Thursday, March 19, 2015

Alien


Alien (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Music by Jerry Goldsmith

Renovatio Records goes all the way back to 1979 for you to revisit Jerry Goldsmith's terrific score for Ridley Scott's sci-fi horror masterpiece Alien. The widely known and highly praised film stars younger versions of Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Ian Holm, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto and John Hurt, and sees them as a crew of a spaceship who are stalked by a very aggressive extraterrestrial creature. Since its initial release, the film has been regarded as one of the best horror science fiction films ever made and became the starter of a very successful saga that is still being revisited by not only filmmakers but also game producers and creators. The film owes much of its success to the magnificent otherwordly sets and landscapes and to the vicious yet erotic design of the creature itself, envisioned by the late H.R. Giger.

For the score, Scott was using some of Goldsmith's previous works as temp tracks. This ultimately led to the director hiring the composer to produce one of the most characteric scores of his career. Despite many production issues concering Scott ordering new alternate cues of several pivotal scenes and even dropping almost entirely a fantasy romantic title theme, Goldsmith managed to develop one of his most visceral scores. Instead of focusing on themes, the composer went for atmosphere and created an array of disturbing stingers along with an exotic instrumentation in order to build an intense and dissonant soundscape that considerably elevates many of the most frightening scenes of the film.

The score was first released in 1979 and later re-printed in CD in 1988 by Silva Screen Records, in an issue containing roughly 30 minutes of music. In 2007, the score received a new treatment by Intrada Records in the form of a long 2-CD album presentation that includes the complete score, plus the alternate takes recorded by Goldsmith. Now, Renovatio Records brings its own arrangement of the score and presents it for you to musically revisit and explore those dark metal corridors, vast cold inhabited landscapes and cavernous derelict ship interiors, along with the occasional Xenomorph bursts of terror that Goldsmith's music evokes so well. Enjoy it!!

Track Listing:
1. Main Title (4:10)
2. Hyper Sleep (2:44)
3. The Landing (4:30)
4. Derelict Ship (5:44)
5. Facehugger (3:38)
6. Nothing To Say (1:50)
7. Here Kitty (2:05)
8. Dallas In The Shaft (4:30)
9. Parker's Death (1:48)
10. Blockade (2:53)
11. No Time (3:11)
12. Alien On Board (3:04)
13. Ripley Confronts Terror (3:02)
14. End Title (4:24)

Total running time: 47:33







Cover Artwork:



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