Friday, March 30, 2012
Film / Music The avant-garde music hidden in The Hunger Games
Posted By Miles Raymer on 03.30.12 at 03:00 PM
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And now, thanks to an article in Wired, I know that the film's score—but not its T-Bone Burnett-produced soundtrack—contains bits of a nine-minute synthesizer piece recorded by an obscure pioneering electronic artist named Laurie Spiegel.
Spiegel created the piece in her home in 1975 1972, under conditions that, in an age when you can easily sequence multitracked synthesizer recordings on your phone, seem fascinatingly primitive:
While recording "Sediment" in her tenement apartment in Manhattan, Spiegel used a semi-modular Electrocomp 200. She recalled having to turn her refrigerator off to keep the analog synthesizer in tune."It was a five-room apartment running on a single 15-amp fuse," she said. "When the refrigerator went on, half the oscillators dropped by a quarter tone. . . . I had to turn the refrigerator off, or it would ruin the take."
"Sediment" is a hypnotic assemblage of layered, otherworldly sounds that nearly 40 years later still sounds excitingly alien. You can listen below.
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