In affiliation with LA's Beyond Fest, my latest favorite label, Death Waltz, who does vinyl re-issues of horror soundtracks, has issued an extremely limited amount of these scores on cassette:
Halloween II
Halloween III
A Field in England
Assault on Precinct 13
So, you'd better hurry if you're a tape nerd like me who wants these John Carpenter / Alan Howarth gems in a never before offered format.
The Death Waltz label is quite possibly the coolest thing happening in the vinyl world. This UK label is reissuing horror and sci fi soundtracks on high quality wax with beautiful and elaborate custom artwork. John Carpenter's score for his B-movie masterpiece is still stunning thirty years later. Now we can hear it the way true analog geeks are supposed to. Last ye we received Vangelis' Bladerunner score on wax and now this? Be still my beating heart. DO grab this fast! Death Waltz only presses extremely limited quantities. Don't miss out.
We've all witnessed the new pandemic of John Carpenter worship. Many are tired of it, many have just discovered it. Personally, I saw my first Carpenter flick around 1984, so this music is branded into my psyche. Anything in said vein works for me. This is not to say everyone does it well, and the phenomenon is to the point where current artists are not only imitating the past, but they're imitating their contemporaries, causing a dull stagnancy that corrupts any collective innovation.
There are a few that are innovative with the nostalgia love. Josh Reed is one of them. Kangarot takes cinematic elements and adds a nice backbone of 80's electro / hip hop, ebm and industrial beats. I see NYC kids in the subway breakin' when I listen. He's a breath of fresh air for this genre. There's also a perfect fluidity throughout the recording, which by the way, is all hardware. No laptops here.
I've tried to come up with clever tags to distinguish what he does... horror breaks, body rock menace... um, ok, I'll leave that up to someone else.
