Soylent Green/Demon Seed (1973/1977)

Released by Special Arrangement with Turner Classic Movies Music FSM adds to its library of science fiction soundtracks with a doubleheader of provocative music from 1970s M-G-M films: Soylent Green and Demon Seed. Soylent Green (1973) was the last and arguably the finest of Charlton Heston's trilogy of early-'70s sci-fi films, beginning with 1970's Beneath the Planet of the Apes and continuing with 1971's The Omega Man. (All three soundtracks are now immortalized as FSM CDs.) Heston plays a detective in this dystopian, overcrowded future, where the death of a prominent executive leads to a discovery of the shocking truth behind the society's precious foodstuff. The music to Soylent Green was composed by Fred Myrow (1939-1999), an eclectic musician who worked in film, theater and the concert hall. Myrow provided an imaginative, pop-based main title (for a montage of still photographs), futuristic-sounding source cues (featuring electric violin and synthesizers), and strange, atmospheric moods for the underscore. The CD includes his original, unused classical-styled music for Edward G. Robinson's death sequence, as well as the actual classical works (by Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Grieg) conducted by Gerald Fried for the finished film. The Soylent Green portion of the CD is entirely in stereo. Demon Seed (1977) was directed by Donald Cammell (Performance) and stars Julie Christie as the wife of a scientist (Fritz Weaver) who has invented the Proteus IV supercomputer. However, Proteus soon develops the need to procreate—and uses Christie as the means to that end, trapping her in her house and terrorizing her. Jerry Fielding's avant garde score was a high-water mark in the composer's experimentation, featuring eerie suspense and violence as Proteus and Christie engage in a battle of wills. Fielding conceived and recorded several pieces electronically, using the musique concrete sound world of Karlheinz Stockhausen; some of this music he later reworked symphonically. FSM's premiere release of the Demon Seed score features the entire orchestral score in stereo, as well as the unused electronic experiments in mono and stereo.