2026 October 12 • Monday
Rupert Hine's incredible electronic score for The Shout is the 923rd
Soundtrack of the Week.
There's a lot of cues here and a large variety of sounds. It can be spacey
or kind of electropop-computer. It can be total dread ambience or even be sound
effects for the film. There are also some musique concrète pieces.
Long and thick synth tones form a background for airier, flute-like synth
lines in "My Wife Is Waiting for Me", for isntance, while much of "Trapped"
sounds like an amplified and angry fly.
What sounds like recordings of tortured human breathing start off the title
track, which explodes into a howl of sonic intensity.
"Bass Drone" is like a stripped down Vangelis Blade Runner cue
while "CS80 Strings" is sunny and angelic-sounding.
Real church organ dominates "Harry's Funeral" and then "EMS seq1" is a
straight sci-fi loop with keening synth notes.
There's a whole track of ring modulator ideas and some unsettling
mixes of different instruments and sources, such as in "Tailcoated Shaman".
It's all pretty amazing.
2026 October 09 • Friday
When was the real golden age of UFOs in the US? The 1950s, maybe,
but I think they were still going strong in the '60s. They certainly
became staples of men's magazines of that decade. Here is, for our first
example, the December, 1969, issue of Saga magazine, with "Worldwide
UFO Maneuvers" on its cover.
The article itself is a collection of anecdotes of the familiar "someone saw a UFO
and then something strange happened" variety. Power failures, heat waves, cars
going out of control, humanoid figures wearing what appear to be diving suits and
using hand-held paralysis rayguns on people.
Nothing in here is verifiable or even sourced, beyond vague citations such as
"Australian Flying Review", with no date or issue number. (This was probably
supposed to be Australian Flying Saucer Review.)
But it's a bunch of names, places and dates and typical UFO encounter stuff,
all inconclusive, all pretty typical, all easy to invent. Once you've read a bunch
of these, it seems like it would be pretty easy to make them up.
And even if UFOs still had traction in the '60s, by 1969 it might have been pretty played out. This
UFO article here gets bottom billing, after Ann-Margret and Snowmobile Ski-chuting. (Surfing was kind of played out
by then too.)
In the back there's one of those body-building ads that were very common in magazine and comics for decades. But this one features "movie and T.V. star" Arnold Schwarzenegger,
even though his first movie did not, I believe, come out until 1970 (though only a
couple of months after this magazine's cover date).
2026 October 05 • Monday
The 922nd
Soundtrack of the Week, and the first 2026
Shocktober selection, is Don Peake's music for The Hills
Have Eyes.
This has to be one of the best examples of using a little to get
a lot. There's a piano, a synthesizer, some percussion and some strings
and that's pretty much it.
Most of the cues rely on the piano and synth to create moods of
dread and terror, with strings and percussion added for extra effect
as needed.
It balances texture and atmosphere with some urgent driving
moods. Somewhere in "Stealing The Baby/Lynne Is Shot/RV Fight/Finding The Walkie Talkie"
a drum kit playing a rock beat comes out of nowhere and the synth gets
to groove for a while.
A similar surprise rock/funk idiom appearance comes in "Ruby Runs With Baby/The Rabbit/Brenda Sees Mutant/Dead
Mom Decoy". There aren't a ton of swinging parts in this score but
when they happen, they're great.
This release includes some alternate versions of those as well
as wind sounds created by synth, some axe hit stings and
a couple of tracks of just percussion.
"Criminal" by Public Image Ltd. changes the feel entirely by keeping some of the rock elements
but steering the music into a place that's sparer, more jagged, not funky but not exactly not not funky either.
I don't really remember that song or the next one, "So Long Cowboy" by Westworld. Time to
watch the movie again!
The last song on the record Sheryl Crow's "Hundreds of Tears", which has an appropriate
dramatic and emotional feel to it.
APPEARANCES