Vangelis’ film score for Blade Runner | Hacker News Reader

Vangelis’ film score for Blade Runner

nemostudios.co.uk

159 pointsdaverol46 comments

I'm particularly fond of the soundtrack editions which overlay Vangelis' music with city background noise, bits of dialog, and other atmospherics from the appropriate scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3fz6CC45ok

I don't know what this version is properly called; however I used to listen to a similar (but shorter, perhaps one hour long) version called the 'Esper Edition'.

Give it a listen, while you read the article... or anytime.

It's great. There is also great versions without dialog if preffered.

Finding an "authentic" version if the Blade Runner soundtrack is surprisingly difficult. Most are compilations and reinterpretations, even made by Vangelis himself. My favourite is this version: http://www.vangelisrarities.com/produit/blade-runner-2019-ed...

The maker must have spent a lot of time extracting this from the multichannel Audiotracks of the Blu-Rays.

Similar to finding a version of Blade Runner you like. Some have the narration, some don't.

I see no way to get a hold of that particular soundtrack and searching the web failed me. How did you get a copy? Any tips?

After much searching I found a copy (FLAC) on MEGA, but I can't find my way back to it. No search engine seems to index MEGA

You might enjoy this classic site - youarelisteningtolosangeles.com - ambient music overlaid with live police chatter. The creator has made other versions since; the Quebec one is nice if you want a different language.

https://somafm.com/sf1033/ SF-1033 does likewise

a little spooky to hear about someone being talked down off the golden gate bridge

doubly spooky during the Giants-world-series riots

"Most San Francisco Police radio is now encrypted and no longer available Unfortunately, all SFPD traffic aside from initial dispatch and response has been encrypted and no longer accessible to the public. San Francisco has moved Police, Fire and EMS to a new digital system. Fire and non-police Emergency Services are still non-encrypted for many of their channels, so this will constitute the majority of the stream."

Thank you for reminding me about soma.fm ... Lovely

If you like these, consider also his work in The City (1990).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LPpJbgod_k

What a wonderful album. Like "Direct", it features many explorations using new digital synths from the late 80s. Fun fact: the voice-overs were done by Polanski and his wife Emmanuelle Seigner (she acts in the "The Ninth Gate" with Johnny Depp). They used to hang out at Vangelis' studio.

https://open.spotify.com/album/5YisV9UHQtoAZHtbLrva9r

Esper Edition - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0XmotXxfeORXbLUizdQ0xK

Looks to be completely unavailable in the US :( And the only place I can find it is on ebay for $150 (Discogs has banned the sale of it).

https://www.last.fm/music/Vangelis/Blade+Runner:+Esper+Editi...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4wEXj0mGlA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr9XwkmHzQw

https://soundcloud.com/dsm348/vangelis-blade-runner-2002-esp...

The 9 year old me didn't know who Vangelis was, but my whole family loved watching Cosmos and loved the music in the early 80's. I loved his music long before I knew who made it. We had the record and played it all the time and was a favorite in the car on long trips (recorded to cassette). That show turned me onto science. And music. Today I listen to it and a flood of memories take over. The Grand Canyon. The Tetons. Yellowstone. Dinosaur Nat'l Park. Mesa Verde. Walley World (jk). All triggered by music; such a beautiful and wondrous thing.

> Cosmos

The soundtrack for that comes from Heaven and Hell, one of Vangelis' best.

For anyone interested in the world of analog synths, now is the time to jump in. The hobby is starting to get affordable enough for everyone, but elitist enough that you'd be fooled into thinking that synth owners spend a lot of money on their hobby. Joking aside, the Yamaha CS-80 sound that built Vangelis' career is easily a $60,000 synthesizer today, but you can still get 90% the same sound from a $600 Behringer Deepmind 6. Both instruments are obviously respectable in their own rights (and perhaps detestable in others), but I think it represents a really hopeful trend for the future of electronic music. I still have a hard time believing that you can get several high-quality polyphonic, analog synthesizers for less than a grand.

I have a DeepMind 12, and while “90% of a CS-80” seems pretty generous, it is as you say a fantastic synth. It does a hell of a lot, especially given its price point. Spending an hour or so to learn its mod shortcut UX makes it great for performances and sound sculpting. The huge range of built-in effects adds a lot of value (and saves space/cash on pedals).

I recommend it to anyone who’s interested in polyphonic analog synths. It has its limitations, but I’ve had mine for years and haven’t felt the need for get another (conventional) synth.

For anyone who wants to learn more, Loopop has a great review of it: https://youtu.be/So8B6HJ2chQ

I am indeed being generous :p

I think most people who remember Blade Runner's lush soundscapes would get fooled by a good DM12 patch. Obviously there are some more subtle modulations that would be hard to replicate (and the DCOs vs CS-80 VCOs certainly don't sound as retro), but I think it's "good enough" to satiate most people looking for a complex pad synth. There's always the 99% of a CS-80 synths out there like Deckard's Dream, too.

