David Shire's Apocalypse Now

Currently listening to David Shire's unused score for Apocalypse Now which was recently released on CD by La-La Land Records... I'd consider myself something of an Apocalypse Now scholar but I must admit Shire's score passed right under my radar, so this is a wonderful surprise, and a fascinating piece of Apocalypse Now lore. Unlike Alex North's unused music for 2001 (which I could never integrate into Kubrick's film), Shire's all-electronic score is not that far removed from Carmine Coppola's soundtrack - it's perhaps a little too dynamic for the pace of the film (think Tangerine Dream's music for Sorcerer), but there are a few uncanny moments where Shire's score anticipates the music the Coppolas' composed for the Kurtz compound sequences - this may well be owing to a similarity in synthesizer equipment but it lifts Shire's music to a level beyond a mere rejected score. Fascinating too to imagine what kind of a film Shire was writing for considering the score frequently sounds like it strayed from something more phantasmagorical, and there are sections of music that reminded me of The Fog and Escape from New York, and at one point Christopher Young's Hellraiser ! La-La Land's CD is augmented with an excellent 25 page thick booklet packed with notes on the score, and apparently this release has a limited run of 2000 units so get your copy as soon as you can...