John Carpenter: 'I’m just this old-school person who made a score for a movie'

http://www.theguardian.com/film/musicblog/2015/feb/02/john-carpenter-im-just-this-old-school-person

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For independent film director and horror music savant John Carpenter, the impetus for his first proper studio album, Lost Themes, began when the director was eight years old. In Bowling Green, Kentucky, he queued up at the local cinema with a cereal box ticket for Fred M Wilcox’s much-anticipated MGM space odyssey Forbidden Planet, unaware of the impact the film would have on his life.

“It was an epic, Cinemascope space adventure,” Carpenter explains by phone from Los Angeles. “And the score was completely electronic.”

“The way the sounds and images were married together. I cannot tell you how profound that was. I had just never heard anything like that. I saw it and I said, ‘I want to do that for a living.’”

His father was a music professor and listened to classical music, and Carpenter says classical was the soundtrack to his early life. But it was the distinctive scores of Louis and Bebe Barron, Dmitri Tiomkin and Bernard Herrmann that turned his attention from Bach and Mozart to the modern music of the cinema. “Film music is really different than other forms of music because it’s coupled with an image, which is what gives it its power. Even after all these years, I can still pick out a Tiomkin score.”

A violin and piano dilettante who once performed in a local garage band called Kaleidoscope, Carpenter’s true aptitude for music began to flourish when scoring his late 70s and early 80s films, Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween and Escape from New York. Like the disturbing images they accompanied, Carpenter’s electronic soundtracks were distinguished by their evocations of dread and dystopia, often with the employment of a snaking, keyboard riff and a pulsating synth bass.

“Composing came out of necessity, because I had to,” Carpenter says of his now classic scores. “If you made a low-budget film or a student film in the old days, you didn’t have money. We couldn’t hire an orchestra or a studio to record an orchestra. But I knew I could sound sort of big with a synthesizer. With enough tracks, you could actually sound like something.”

As an album of scores inspired by ‘imaginary’ films, Lost Themes does not stray far from the template Carpenter created all those years ago, but it is, nonetheless, an affecting sampler of miniature symphonies. Using updated keyboards, digital plug-ins and Pro Logic software, the proudly old-fangled musician still managed to capture the rounded, analog tones of his original scores. Opener Vortex re-imagines the sci-fi death-disco of Escape from New York with such enthusiasm that it’s tempting to picture Snake Plissken’s gnarled visage hovering over a burning, post-apocalyptic wasteland. Tracks like the appropriately titled Mystery and Wraith mine the slasher territory of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (which was scored by Italian prog rockers Goblin) and Carpenter’s own Halloween anthem with chilling results. The lilting Night closes the album in a somber fusion of bass and icy atmospherics reminiscent of The Thing.

Related: The Thing set on survival | Anne Billson

Though devoted fans of the director will no doubt take pleasure in matching up vintage Carpenter scenes with the new musical offerings, Carpenter himself is adamant that the songs were beholden to nothing but his own active imagination.

“The whole making of Lost Themes was just joyous,” he says. “I did not have to be a slave to the image. It was only the music.”

Part of the pleasure of the process was the addition of Carpenter’s musician son, Cody, and godson, Daniel Davies, to the album’s personnel. The two-year recording session originated in marathon bouts of Borderlands and Assassin’s Creed video games played between father and son.

“The improvisations started with rock ‘n roll and blues,” he continues. “After we did that a while, we suddenly started scoring. We’d play video games, then go downstairs and play music. Then go back to the video games, and then play music. And suddenly we had 60 minutes of music done.”

Waxing humorously about his own stature within a musical genre he helped to create and popularise, Carpenter admits that he knows little of the legions of contemporary electronic musicians he has inspired such as Autechre, Oneohtrix Point Never and Cliff Martinez.

“I have no idea who you are talking about,” he laughs. “The only tribute I ever got was in some low rent wrestling circuit. There was this Samoan Swat team that came out, and they played the Halloween theme on a cheap boom box.”

When asked his opinion of electronic music’s millennial trends toward miniaturization and microbeats, Carpenter says: “It all sounds thin to me. I’m thinking, don’t they have the same plug-ins that I do? Dude, you can play orchestras now, are you kidding me?”

“I’m just this old-school person who took a crappy synthesizer and made a score for a movie. But other people don’t approach it like I do. I’m making orchestral music with electronic sounds. They are making electronic music with electronic sounds. There’s a difference. The only inspiration I provide to these other composers is when they listen to my stuff, they say, ‘My God, if that guy can score a movie, I can be Stravinsky!’”

Regardless of Carpenter’s self-deprecation, Lost Themes demonstrates why the master of horror continues his reign as one of the masters of the electronic genre as well.

Lost Themes is out on 3 February via Sacred Bones Records; the John Carpenter: Master of Fear season is on at Brooklyn Academy of Music from 5 to 22 February