John Carpenter's Lost Themes makes anything sound exciting, whether it's paint drying or a plot summary of an unfinished horror short story of mine

P.J. Soles from John Carpenter's Halloween (Photo source: Popcorn Cinema)

The following is a repost of one of my most well-received pieces from earlier this year, originally posted on March 20, 2015. In between the time I wrote the piece and now, John Carpenter composed the main title theme for the CBS summer show Zoo.

The most significant and impressive piece of work John Carpenter has made in the last 15 years is neither a feature film nor a TV-movie. It's John Carpenter's Lost Themes, a new collection of original Carpenter instrumentals that, in the Albertus font-loving filmmaker/composer's own words, are "meant to score the movies in your head." The Sacred Bones Records album is Carpenter's entry into the imaginary soundtracks genre, where the likes of Black Dynamite composer Adrian Younge (2000's Venice Dawn) and the duo of Danger Mouse and Magic City composer Daniele Luppi (2011's Rome) have created score cues or theme tunes for movies that don't exist.

Lost Themes tracks like "Vortex" and "Abyss" resemble outtakes from Carpenter's scores to the 1988 cult favorite They Live and the mad-underrated In the Mouth of Madness, and except for the really cheesy Big Trouble in Little China end title theme sung by Carpenter himself, that Carpenter synth sound Lost Themes reacquaints us with has aged remarkably well. It's aged so well that Carpenter's pulsating and frequently sampled 1976 Assault on Precinct 13 main title theme--which Carpenter has said was influenced by Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" and is in rotation during both the AFOS morning block "Beat Box" and "AFOS Prime"--sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday, while the likes of Steven Price, frequent Steven Soderbergh collaborator David Holmes and It Follows composer Rich Vreeland, a.k.a. Disasterpeace, dig the Carpenter sound so much that they borrow from Carpenter in their respective film scores.



I'd add some of the Lost Themes instrumentals to AFOS rotation, but the station format focuses only on score music written for movies and TV shows that aren't imaginary, and I don't have enough station hard drive space to launch a new imaginary soundtrack music block just to stream Lost Themes selections. For about a year, the station schedule included "Rome, Italian Style," an imaginary soundtrack music block I named after one of my favorite SCTV sketches (and a rare SCTV sketch that's not marred by an annoying laugh track). Younge's Venice Dawn tracks and Luppi's Rome tracks were part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist, and if the block still existed, those tracks would have shared space with the Lost Themes pieces. The Carpenter sound, which is basically '70s and '80s Italian film music, would have been a nice fit with the '60s Italian film vibe of the Venice Dawn and Rome tracks.

Junta Juleil's Culture Shock and Consequence of Sound both have gotten creative and used the Lost Themes instrumentals to fancast fictional Carpenter movies featuring those tracks. For example, in their movie idea built out of the Lost Themes track "Purgatory," Consequence of Sound imagined a 1988 murder mystery starring Kevin Dillon, Ernie Hudson and Daryl Hannah in her At Play in the Fields of the Lord skinny-dipping scene heyday, while "Purgatory" got Junta Juleil author Sean Gill to envision a completely implausible but much more enticing movie: a Big Trouble in Little China mini-reunion between Dennis Dun and Kurt Russell, who reprises his non-Carpenter role as Captain Ron.

John Carpenter directs Victor Wong and Donald Pleasence on the set of Prince of Darkness, one of seven big-screen Carpenter movies I haven't seen yet. All those remaining seven movies do not star Kurt Russell, Carpenter's muse.

I'd indulge in some Lost Themes-inspired fancasting too, but I don't want to bite Junta Juleil and Consequence of Sound's style, so I'm going to do a completely different approach to playing around with Lost Themes and demonstrating how Carpenter's new instrumentals can make anything sound exciting and atmospheric. I'm going to unearth a plot synopsis I wrote three years ago for a never-finished horror short story and spice it up--or rather, Carpenter it up--with Lost Themes selections.

