Archive for the ‘Ennio Morricone’ Category

Check out my Thing…soundtrack

Monday, July 18th, 2011

Ennio Morricone – The Thing: Music From The Motion Picture
Humanity (Part 1)
Shape
Contamination
Bestiality
Solitude
Eternity
Wait
Humanity (Part 2)
Sterilization
 Despair
 The Thing remains the only horror film directed by John Carpenter that he did not also contribute the score to. But I think it’s fair to say that he found a good replacement in Ennio Morricone.

Morricone is a god of film scores, having written approximately 800 billion in his 82 years (Okay, so it’s more like 500. Still, that’s fucking insane). Even if you don’t know the name Morricone, you are familar with his work. He did this. And this. Also this and this. Some notable Hollywood films he did the scores for include Brian DePalma’s The Untouchables and…Exorcist II: The Heretic.

Hey, they can’t all be bangers.

Morricone’s score to The Thing perfectly captures the claustrophobic feel of the film, although it doesn’t work that well as an independent piece of music. Most of it is so quiet that it is barely audible, and just when your ears have become accustomed to the muted music, it explodes in a menagerie of plucking strings and bombastic horns.

After a while, the soundtrack itself becomes kind of scary, as you wait for it to jolt your system with another sonic blast. While it’s not easy listening, I imagine it would be a great way to liven up your day-to-day activities. Work in a cubicle? Play this on headphones and you’ll have the most intense numbers-crunching session of all time. Clean your home while listening to it, and be prepared for your humdrum dusting to turn into a terrifying battle against microscopic dust aliens.  Listen to it at the bus stop and you’ll slowly start to suspect that everyone around you is really an alien shapeshifter – well, that might happen at the bus stop no matter what you’re listening to, but you get my point.

A word on the technical aspect of this rip. Like I said before, this is a QUIET soundtrack. One limitation of vinyl is that quiet music can be overcome with surface noise, and that was the case with my original recording.

To make it a little more listenable, I cleaned it up using Audacity’s noise removal tool. While the quiet parts are crystal clear now, some of the loudest parts of the score have some very slight distortion. I still think it’s more than a fair trade-off though, considering the ration of quiet-to-loud parts. And besides, I wasn’t about to chuck out 40-plus bucks for a used CD copy.

Posted in Ennio Morricone, soundtrack, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

I Don’t The Twits and the Twits Don’t Like Me

Friday, May 29th, 2009

I’m pretty much done whining about the Twits. There’s only so much yelling you can do to the deaf. They’re obviously oblivious to their idiocy. I called one “an example of everything wrong with the Internet” and he said “thank you, that is a hell of a responsibility.”

Wait, what…that doesn’t even make any fucking sense! There’s no responsibility in being an example you idiot. You can be an example of why you shouldn’t smoke crack, that doesn’t carry any responsibility with it. Jesus Christ. I can’t debate/argue with that! I might as well retort with “Vanilla monkey sky flower!” It would make just as much sense, what’s the point. And complaining about attention whores is a futile endeavor since that’s what they want. It is sad that I haven’t become accustomed to the rampant vitriol and idiocy that dominates the Internet though.

Anyways, I promised two soundtracks tonight, but one of the albums sounds like shit and is going to take some time to clean up. So I grabbed something that is relevant to today’s events instead.

Marilyn Manson
The Horrible People
The Not-So-Beautiful People
Suicide Is Painless
These songs are doubly relevant considering my earlier post today was all about Trent Reznor and horrible people, an triply relevant since Manson has a new album out. “Beautiful People” was always my favorite Manson song, even though at the time I was not a big Manson fan. I thought his shtick was a bit too much and even as a teen I could see he was pandering to an audience. Looking back though I kind of miss the days when he was popular, at least he was trying to make people think, even if it was for bullshit reasons. I’d rather take a billion Marylin Manson’s than one Shinedown or Hinder or whatever the fuck is on radio right now. These mixes are from a 10” vinyl picture disc. I’m including his cover of “Suicide Is Painless” (which is from the Blair Witch 2 soundtrack) as a fucking hint for certain people out there.

The Thing Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
This was another one of my holy grail soundtracks that I’ve been looking for since as long as I’ve been collecting soundtracks. I got it for five bucks last week. Good deal considering the CD is worth twenty times that. As far as I know The Thing is the only Carpenter film that wasn’t scored by him. Instead he got the legendary Ennio Morricone, the composer of classics like The Good The Bad and the Ugly, The Untouchables and Mission to Mars (okay they aren’t all classics). This score is excellent, a great example of music’s ability to create tension, shock and manipulate your emotions. Be warned though, excessive listening may result in nightmares of Wilford Brimley trying to kill you.

Posted in covers, Ennio Morricone, Marilyn Manson, remixes, soundtrack | 1 Comment »