What Means the World to You: 2015 in Musical Memories
February: John Carpenter — Lost Themes
The first piece of John Carpenter’s music I heard as pop music, instead of “film” music, was the title score to his 1976 siege flick, Assault On Precinct 13. Though horror staples like Halloween or Christine had long been present as a self-dare for an unattended kid with cable, it had taken me a weirdly long time to get too exhaustive in watching Carpenter’s stuff. I may have run out of Cronenberg, begrudgingly drifting to what I assumed was a less perverse version of a similar impulse? I tracked the movie down in the twilight of physical media, when deep-shelved video stores could still exist in Brooklyn. I was obsessive on several media fronts then, making unending iPod classic playlists, still gifting mix CDs like they weren’t politely tolerated clutter. From the first frames, the Precinct 13 music hit me as perfect, under-heard punk, or post-punk, or cold wave, or whatever the fuck. As music.
Put into the world a full year before the first, way-ahead-of-its-time Suicide record, the scary forward momentum of Carpenter’s synths was almost unprecedented. He painted pure menace in blood reds. It’s the sound of unstoppability distilled. If I listen at the right moment it can momentarily grant a faux-toughness, more than the match of anything in front of me. (It’s the theme music for a faceless horde of murderous thugs in the movie, so it’s best not to make anything more than a vague, thematic comparison.) Carpenter’s been exceedingly humble when looking back in the press, often presenting his music as the function of budget and time constraints, something he did because he had to, not because he was the best man for the job. In February, Brooklyn label Sacred Bones put out Lost Themes, the first free floating album as album he’s ever made. While the songs sometimes lack the primal minimalism of his most iconic movie stuff, it’s a solid representation of the things he’s always done. It’s dark and dramatic, with an epic sweep conjured from just a few carefully chosen tones. But it was just the idea of it that deeply moved me, imagining a guy who considered himself one thing for a lifetime, being assured later in life that he was this other thing too.
A month or so after Lost Themes came out, I watched the beautiful, brutal opening sequence of David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, at the only art house theater in the mid-size Oregon city where my parents still live, buzzed on the last batch of non-legal weed I’d ever have to sniff out there. It didn’t require a spaced-out perspective to see Carpenter’s influence on the screen. Again, I heard it first, in the throbbing score Mitchell commissioned from soundtrack artist, Disasterpiece. In 2015, the sound of creeping dread isn’t string stabs or fingers fluttering in theremin air. It’s a simple repetitive refrain on a synthesizer, a thick, tangible personification of whatever the thing is that’s currently coming to get you. And that’s John Carpenter’s sound. That level of achievement is hard to even wrap your head around. For generations of people, he changed what a incredibly distinct, overwhelmingly powerful emotion just instinctively sounds like.—Jeff Klingman