"The Pet" was my attempt to create a new Filipino monster that would have joined the creepy likes of the aswang and the manananggal. The story would have mixed Filipino monster folklore with one of the most unsettling horror tropes, eye trauma. Here's a good example of how unsettling that trope can be: I was so bothered by a Lasik operation-gone-wrong episode of the short-lived early '00s supernatural show The Others (no relation to the Nicole Kidman haunted house flick of the same name) that I've refused to undergo Lasik surgery to improve my eyesight. At the time I was trying to write "The Pet" as a submission to a Filipino YA horror anthology (it was called HORROR, with the title in all caps, as if it were a book by Meek Mill), I thought, "Eye trauma is terrifying, so how do I work that into the creation of a new monster?"

The result was a story where I only got as far as completing four pages. I ended up missing the anthology submission deadline because I was never satisfied with both the dialogue I wrote and the legal hurdles the story's characters would have overcome in order to acquire the titular creature. Also, I think "The Pet" would be better off as either an episode of a horror comedy anthology show or a short film rather than as a short story in print. I always imagined it as a Joe Dante suburban comedy/thriller with a John Carpenter score--and a Filipino American backdrop.

John Carpenter's Lost Themes makes anything sound exciting, whether it's paint drying or a plot summary of an unfinished horror short story of mine

John Carpenter, shooting exterior footage for Escape from New York

The most significant and impressive piece of work John Carpenter has made in the last 15 years is neither a feature film nor a TV-movie. It's John Carpenter's Lost Themes, a new collection of original Carpenter instrumentals that, in the Albertus font-loving filmmaker/composer's own words, are "meant to score the movies in your head." The Sacred Bones Records album is Carpenter's entry into the imaginary soundtracks genre, where the likes of Black Dynamite composer Adrian Younge (2000's Venice Dawn) and the duo of Danger Mouse and Magic City composer Daniele Luppi (2011's Rome) have created score cues or theme tunes for movies that don't exist.

Lost Themes tracks like "Vortex" and "Abyss" resemble outtakes from Carpenter's scores to the 1988 cult favorite They Live and the mad-underrated In the Mouth of Madness, and except for the really cheesy Big Trouble in Little China end title theme sung by Carpenter himself, that Carpenter synth sound Lost Themes reacquaints us with has aged remarkably well. It's aged so well that Carpenter's pulsating and frequently sampled 1976 Assault on Precinct 13 main title theme--which Carpenter has said was influenced by Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" and is in rotation during both the AFOS morning block "Beat Box" and "AFOS Prime"--sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday, while the likes of Steven Price, frequent Steven Soderbergh collaborator David Holmes and It Follows composer Rich Vreeland, a.k.a. Disasterpeace, dig the Carpenter sound so much that they borrow from Carpenter in their respective film scores.

I'd add some of the Lost Themes instrumentals to AFOS rotation, but the station format focuses only on score music written for movies and TV shows that aren't imaginary, and I don't have enough station hard drive space to launch a new imaginary soundtrack music block just to stream Lost Themes selections. For about a year, the station schedule included "Rome, Italian Style," an imaginary soundtrack music block I named after one of my favorite SCTV sketches (and a rare SCTV sketch that's not marred by an annoying laugh track). Younge's Venice Dawn tracks and Luppi's Rome tracks were part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist, and if the block still existed, those tracks would have shared space with the Lost Themes pieces. The Carpenter sound, which is basically '70s and '80s Italian film music, would have been a nice fit with the '60s Italian film vibe of the Venice Dawn and Rome tracks.

Junta Juleil's Culture Shock and Consequence of Sound both have gotten creative and used the Lost Themes instrumentals to fancast fictional Carpenter movies featuring those tracks. For example, in their movie idea built out of the Lost Themes track "Purgatory," Consequence of Sound imagined a 1988 murder mystery starring Kevin Dillon, Ernie Hudson and Daryl Hannah in her At Play in the Fields of the Lord skinny-dipping scene heyday, while "Purgatory" got Junta Juleil author Sean Gill to envision a completely implausible but much more enticing movie: a Big Trouble in Little China mini-reunion between Dennis Dun and Kurt Russell, who reprises his non-Carpenter role as Captain Ron.

