John Carpenter: Lost Themes Remixed

As John Carpenter began to lose interest in making films, he entered into an unexpected renaissance as one of the most influential icons of the synthesizer age. Carpenter himself will tell you how accidental that status is: He only began composing and recording the scores to his films—starting with his first one, 1974’s Dark Star—in order to avoid having to pay someone else to do it. His use of electronic instruments, even his signature minimalist style—all of it sprang from budgetary concerns. 

But Carpenter’s scores—specifically the ones for Halloween and The Fog—developed a cult following among synth geeks, and this burgeoning fan base has inspired him to try his hand at making music without a movie to compose it for. Encouraged by his musician son and his discovery of modern digital recording software, he released his first solo album, Lost Themes, earlier this year. Although the tracks are smoothed out by bland Logic plugins, it was a pretty decent evocation of his soundtrack work.

If Lost Themes provided an opportunity to reflect on Carpenter’s influence on several generations of electronic musicians, the selection of remixes by other artists tacked on as bonus tracks makes that influence explicit. Now, Sacred Bones has fleshed out the set out with a couple more tracks and Lost Themes Remixed stands as a companion volume to the original record.

Remix albums are tricky things, and the ones that fail (and most of them do) do so for the same few reasons: too many stylistically disparate remixers, too much reverence for the the source material, remixers who are clearly in it for the easy paycheck. Lost Themes Remixed avoids all three. Carpenter’s status seems to have inspired the nine remixers to bring their A game, and Sacred Bones selected committed experimentalists like Prurient, Zola Jesus, and Blanck Mass (aka Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin John Power) who wouldn’t play too nice with Carpenter’s recordings.

Stylistically, pretty much any artist who’s going to want to remix John Carpenter is going to have a few things in common, including a pervasive gloominess and an affection for throbbing, single-note bass lines played on analog synthesizers. As a result, LTR manages to hold together as a unified stylistic statement in a way that isn’t common for remix collections.

Despite the project’s singular focus, LTR doesn’t just reflect Carpenter’s influence on contemporary musicians, but the range of artists that he’s inspired. Prurient transforms Carpenter’s New Age-leaning "Purgatory" into a harsh, icy soundscape. The Blanck Mass reworking of "Fallen" sounds like slasher-movie music from some grimy, glitched-up cyberpunk future. Zola Jesus and Dean Hurley reconfigure Lost Themes’ most classically Carpenteresque track "Night" into vocal house for vampires.

Interestingly, some of the remixers seem to be correcting Lost Themes’ deviations from Carpenter’s signature formula. In its original form, "Abyss" highlights both Carpenter’s knack for building complex arrangements out of deceptively simple parts and his weakness for really corny synth patches. Foetus mastermind J.G. Thirlwell swaps them out for the kind of assaultive analog sounds that set the tense mood of Carpenter’s early films (and which themselves were considered corny at the time). One one hand there’s something offensive about the idea of somebody trying to fix an artist’s new work by making it sound more like his old stuff. On the other hand, I have to admit I like the remix more.