Audiodrome

"Max, I would like you to try this on for size"... Listening this morning to Howard Shore's soundtrack for Videodrome, and quite an extraordinary 30-odd minutes of New Flesh it is too. The soundtrack contains all the music from Videodrome but augmented with additional electronic effects and processing. One might even call it an early example of remixing and reconstruction, which seems very appropriate to Videodrome's theme of mutation and "reprogramming". It's a surprisingly abrasive suite of music too, with torrents of electronic noise sometimes overwhelming Shore's central Videodrome theme music, and anticipates glitch music by a good decade - the opening few minutes of the soundtrack could easily be mistaken for an Autechre track as layers of sound squelch, squiggle and ricochet off one another to dizzying effect. Meshing with the cold, mechanical textures are Shores's beautiful use of strings, which remind me of Goreki's Symphony No. 3, as they soar into the upper register (and put to excellent use in the film's final sequence when Max Renn embraces "total transformation"). Incidentally, the album sleeve credits Alan Howarth for engineering duties, forging a link between Videodrome and the great electronic soundtracks of Escape From New York, Halloween II, Halloween III: Season of the Witch...