Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... on the 1994 Atlantic album or, if you're a devoted fan of the film, on one of the post-2000, fan-engineered bootlegs for an adequate, but still unsatisfactory survey of the new age music from a cult classic. Avoid it... on all of the albums if you expect any of them to give you a decent presentation of Vangelis' original recording in consistent sound quality, for this highly overrated, largely ambient work isn't worth the trouble. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Blade Runner: (Vangelis) Readers of Filmtracks have long mentioned the lack of any editorial commentary about Vangelis' memorable and, for some, groundbreaking new age score for Blade Runner at this site. There has always been good reason for its omission from the official discussion, however, because Blade Runner is perhaps the single most frustrating piece of film music to have ever tantalized and perpetually eluded listeners through the decades that have followed its debut. The score's questionable application in the film and its long, unsatisfactory history on album have defined it as a mess of a proportion perhaps not seen in any other place in the history of this genre of music. Those who have admired the soundtracks of Evangelos Odyssey Papathanassiou through the years are well aware of the disgruntlement that the translation of his music to album form yields, but the cult status of Blade Runner, a production superior to most of Vangelis' other collaborations, gives this particular score special meaning for many collectors. Director Ridley Scott's 1982 vision of a bleak future for Los Angeles remains very well respected for its thoughtful commentary about existential matters and the relation between humanity and the robots it creates to serve its needs. Harrison Ford, at the height of his career, plays a type of cop known as a "blade runner," hunting down ("retiring") the robots ("replicants") that have gone rogue and returned to Earth after escaping the perils of space exploitation and wars. The cinematography and art direction of Scott's rendering of L.A. in 2019 was the clinching factor in the success of Blade Runner, despite a fair number of fallacies of logic that present themselves whenever an apocalyptic version of the future is set in such a near term. Scott himself has obsessed about this film considerably through the years, seeking a level of perfection in several different edits of it that extends beyond even his bizarre fascination with altering seemingly everything he has ever done. He finally achieved peace of mind in regards to Blade Runner in 2007 (by his own admission), when his 25th anniversary director's cut was released to fans still eager for another incarnation of the concept. As most film score collectors know, Scott has a nasty habit of badly editing, rearranging, or outright replacing the original music in his films, and while most of the attention in these regards rests with Jerry Goldsmith's frustrating outings with Scott, Vangelis' music for Blade Runner was not immune to the "Scott effect" either. The tone of Vangelis' work for the film was almost purely atmospheric, following a "stream of consciousness" approach to the new age sounds provided for many of the film's individual scenes. To spice up the musical environment of Blade Runner, Scott licensed music from Gail Laughton's "Harps of the Ancient Temples" and Japanese group Ensemble Nipponia's traditional pieces, among other source items, aiding in the ambiguous, multicultural landscape in Los Angeles' dark future. "Memories of Green" came from Vangelis' own 1980 album "See You Later." The employment of new age sounds in films was a trend made popular in part by Vangelis' use of sequencers in both this score and Chariots of Fire the year before. Each cue in this kind of score plays like a separate new age track on an album typical to that genre, with only Vangelis' distinct electronic and vocal textures providing any sense of overarching continuity to the works. The most interesting aspect of Blade Runner in particular is the fact that so many people love the film and get hung up on the storied history of this score on album that few actually stop to fully consider the merit of the music as written for the film in the first place. In the case of Vangelis' later scores for 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Alexander, an immense sense of resonant beauty carries the music well enough to compensate for the lack of structural depth or coordination across the entire work. In a basic sense, if the atmosphere is gorgeously harmonic enough, the tossing aside of usual film music conventions isn't as troublesome. Both of those later scores, however, had trouble fitting well in various scenes on screen, and Blade Runner suffers from the same problem. What works on a new age album doesn't necessarily capture the nuance of a particular scene, and there are points in Blade Runner when Vangelis' music simply distracts from the underlying emotional impact of the character interaction. The "Love Theme" especially has a way of forcing a noir-like element into the mix without convincing sincerity. Despite the handful of scenes in Blade Runner not complimented by Vangelis' music, the composer does capture the other-worldly aspect of the picture in a general way. The score features a fair amount of dissonance by Vangelis standards, often employing seemingly