Description
Double album with gatefold cover
John Carpenter is a rarity among film directors in that he is also a composer who writes the musical scores for his movies. Carpenter’s 1981 film Escape From New York was a kind of genre hybrid, a science fiction crime thriller with suggestions of a spaghetti Western thrown in. Set in a near future when Manhattan has been converted into a no-man’s-land prison, the movie needed an appropriately futuristic soundtrack, and Carpenter came up with a score for synthesizer that he played with his sound designer, Alan Howarth. Despite the instrumentation, however, the composer retained a style familiar from such earlier works as Halloween. He favored simple, repetitive keyboard figures, generally two per sequence, set in a fast-slow counterpoint. The Escape From New York score had a few changes of pace, notably a borrowing from Debussy and an ersatz Broadway show tune, Everyone’s Coming to New York (Shoot a cop with a gun/The Big Apple is plenty of fun), written by Nick Castle, but most of the music sounded like earlier Carpenter scores, similarly creating a tense, ominous tone much of the time. The high-tech sound was sometimes at odds with the bombed-out sets in the film, but it helped maintain a tense mood in a movie that sometimes threatened to become comical because it was so stylized. The expanded version also sees Howarth adding re-edited and retitling previously released material to come up with an additional 20 minutes worth of cues and excerpts from the film’s arch dialogue. There was music from two cut scenes and an unused closing-credit theme, all of it in a consistent style with the previously heard material.
Track list:
1. Main Title
2. The Bank Robbery
3. Prison Introduction (dialogue)
4. Over The Wall/Airforce One
5. He’s Still Alive/Romero
6. Snake Plissken (dialogue)
7. Orientation
8. Tell Him (dialogue)
9. Engulfed Cathedral (Debussy)
10. Across The Roof
11. Descent Into New York
12. Back To The Pod – Version 1
13. Everyone’s Coming To New York
14. Don’t Go Down There (dialogue)
15. Back To The Pod – Version 2/The Grazies Come Out
16. I Heard You Were Dead! (dialogue)
17. Arrival At The Library
18. You Are The Duke Of New York (dialogue)
19. The Duke Arrives/Barricade
20. President At The Train
21. Who Are You? (dialogue)
22. Police Action
23. Romero And The President
24. The President Is Gone
25. 69th Street Bridge
26. Over The Wall
27. The Name Is Plissken (dialogue)
28. Snake Shake