|
According to some sources, Ridley Scott invited Vangelis to see a preliminary version of the film. Vangelis got terrorized and bewildered for what he saw. Bewildered by the beauty of the movie and terrorized because he thought the foreseen future of Blade Runner very reasonable. The first thing he wanted to do was to check the length of the film and take familiarity with its environment, to understand its meaning. Which are the feelings expressed by the film? What does it convey? Eventually Vangelis created a musical world which had the characteristic of a futuristic nostalgia and yearning; a whirling ensemble of motionless romanticism, of haunting electronic backgrounds, of street blues, delicate celestial nuances and a heart breaking gloom. Something powerful and disruptive, that is still considered nowadays one of the most stunning and beautiful soundtracks ever created. But how did he manage to achieve this result? At that time, in 1982, Vangelis was experimenting the sounds of percussive instruments. He was trying to mix these sounds together with the ones produced by his synthesizers, he was trying to get an electronic/acoustic sound. But Blade Runner was asking something very different from the style he had used before in his previous soundtrack as in Chariots of Fire. Chariots of Fire was a simple, intimate and human film. But Blade Runner was an enormous adventure, a completely different story, mixed between past and future. Where you could see the wildest and strangest things. It was a world where the newness was at close contact with the ancient. Where the ancient did meant the nostalgic essence of the past. And there was another big problem: time. In the major part of the movies from Hollywood, soundtracks are the latest element to be created, and they are finished in few days or weeks. But Vangelis is the most "craftsman" among musicians; not only he does compose, arrange and produce his music, but he plays it too. This means that the Blade Runner soundtrack was the working result of a single man. Vangelis makes music by hand, in the same way Disney drew his cartoons. And to do this, it requires much time. His working method is very similar to Ridley Scott's technique "stratification". The musician is used to improvise the melody of every track, record it and then enrich it with sounds and backgrounds, by reprocessing it over and over again. |
