Michael Hoenig, Steven Becknell (French horn), Mark L. Adams (French horn), Nathan Campbell (French horn), Chris van Steenbergen (French horn), Charles Movillas (trombone), Bruce Wagner (trombone), George Thatcher (trombone), Mark Zimoski (percussions), Kathryn Ann Dayak (percussions)
Producer(s)
Michael Hoenig
Notes
The Blob is a 1988 US horror film Michael Hoenig wrote the music for. A soundtrack album was released in the same year.
The soundtrack album has been re-released in 2011 as a limited edition, now featuring about 15 minutes more music material. Given the partial different track titles, at time of writing it is unknown whether the complete material of the older version is present on the new release as well.
The re-release comes with a 16-page booklet, featuring ten stills from the movie and extensive liner notes by Brian Satterwhite about both the movie and the score. It contains numerous quotes from Michael Hoenig; some excerpts as follows:
"I came from the music world into the film world through Koyaanisqatsi. I totally fell in love with filmmaking. I thought music for films gave me incredible freedom to do what I loved to do. It was a time when people wanted to hear something different and were truly genuine about it. [...] I was incredibly busy during that time. I worked continuously going from one project to the other while sometimes doing two at the same time. [...] Because it was a genre horror film, I thought maybe this time I should play into the characters, but there was really not much character development in the script! The people that you like die off pretty quickly. The Blob goes through more change than the Kevin Dillon character, which presented an interesting conundrum that left the Blob itself as the main musical motive. [...] The Blob is really the only character in the film in terms of a thematic content. It had a clearly evolving motive... a deep, 'breath-like' sound. It started with layered custom samples that were transposed down, evolved over time, and later mutated into huge multilayered brass sounds. I remember I wasn't sure if I should play it campy or highlight all the tongue-in-cheek jokes. The trivial things seemed the most difficult. [...] The thing that made it all possible was the Synclavier. It was an incredible composition tool, that also served as a sound generator as well as a sampling powerhouse. Through its MIDI interface it also controlled all other synthesizers and keyboards in the studio. Polyphonic sampling was available, but there were no sample libraries like there are today. You had to record everything from scratch and work exclusively with custom samples. [...] When I saw the film, I knew there had to be brass in those chase sequences. There were no sample libraries. It was all very limited in those days. [...] The brass and percussion were live recordings. I think we used a twelve piece brass section and two percussionists. The mixture of electronics and live instruments, rarely done in those days, gave the score a unique energy. [...] I was able to try something I had never tried before. I came totally from the electronic side and worked myself into hybrid electronic-orchestral textures. It was wonderful!"
Releases
USA
1988: Filmtrax
CD [a]: FUSD 103
2011: La-La Land
CD [b]: LLLCD 1166; Limited edition of 2,000 copies
