The avant-garde music hidden in The Hunger Games

Switch to the mobile version of this page.

- Username
- View Profile
- Edit Profile
- Log Out
- Log in
- Create Account

The Chicago Reader

Archives | RSS

« A John Cage Q&A with composer and A… | This is an irony-free zone »

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

Will Katniss defeat Darth Vader and destroy the One Ring?

Will Katniss defeat Darth Vader and destroy the One Ring?

For a fairly devoted sci-fi nerd, I know remarkably little about The Hunger Games. I know that there are some sort of games involved, and that these games have something to do with some type of hunger situation. I know blah blah something something the Capitol. I know that my smart friends like to point out that our society's seemingly insatiable appetite for a movie portraying children murdering one another for the amusement of a fictional corrupt and decadent society is, from a certain somewhat reasonable perspective, not all that different from that fictional corrupt and decadent society's thing for bloodsport. Whenever someone tells me something to that effect, I act like I haven't already heard and read that exact same idea a couple dozen times already because I don't want to take away from their moment.

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.