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| Vangelis |
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.
@Amazon.com: CD or
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- Music as Written for the Film: **
- 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: **