I'd indulge in some Lost Themes-inspired fancasting too, but I don't want to bite Junta Juleil and Consequence of Sound's style, so I'm going to do a completely different approach to playing around with Lost Themes and demonstrating how Carpenter's new instrumentals can make anything sound exciting and atmospheric. I'm going to unearth a plot synopsis I wrote three years ago for a never-finished horror short story and spice it up--or rather, Carpenter it up--with Lost Themes selections.

"The Pet" was my attempt to create a new Filipino monster that would have joined the creepy likes of the aswang and the manananggal. The story would have mixed Filipino monster folklore with one of the most unsettling horror tropes, eye trauma. Here's a good example of how unsettling that trope can be: I was so bothered by a Lasik operation-gone-wrong episode of the short-lived early '00s supernatural show The Others (no relation to the Nicole Kidman haunted house flick of the same name) that I've refused to undergo Lasik surgery to improve my eyesight. At the time I was trying to write "The Pet" as a submission to a Filipino YA horror anthology (it was called HORROR, with the title in all caps, as if it were a book by Meek Mill), I thought, "Eye trauma is terrifying, so how do I work that into the creation of a new monster?"

The result was a story where I only got as far as completing four pages. I ended up missing the anthology submission deadline because I was never satisfied with both the dialogue I wrote and the legal hurdles the story's characters would have overcome in order to acquire the titular creature. Also, I think "The Pet" would be better off as either an episode of a horror comedy anthology show or a short film rather than as a short story in print. I always imagined it as a Joe Dante suburban comedy/thriller with a John Carpenter score--and a Filipino American backdrop.

Close to "Rome"

(Photo source: Poetic and Chic)

"Rome, Italian Style," which I named after one of my favorite SCTV sketches, is an hour-long block I launched on A Fistful of Soundtracks last summer as a way to give some airplay to the badass and lush Rome album, the '60s Italian film music-inspired project produced by superduperproducer Danger Mouse and Magic City composer Daniele Luppi and featuring Jack White and Norah Jones on vocals. Besides the Rome tracks, the 11am block (which airs every weekday except Friday) also features '60s and '70s film and TV theme covers and tracks from outside the film and TV music world that were modeled after '60s and '70s film and TV scores.

The following tunes that I found on Spotify aren't currently part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist, but they ought to be.

Jones' new breakup-themed album Little Broken Hearts, which was produced by Danger Mouse, feels like a companion piece to Rome.

Both the Blue Harlem and Lena Horne tracks are covers of "Meglio Stasera" from the first Pink Panther. For some reason, the shots of Selina Kyle atop the Batpod in The Dark Knight Rises made me flash back to the first few seconds of this:

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day archive

July 1, 2011: Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi featuring Edda Dell'Orso, "Theme of Rome"
July 4, 2011: Babe Ruth, "The Mexican"
July 5, 2011: Goldfrapp, "Utopia (New Ears Mix)"
July 6, 2011: Frank Sinatra and Count Basie, "More [Theme from Mondo Cane]"
July 7, 2011: Count Basie and His Orchestra, "007"
July 8, 2011: Adrian Younge, "1969 Organ"
July 11, 2011: John Zorn, "Erotico (The Burglars)"
July 12, 2011: Barry Adamson, "The Big Bamboozle"
July 13, 2011: Mike Patton, "Deep Down"
July 14, 2011: Goldfrapp, "Pilots"
July 15, 2011: Jimmy Smith, "Walk on the Wild Side"
July 18, 2011: Elvis Costello and Sy Richardson, "A Town Called Big Nothing (Really Big Nothing)"
July 19, 2011: Count Basie and His Orchestra, Ella Fitzgerald & The Tommy Flanagan Trio, "Sanford & Son Theme (The Streetbeater)"
July 20, 2011: Daniele Luppi, "An Italian Story"
July 21, 2011: The John Gregory Orchestra, "It Takes a Thief"
July 22, 2011: Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, "Spy School Graduation Theme"
July 25, 2011: The John Gregory Orchestra, "The Avengers"
July 26, 2011: Goldfrapp, "Lovely Head"
July 27, 2011: Parodi/Fair, "James Bond Theme (GoldenEye Trailer Version)"
July 28, 2011: Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi, "Her Hollow Ways"
July 29, 2011: The Wondermints, "The Party"

The "Rome, Italian Style" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks airs Mondays through Thursdays from 11am to noon.

