“Los Angeles November, 2019,” announces the title in white letters surrounded by a black screen. The nighttime skyline bursts with fire coming from the top of some buildings while many points of light denote what is a densely populated area, flying cars cross the skies, a blue eye pupil reflects the scene, and the camera approaches a pyramidal building and inside in a blue greyish room an interview is about to begin. The synthesizer track brings a vibe of an industrial and inorganic future that still somehow packs a soul. ‘Blade Runner’ (1982) would grow to become a heavily influential sci-fi picture to the point of crossing not only the genre but also the medium it inhabits, and its soundtrack, composed by Greek musician Vangelis (1943 – 2022), is as influential as much being a landmark in the symbiotic relationship between the sci-fi genre and electronic music.
“Electronic music aurally mirrors the modernism often associated with science-fiction visuals and themes. Visions of strange new worlds benefit from complementary soundtracks,” says sci-fi writer Jon Frechette in an interview with The Big Picture Film Club. Alongside Todd Luoto, Frechette is the co-creator of BBC’s science fiction narrative podcast ‘The Skies Are Watching,’ which was lauded at the Tribeca Festival last season.
Electronic Music’s primordial roots can be traced back to the first instruments that came by the end of the 19th Century and the dawn of the 20th Century, like the Telharmonium organ that synthesized the sound of orchestral instruments with considerable precision. Some decades before, modern sci-fi storytelling was taking its first steps with the patched up corpse in the book Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley and the futuristic tales crafted by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
In the 1920s, Soviet inventor Leon Theremin developed the Theremin, which produced a peculiar non-acoustic sound that would go on that feels like the soundtrack to its literature contemporaries Isaac Asimov and John W. Campbell and their visions of a possible future.
These worlds had their first on-screen contact with Bernard Hermann’s score for ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ (1951) which brought an unearthly howl by employing a radio wave antenna and knobs to control pitch and frequency, which was performed with a simple hand wave in its magnetic field. Hermann furthered the sense of strangeness to the story of an alien visiting Earth to warn its inhabitants that their warmongering ways are a threat to other planets, a theme that resounds with the world we live in now.
However, even after ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still,’ Hollywood pictures still used the new technology for particular moments while favoring traditional orchestral soundtracks. Nevertheless, in 1956 cinema arrives in the ‘Forbidden Planet,’ the first picture to have an electronic score from the beginning to the end, a game changer.
Its launching pad started to ignite when MGM producer Dore Schary met cutting-edge experimental artists Bebe and Louis Barron in a Greenwich Village Club and presented his idea of them providing 20 minutes of rare electronic sound effects. In the end, that third of an hour became the whole score as MGM’s music department opted to back the Barrons, and they worked in the New York studio to create their out-of-this-world sounds. It marked the first time MGM recorded outside its studio lot, thus carving a milestone in cinema and music history.
When sci-fi and synthesizers break barriers
That is how the culture got to the present moment, where electronic music and sci-fi pictures share a close bond. The Barrons would influence Vangelis’ work in ‘Blade Runner’ that has layered synth sounds and sinewaves, making the soundtrack a character itself as the viewer follows Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) and his hunt for the replicants led by Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), who, in turn, just want to prolong their short lifespan, all in a dystopian Los Angeles stripped of its golden era glamour. Vangelis’ compositions for the picture are ingrained in many conversations about soundtracking in many different media formats.
For American musician KiNG MALA, “electronic music feels futuristic and often surreal, which serves the sci-fi genre well, but honestly, when a sci-fi movie has a primarily electronic score, I tend to find it boring and predictable.” This line resonates with the many “heirs” of ‘Blade Runner’ and their propagation in the “content production” era brought by the streaming services and echoing the straight-to-video days.
MALA is working on new music that is inspired by horror films such as ‘The Witch,’ ‘The Shining,’ and ‘Midsommar.’ Not only a musician but also a cinephile, her eyes and ears are also connected to the sci-fi world, including the ‘Alien’ saga that is a horror sci-fi classic.
“The ‘Interstellar’ soundtrack is one of my faves, it uses silence and simplicity in a really genius way. I really love that it’s mostly orchestral rather than using synths and samples. I also really loved the soundtrack for ‘Alien Romulus,’ it felt very horror inspired and unique. Also, obviously, ‘Dune 2’ was insane,” says MALA, which explains that there is still room for orchestral music in the genre as performed by Hans Zimmer, and although there is a symbiotic relationship with electronic music, synthesized sci-fi soundtracks have the challenge of bringing something new to the game.
For Jon Frechette, Russia’s Andrei Tarkovsky (1932 – 1986), a world cinema giant, is a director who mastered working with electronic music in sci-fi worlds. “The soundtrack to ‘Stalker’ (Tarkovsky) is so good. It’s strange, evocative and meditative, like the film itself.”
The 1979 picture tells the story of three future travellers crossing a forbidden area and finding a heaven where fantasies are fulfilled, and truth is revealed. All tuned with the poetry and symbolism from Tarkovsky’s mind. On the other hand, different from ‘Stalker,’ mediocre electronic soundtrack to a non-special sci-fi picture can become just noise in the background, mirroring the words by KiNG MALA.
Still, to those that are special, such as ‘Forbidden Planet,’ ‘Blade Runner,’ ‘Tron: Legacy,’ ‘Blade Runner 2049,’ ‘Stalker’ and others of its ilk, soundtrack becomes an aspect that not only aggregates to the narrative but has a life of its own crossing through genre and format barriers.
