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...

Reading Videodrome

“It has a title now, by the way,” called Harlan.
Max stopped in his tracks.
“It’s supered for a few seconds at the end of this transmission. No credits. Just one word. VIDEODROME.”

More novelization reading and this weekend it was the turn of Dennis Etchison's adaptation of David Cronenberg's Videodrome screenplay. I was particularly keen to read this novel (written under Etchison's Jack Martin pseudonym) on foot of the interview with the author on Arrow's Videodrome Blu-Ray, and was surprised to discover the novel pretty much sticks to the same narrative trajectory as the film despite the numerous revisions the screenplay underwent. Still, there are some surprises. The novel opens with Max Renn awaking from a dream where he is about to be ritually executed, and there are special effects set pieces that fell by the wayside where Cronenberg's ideas perhaps outran Rick Baker's wizardry - at one point a television in a store window smashes thru the glass and slithers across the sidewalk to deliver Max a warning message from Brian O'Blivion. Still, Etchison's writing is vivid and powerful - his Max Renn is often a more engaging character than Cronenberg's, the novel frequently switching to Renn's own perspective to chart his increasingly perilous state from the Videodrome mutation, and in this respect neatly anticipates Seth Brundle's decline in The Fly. Recommended reading.