Jerry Goldsmith — Alien OST
Lets firstly set the scene with the scores two main players: Goldsmith had being employed to score Alien at the height of his career in 1979; a year after he’d won his one & only Oscar for his famous & highly recognizable score for the first Omen film. Alien was Ridley Scott’s second film after the critically praised Duellists & there’s a feeling that he felt he had a lot to prove. And basically what occurred was a battle of wills; the first & main bug bear was Scott didn’t like Goldsmith’s original main titles theme which he felt were too space bound romantic for his dark picture. This was the start of the problems between the pair which escalated as the film was cut down, sonically messed about with & ultimate resulted in whole scenes of the film been rescored using music from Goldsmith’s 1962 soundtrack for the film Freud; with-out Goldsmiths say so.
On the first disc we get to hear the original score as Goldsmith intended it along with 6 tracks of rescored alternate cues with the total disc coming in at nearly 77 minutes of music. This disc offers up Goldsmiths sonic vision for the film & while you can see Scott’s point with some of the more romantic galactic feel to the string work on the title theme- they rather bring to mind the hopeful space bound sonic sentiments found in the likes of Star Trek the monition pictures soundtrack (which Goldsmith also scored). There’s also lot to like & marvel at here that sadly was underplayed in the final soundtrack such as: the grand & graceful folds of strings and brass that dip down into more edgy atonal darkness, his use of unusual & often noise bound instrumentation such as didgeridu(an aboriginal instrument made of wood hallowed out by fire & termites) & the Serpent (a huge ancient wind instrument with many curves which sounds like a mixture between a tuba, bassoon & french Horn). The use of Echoplexed recordings of an Indian conch to create the eerier reverb tone that Goldsmith called the ‘alien effect’. Yes sure elements of just about all of this made it onto the finshed soundtrack(except of course the romantic strings)- but it was often in a very different & shorten form.
The Second disc offers up the soundtrack that appeared on the finished film along with another six bonus tracks & this clocks in at the lot shorter runtime of near on 50 minutes- so you can see how much was left out of the end film. The set also comes with very extensive liner notes & track by track break downs which are in the full colour 30 page booklet; this really is the cherry on the top of this release & makes very interesting, informative reading uncovering the story of the often untold battle that went on behind the scenes regarding the soundtrack
So in finishing off this is truly is the ultimate release of this classic soundtrack showing both Composers & directors sonic vision for this classic & ground breaking movie- to find out more & order direct go to here