrome boasts the structural complexity and harmonic language that are hallmarks of creative thought, its cold, remote textures and manipulated sounds bear few traces of human participation. This is music that harnesses the transformative power of technology to warn against its growing influence over everyone. - AllMusic
Videodrome was the third film of Cronenberg's to be scored by Howard Shore. For the recording, Shore used dramatic orchestral music that increasingly incorporated, and eventually emphasized, electronic instrumentation. This was designed to follow the protagonist Max Renn's descent into video hallucinations. In order to achieve this, Shore composed the entire score for an orchestra before programming it into a Synclavier II digital synthesizer. The rendered score, taken from the Synclavier II, was then recorded being played in tandem with a small string section. The resulting sound was a subtle blend that often made it difficult to tell which sounds were real and which were synthesized.
The album is not a direct copy of the music used in the film, but rather a remixing. The mix was an assembly of the film's original tracks that often accentuated the various layers of the music differently than in the film itself. It also includes elements of synthesized speech and sound effects. The mix was done by Scot Holton of Var�se Sarabande, who loved many of the subtler elements of the films score and made them more prominent in the albums tracks. Shore has commented that while there were small issues with some of the acoustic numbers, that "on the whole I think they did very well." - Wikipedia
1. Welcome To Videodrome (04:13)
2. 801 A/B (07:17)
3. A Slow Burn (04:49)
4. TV Or Not TV (05:10)
5. TV Passions (05:51)
6. Pins And Needles (03:05)
7. Long Live The New Flesh (03:26)
Total Duration: 33:51
Music Composed by Howard Shore
Realized on Synclavier II
Synthesizer Programming: Tom Coppola
Computer Programmers: Peter Hedeman & Maury Rosenfeld
Varese Sarabande VSD-5975, released September 8, 1998, out of print. Please PM for link.