Intrada are about to release a special edition of the late John Barry's soundtrack to the outer space adventure The Black Hole (1979). Remastered from the original master tapes, this also promises to be the entire score, adding an extra twenty minutes of unreleased music. This is also the score's official debut on CD, see Soundtrack Collector for details.
Music samples, more details and CD ordering information on Intrada's website here.
I only wrote about John Barry's music for outer space a few weeks ago, a recurring and favourite theme of mine in all his work. The score for The Black Hole is some of John Barry's best work, regardless of what you think of the movie. Personally, the music has helped transport me into the dark, futuristic adventure. It's fun to see Disney taking some risks, killing off characters (that aren't parents) and even getting metaphysical...
My full review of The Black Hole is here.
Hopefully someone will remaster the movie soon. It looks very poor on "Disney DVD"...
(The above Japanese poster was teleported from the supreme sci-fi nostalgists' blog... Space: 1970.)
Should be really interesting. I believe the reason the soundtrack has never been released on CD before now is because the score was one of the first fully digital recordings and Disney went with four-bit (that's right, [i]four[/i] bit), 32kHz recording. Up to (presumably) now, the results of converting to higher bitrates has proved less than satisfactory, and even the version on iTunes was mastered from analog tapes.
ReplyDeleteThat's something I didn't know before, still this was 1978 and that was probably the LATEST thing. A year or two back I picked up an LP of The Black Hole's OST at a record show and noticed it had "A Digital Recording" captioned on the front. I didn't know such a thing existed at the time but I'm sure it was starting to come in. I guess Disney just wanted to be on the up and up there.
DeleteNecroposting here, but just have to say, this is a STUNNING project, it sounds amazing and was released with a thorough booklet that reviews the entire project. It was clearly brought about by someone with an absolute love for the source material. The booklet covers the development of the film and score, from concept to execution, a critical analysis of each track's style/motif, and concludes with a note from the producer on the long, arduous journey of making this happen. If you are a fan of this score or film, it is an absolute must-have.
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