Gil Mellé - The Andromeda Strain

Creel pone of one of the most legendary early electronic music film scores (right up there with Bebe & Louis Barron’s “Forbidden Planet”, Bernard Hermann’s “The Day The Earth Stood Still”, and Oskar Sala’s trautonium sound design for Hitchcock’s “The Birds”) - mainly due to the scarcity & production values of the original release; a hexagonal 10” record housed in a six-fold flap-system affixed to the cover of a metallic 10” sleeve which opens up to reveal a set of photos from the film & the liner notes (the art / spec of the original issue is re-produced wonderfully here; even down to the hexagonal insert !!!)

Which is all well & good, but the attraction for me to this suite of pieces by jazz composer Gil Mellé has always been the bizarre invented electronic instrumentation (like the percussotron iii - a primitive drum machine) and lo-fi / distorted musique concrète techniques (the first piece alone consists of ten tape-transformed piano parts and the ambience of a bowling alley !!!) for early 70s Hollywood film-score material, this stuff is pretty damn far out ... most of it sounds like a more free/european take on the Patrick Gleeson collabs on Herbie Hancock’s “sextant”, other parts sound like the weird finnish jerry-rigged electronics of Erkki Kurreniemi or even the more far-out segments on the first two Kluster records ...

No matter how you slice it, this is an important set; rife with sound-research oriented takes that situate it well within the creel pone canon.

• Gil Mellé - The Andromeda Strain (1971) - 320 Kbps

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