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.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 18th, 2011 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Ennio Morricone, soundtrack, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.