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi, "Her Hollow Ways"

Song: "Her Hollow Ways" by Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi
Released: 2011
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: This lush instrumental from Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi's Rome album sounds so much like a theme from some late '60s or early '70s Italian drama about either star-crossed lovers or a sexually repressed housewife who masturbates in the bathtub a lot that you can practically see opening credits in white like "Musica composta, orchestrata e diretta da Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi" as you hear it.

Some YouTuber took "Her Hollow Ways" and added it to a slideshow of vintage photos of elegant '50s and '60s ladies from Life magazine's Web archives for some reason. It kind of works.

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: Daniele Luppi, "An Italian Story"

Song: "An Italian Story" by film composer Daniele Luppi
Released: 2004
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: The imaginary soundtrack Rome isn't the first time Luppi paid tribute to '60s and '70s Italian film scores with the help of many of the veteran musicians who performed on those scores. In 2004, Luppi released An Italian Story, which featured original music that he wrote to salute not just Ennio Morricone (whom Luppi feels doesn't get enough props for his more avant-garde material and his work with early synths), but also Nino Rota, Piero Umiliani, Piero Piccioni, Armando Trovajoli and Stelvio Cipriani. All of them are composers Luppi has admired since his childhood in Italy.

"Like the films themselves, the music of the era was shiny and exuberant, filled with unusual flourishes and surprising turns," wrote Italian Story liner notes author Dan Epstein about the '60s and '70s sound Luppi recaptured. "It was the joyous sound of 'la dolce vita'--a newly prosperous nation springing back to effervescent life after the forced dreariness of the Mussolini regime and the grim period of poverty and austerity that followed World War II."

For the album's breezy title track (and another track on the album, "Fashion Party"), Luppi recruited Alessandro Alessandroni--the whistler/guitarist/virtual one-man band who was responsible for many of the bizarre noises during Morricone's scores--to whistle, of course.

"I will always remember the smile on [Alessandroni's] face when he first heard [the title track]," recalled Luppi in the liner notes. "It was like, 'Here I am, playing with these great musicians once again!'"

That feeling of being reunited with old friends is also experienced by us while listening to "An Italian Story." To those of us who have dug Italian film scores since the first time we saw either Once Upon a Time in the West or maybe The Sicilian Clan, Alessandroni's whistle is like an old friend.

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: Barry Adamson, "The Big Bamboozle"

Song: "The Big Bamboozle" by imaginary soundtrack producer Barry Adamson
Released: 1995
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: Adamson's "Big Bamboozle" crime-jazz instrumental is so seamy-sounding it would have been perfect as music during Kiss Me Deadly (a classic noir that, by the way, finally got the Criterion treatment on Blu-ray and DVD this summer).

I like "The Big Bamboozle" so much that when I edited together episodes of A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series, I frequently used it as an instrumental bed for segments where I spoke.

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: Adrian Younge, "1969 Organ"

Song: "1969 Organ" by Adrian Younge
Released: 2000
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: It's my favorite track off Black Dynamite editor/composer Adrian Younge's imaginary soundtrack Venice Dawn, a long-out-of-print homage to '60s and '70s Italian film music from 2000 that Younge and Wax Poetics Records reissued as a free download earlier this week.

"It is well documented that American soul expanded the thresholds of contemporary music and influenced composers around the world. Classically trained European composers, such as Ennio Morricone, loved the sound of soul and synthesized this compositional style with his music," said the self-taught musician, film editor and former hip-hop producer to Wax Poetics. "Ennio Morricone is by far one of my favorite composers."