random keyboarded lines accented by a variety of tingling percussion effects. These higher elements lend a slightly metallic sound to the treble and are therefore somewhat futuristic, but rarely do these sounds combine with the sequenced portions with any satisfaction. A variety of vocal tones are employed, from the masculine, full choir environment more notable in his later scores to solo operatic performances and other vocalized singing in manipulated form. A solo saxophone identifies the relations between Ford's lead and Sean Young's character, though this instrument is seemingly distorted electronically to the degree less striking than in Robert Rodriguez's Sin City two decades later. The voices are at times distorted intentionally, though with the official album presentations of Blade Runner containing so much distantly placed dialogue from the film within the score tracks, some listeners may not notice any intentional alterations for artistic purposes. Thematically, Blade Runner is not completely devoid of identity, but like Vangelis' other famous scores, it doesn't elaborate well (or at all) on any particular idea. The aforementioned love theme is as adequately soothing as anything could be in the score's otherwise drab environment, but its usage is restricted to the same repeated fragments of recording. The composer recorded a separate, operatic theme for the character that has nothing to do with the main idea. A descending figure heard prominently in "Main Titles" does not become a cohesive element in the score. A redemptive, but faint melody accompanying the gripping death scene for Rutger Hauer's antagonist-turned-sympathetic and the accompanying "I've seen things" monologue is singular as well. Vangelis saves the score's most memorable theme for the end credits, during which a highly propulsive rhythm drives a surprisingly harmonic theme (complete with harp and timpani effects) in a manner that the action scenes in the film could have used. The theme is extremely simplistic and has no noteworthy secondary phrase, interlude, or bridge (however you want to call it), but it stands apart after an otherwise anonymous listening experience. Considered as a whole, Vangelis' score for Blade Runner resides closer to the realm of sound effects and/or new age album atmospherics rather than anything resembling a truly effective film score. His work congeals in the last few scenes, the "Tears in Rain" and "End Titles" cues finally establishing an effective stance. But, despite all the fuss you hear about Blade Runner from those who continue to perpetuate both the composer and film's cult status, it's simply not as impressive of a work as the film could have used. The other aspects of the production support the music, ironically, and Scott's tinkering with various source songs and other material was likely of no help. Rumors have persisted that Vangelis is not fond of having his work edited and rearranged in films, but that hasn't stopped him from continuing his collaboration with Scott into the 2000's. One area in which Vangelis is himself guilty of muddying the waters of his own creations is his disrespect for the original recordings of music he conjures on the fly for his assignments. Finding an original recording of a Vangelis score (the music that you actually hear in the film) is a task that has frustrated many collectors, most of whom end up turning to bootlegs of various creative but still unsatisfying methods of obtaining the music. Vangelis tends to rearrange and re-record his own music liberally, thus causing most of the music you hear on his albums to differ, sometimes quite strikingly, from what was heard in the films. In this history of his behavior, Blade Runner has been especially maligned. With a handful of official albums and a plethora of bootlegs, there still does not exist, as of the conclusion of the 2000's, an accurate representation of this score in clear sound quality on album. Despite the high profile nature of the film, the original recording never received an LP release. In fact, an official album didn't exist until a CD belatedly (and poorly) addressed the situation in 1994. But Blade Runner was represented by two products prior to that, both problematic for different reasons. The first was a re-recording of about half of the score by "The New American Orchestra," a pop-oriented group that included soloists who would go on to orchestrate or perform with John Williams and James Horner in future decades. This group, led by conductor Jack Elliott, availed itself of the absence of an official soundtrack release to fill the void for ten years (who could blame them for cashing in?), both on LP and CD. Released by Warner Brothers' "Full Moon" label in fuller form on LP in 1982 (including significant improvisation based upon Vangelis' original score cues), a 1987 CD version of this recording cut that material back to 34 minutes that better followed the score. The light jazz interpretations of Vangelis' "Love Theme" and the incredibly poor electronic and orchestral blending for "Main Title" and two versions of "End Title" make this performance more of an irritation than anything else. It fails to capture the general spirit of Vangelis' textures and therefore fails. A much better re-recording of the "End Title" (and actually very listenable) would be accomplished for one of Silva Screen's compilations of the early 1990's. In 1993, the first bootleg of Blade