I'm very much in that boat myself! Zero synth or really even musical experience, picked up a Korg Prologue on a lark from a local CL seller. Do you have any recommended introductory resources? Right now I'm focusing on learning the basic modulation the synth offers alongside some very basic music theory to get a grasp on chords/melodies/etc.

That's awesome! I'd recommend all first-step beginners check out Ableton's Learning Music[0] and Learning Synths[1] resources to start. They're both great sites for getting to grips with the basics, and should take ~2 hours each. They're also super accessible, anyone aged middle-school or older should be able to get something valuable from these guides. Learning Synths is particularly salient because it teaches subtractive synthesis, so (almost) all of the parameters it shows you how to use will also exist on the Prologue.

After that, it's mostly up to you. There are hundreds of niches in both sound design and music theory, all of them with their own unique quirks to learn. Let your sense of curiosity guide you, and you'll definitely find something interesting. You should probably look into getting some DAW software if you want to compose full tracks, and a DAC would allow you to record off the Prologue into your computer. It really is an open-ended hobby besides that.

The only other piece of advice I like to give is to temper your expectations. The process of learning music theory and sound design is long, and everyone makes a lot of garbage when they're starting (much like programming). Unlike programming, I find the process of sound design to be pretty therapeutic, and many nights I'd find myself sitting in front of my modular rack instead of watching TV or playing games with friends. Everyone's relationship with it will be a little different, but nobody should be overly critical of their own work. Do whatever is fun to you, and let the inspiration follow.

[0] https://learningmusic.ableton.com/

[1] https://learningsynths.ableton.com/

Dillinja produced a fantastic track by sampling the score - "The Angels Fell" [MET006, 1995]

One of my all-time favourite jungle/drum&bass tracks :-)

https://metalheadz.bandcamp.com/track/the-angels-fell-2015-r...

It's awesome.

I had this CD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooverider_Presents:_The_Prot...

Contains another Dillinja track that also has Blade Runner samples.

Which track? Silver Blade uses "Boymerang - Soul Beat Runna" as the source

ok. Yes Silver Blade, there is also Blade runner in there

https://open.spotify.com/track/2KL9mHCn3aSZJzxpJM4HNb

Which is very neatly mixed with (goa) trance by Paul Oakenfold in his 'The Goa Mix' a-side, orig. broadcast in 1994 [1] (other versions exist as well).

https://www.discogs.com/release/3016836-Paul-Oakenfold-The-G...

Wow, it's been ages since I've listened to this. I wrote a ton of code in the late 90s/early 2000s listening to this album. Thank you!

Goa trance is one of the few music genres which allows me to focus on a task but nowadays it tires me too much (my brain gets tired), cause of age. So I tend to stick to mid-tempo and techno (ambient would me too tired as well but for different reasons). If you want to get back into the music, consider some of the Astral Projection remixes (or works others remixed of theirs, like Filteria).

https://open.spotify.com/album/4YmtGnpe9snrykNjqJwpOK

The 2011 version makes me sad. It was completely unnecessary and inferior to the original.

Here is the whole thing: https://soundcloud.com/pauloakenfold/paul-oakenfold-radio-1-...

Oh wow, scrolling up/down with 2 fingers on a trackpad makes the pages fly by horizontally insanely fast....

You'd have to be a replicant to read it.

I copied the pasted all the text into my markdown editor just so I could read it.

It's probably a test ...

Bad UX here. Scrolls more than a whole screen at a time on FF with my settings. & no scroll-bar, so chunks of the text can't be read. CSS oddity's my guess.

Typo on page 6, those are BGW not BWG amplifiers. They are BGW 750 laboratory amps, and I am quite familiar with them. They were some of the best sound reinforcement/labs amps made at the time.

For me Nemo studios have such a mysterious vibe. I can imagine Vangelis walking around the city and spending days and nights making his music there. Must have been amazing times.

He will not be forgotten.

On iPad the text appears to be cut off mid-line at the bottom of every page and it's not clearhow many lines are not visible.

Yeah, the authors managed to outdo plain PDF at hostility toward phone users, all for a wall of text interspersed with images.

In general the site is not mobile friendly.

At least Reader mode works fine.

How does this page implement the horizontal scrolling? How does it decide how to format into columns?

Not too interesting technically - it's just a bunch of divs that are manually filled with text and defined to be a fixed size. I was hoping to see something that would automatically reformat text into columns based on screen and column size, per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29172083.

I'd say the page is a candidate for the title worst mobile UX ever.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com