Younge is also fond of the Italian band Goblin of Suspiria fame and similar-sounding psychedelic soul acts, and their sounds also influenced Venice Dawn (I also detect a little Jerry van Rooyen in the organ riffs in "1969 Organ"). Like Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi's Rome project, Venice Dawn is a score written for an old movie that doesn't exist. At the time of Venice Dawn's initial release, Younge pretended Venice Dawn was a real piece of Italian cinema and punked everyone.

That mischievous spirit was carried over by Younge and director Scott Sanders into Black Dynamite. The 2009 blaxploitation homage is one of the funniest and most effective comedy films of the '00s because its approach to spoofing blaxploitation flicks is refreshingly timeless (unlike the lazily written and instantly dated pop-culture references of the Epic Movie/Disaster Movie/Meet the Spartans spoof franchise) and the actors in Black Dynamite play everything straight--just like the Leslie Nielsen who was completely dead-serious and stone-faced during the brilliant and short-lived Police Squad! TV series, not the Leslie Nielsen who went completely broad and resorted to mugging to the camera in the Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! movies.

While we await both Younge's score music for Adult Swim's animated version of Black Dynamite in spring 2012 and his Wax Poetics album Something About April, which is scheduled to drop in September, he's offered us an appetizer to Something About April in the form of the newly unearthed Venice Dawn--an EP that can now be sampled during the "Rome, Italian Style" block of imaginary soundtracks and covers of '60s and '70s score music from Monday to Thursday at 11am on A Fistful of Soundtracks.

All the other "Rome, Italian Style" Tracks of the Day from this week:
Count Basie and His Orchestra, "007"
Frank Sinatra and Count Basie, "More [Theme from Mondo Cane]"
Goldfrapp, "Utopia (New Ears Mix)"
Babe Ruth, "The Mexican"

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi, "Theme of Rome"

This is the first in a series of weekday posts about the tracks that are streamed during A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Rome, Italian Style" block. From today until July 29, each post will give some background on a different track from the block's playlist (and maybe even include a music video that the artist made for the track). "Rome, Italian Style" airs Mondays through Thursdays at 11am on AFOS.

Not to be confused with the HBO sword-and-mandals show Rome, producers Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi's new Capitol Records release Rome is a concept album inspired by swanky '60s and '70s Italian film scores that were penned by the ingenious likes of Riz Ortolani and Ennio Morricone ("Back in the early '60s, more experimental composition was looked down on, so the movies were a great vehicle to get away with doing all that," said Danger Mouse in a 2010 Guardian article about the making of Rome). The "Rome, Italian Style" playlist was built around the tracks from Rome, but because nine tracks aren't enough to fill a four-day-a-week, one-hour-per-day block, the playlist includes other songs that were influenced by the sounds of '60s and '70s Italian composers or their British and American counterparts (like John Barry and Henry Mancini), as well as covers of themes that Ortolani, Morricone, Barry, Mancini and others wrote during that era.

Song: "Theme of Rome" by Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi featuring Edda Dell'Orso
Released: 2011
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: During the recording of Rome, Danger Mouse and Luppi enlisted several musicians and singers who took part in many of the vintage Italian scores that influenced the project. One of these artists is singer Edda Dell'Orso, whose voice can be heard during Morricone's scores from Once Upon a Time in the West, Duck, You Sucker, Danger: Diabolik, a giallo called The Fifth Cord and Maddalena. Her wordless vocals grace "Theme of Rome," the album's opening track.

Dell'Orso's voice was like a guide through the surreal aural world of Morricone, and it acts as a guide once again as we enter the dark and melancholy Italian movie that Danger Mouse and Luppi have created with just their imaginary soundtrack and without any visuals. I have no idea what language Dell'Orso was singing in during those old Morricone cues (it's a language only she understands--Dell'Orso-ese?), but her voice during "Come Maddalena" is so reassuring and calming that I bet she was singing "And we're walking, we're walking."