Runner arrived in the form of 2000-copy pressing from the "Off World" bootleg label, available for only a short time through soundtrack specialty outlets in the pre-Internet era. Because CDr technology did not exist at the time, a pressed bootleg of this kind was relatively rare, and some have long speculated that controversial soundtrack record producer Ford A. Thaxton was associated with its creation or distribution. Running at about 72 minutes, this album included all the pertinent original material from Vangelis, complimented by the Gail Laughton "Bicycle Riders" piece, Jack Lawrence's "If I Didn't Care," Robert Randles' trailer music, and the brief John Williams "Ladd Company" studio logo music. Unfortunately, its sound quality was nowhere near acceptable levels, failing to emulate to any degree the impressive clarity that Vangelis' recordings (even going back to this time) have exhibited. Never the less, this bootleg was greeted with fanaticism and fueled the many other bootlegs to follow. Likely in response to this popularity, Warner's Atlantic label finally decided to release an official soundtrack album for Blade Runner in 1994, compiling 58 minutes of music generally related to the film but not always the original recording. Some of the tracks by Vangelis on this album were simply inspired by the film (and eventually used in Scott's later cuts) and others were alternate performances that didn't match what was heard in context. To make matters worse, dialogue riddles this product, mixed with the same extremely wet, echoing technique as the music itself. This wishy-washy atmosphere may work well for a score in the fantasy realm, but it makes the dialogue somewhat useless on album. For very casual fans of Blade Runner, the 1994 album is all that will be required. The trio of tracks from "Wait For Me" to "Love Theme" is nothing less than Vangelis easy listening at its best. But more bootlegs were destined to come, the first of which from Romania in 1995. This pressed, "Gongo" label album was similar to the "Off World" CD of 1993 but drops the trailer music, replaces one of the source songs, and adds the "Blimpverts" piece based on a traditional Japanese opera. In the early 2000's, a flurry of CDr bootlegs resulted from the engineering of the surround channels on Blade Runner's DVD releases. Sound quality was improved, but ambient sound effects are a detraction. From 2001 to 2003, these bootlegs came from the fake labels of "Esper," "Deck Art," "Los Angeles, November 2019" (with mostly ambience), and another "Off World" variation. Some of these took material from a Blade Runner video game while others found the Laughton and Japanese material from albums specific to those genres and artists. These supposedly complete bootlegs ran over 100 minutes in length but still suffer from inconsistencies in sound quality despite the best of modern fan engineering. They also fail to address Vangelis' continuing meddling with the score, a circumstance compounded by the official 25th anniversary 3-CD set from Universal Music that accompanied Scott's definitive (and hopefully final) director's cut on DVD in 2007. This set had all the promise of finally solving most of the lingering problems with the previous commercial and bootleg products, but it is unfortunately a tremendous dud. Of its three CDs, the first is simply a copy of the 1994 Atlantic album. A remastering is claimed, but there is no substantial difference in quality. The second album, which was supposedly to fill in the unreleased material, includes mostly alternate takes of those cues, along with more fresh music recorded specifically for this occasion. It only adds two or three actual, original score cues to the equation. The third CD is a disgrace, with all-new "inspired by the film" pieces of dubious merit, most of which frightfully dull, mixed with spoken word vocals by various personalities from Hollywood and world politics. The two additional CDs offer no meaningful or particularly interesting music, and with fewer liner notes than many of the bootlegs, the $30 Universal set should be shunned. Thus, in the end, there is no truly satisfactory album for Blade Runner in existence. The fact that the score remains extremely overrated by fans is the most neglected aspect of this entire mess, however. Watch the film instead.
Music as Heard on the Re-Recorded 1987 Album: * Music as Heard on the 1994 Atlantic Album: *** Music as Heard on the Various Bootlegs: ** Music as Heard on the 2007 Universal Set: ** Overall: ** Track Listings (1987 Full Moon Album):
Total Time: 33:15
Track Listings (1993 Off World Bootleg):
Total Time: 72:22
Track Listings (1994 Atlantic Album):
Total Time: 57:33
Track Listings (1995 Gongo Bootleg):
Total Time: 70:17
Track Listings (2001 Off World Bootleg):
Total Time: 102:49
Track Listings (2003 Esper Edition Bootleg):
Total Time: 112:54
All artwork and sound clips from Blade Runner are Copyright © 1987, 1994, 2007, Full Moon/Warner Brothers, Off World (Bootleg), Atlantic Records, Gongo (Bootleg), Off World (Bootleg), Esper Edition (Bootleg). The reviews and notes contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Filmtracks Publications. Audio clips can be heard using RealPlayer but cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 9/27/09, updated 9/27/09. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 2009-2013, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
1987 Full Moon
