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- The Brain in
a Box draws together, in one lushly hologrammed trophy container,
a wealth of musical variations on the theme of space and science fiction.
Lift the studded metal lid and you’ll find five CDs (Movie Themes,
TV Themes, Pop, Incidental/Lounge, and Novelty)
and the hardback Brain in a Book which trawl through sci-fi from
its high-minded inventiveness to its cheapo schlockishness. Spoiling
us with a plethora of poster and still reproductions
 at
every available opportunity, the book roves through the history of music
and sci-fi unions (such as Offenbach’s Le Voyage dans la lune),
including film plots that draw on music for their narrative themes;
it even throws in a bit of meaningless banter from Ray Bradbury for
good measure.
- Within this same
book, the compilers state:
our quest for the best, the coolest, the must-have tracks, we, the
producers, went to aficionados all over the country and sifted through
hundreds of just about every intergalactic recording you could possibly
imagine. (4–5)
This highlights the toil that's gone into the package, the extent to
which the team has admirably fulfilled two key subcultural criteria:
painstakingly researched esoterica and a fetish-friendly collectable
with all the trimmings of a smart investment for the future. However,
just as Brain in a Box grants its owner the finest mantelpiece
in all of sci-fi-dom, it also comes up trumps as an archive of intriguing
and often genuinely innovative music that may not have survived very
long had it not been for obsessive hoarders within the sci-fi community.
- However,
while the scope of Brain in a Box is impressively wide, there
are nevertheless a few glaring absences. On the whole, the chosen tracks
come from English-speaking nations, mainly the US. Also, none of the
themes from Star Wars are to be found, an unsurprising result
of their licensing costs. Yet what self-respecting sci-fi muso would
have dared to leave out—as Brain in a Box has—Wendy
Carlos, David Bowie, or, in fact (Jefferson Airplane aside) all the
late sixties references of the Dark Side of the Moon? Parliament’s
“Unfunky UFO” is the box’s single concession to funk,
a genre which puts much store in the extra-terrestrial, and Sun Ra’s
complex philosophical/political investment in the celestial only sneaks
in a brief appearance with “Space is the Place.” What’s
more insulting is that the Parliament track is wedged onto the Novelty
CD (while They Might Be Giants resides in the higher status Pop
one) and Sun Ra sticks out like a crash-landed sputnik amidst two tupperware
party mood-makers on the Incidental/Lounge volume.
- In some ways, this
clashing track order exemplifies everything the box set stands for—musical
diversity. At times, however, the constant jolt of being thrown from
genre to genre gets a little wearing. The eeriness of The Twilight
Zone’s theme is trampled over by the boisterous adventure tales
of Lost in Space and My Favorite Martian. These are then
followed by the intangible Dr. Who credit music which we have
little time to settle into before an about turn into the brash‘n’bouncy
cartoonish introduction to The Jetsons. Likewise, the muted understatement
of the first song from The Rocky Horror Picture Show loses all
it has subtly built up when succeeded by the comparatively heavy-handed
bombast of Also Sprach Zarathustra.
- While this ordering
is unfortunate and does some of the music an injustice, it evidently
springs from an eagerness to showcase the sheer range of musicians who
have made reference to the extra-terrestrial. Unlikely sources include
Ella Fitzgerald and offerings from such genres as rockabilly (Bill Riley
and his Little Green Men), bluegrass (The Buchanan Brothers and Georgia
Catamounts), big band (Chris Conner and many a TV theme), garage (The
Marketts), surf (The Rubinoos), hippy rock (Jefferson Airplane), pop
folk (Prelude), country (Mojo Nixon and World Famous Blue Jays), new
wave/alt rock (B-52s and Suburban Lawns), and the small tightly packed
bullets which traditionally constitute music for animation.
- Much
of this music fails to divert from its generic course to accommodate
the theme at hand. Sometimes, especially when songs are sci-fi in lyric
alone, it is as if space were a quick and obvious cash-in rather than
a core inspiration to the composition. To add to this, many of the pop
songs included in the set are particularly gimmicky. Novelty tracks
like Louis Prima’s “Beep! Beep!” and Buchanan and Goodman’s
“The Flying Saucer (Parts 1 and 2)” have narrative twists,
so they only work properly once. Irritating as these numbers can be,
they do betray the effect aliens have upon the popular consciousness,
including the desire to jest in the face of anxiety—something immediately
recognizable to fans of almost any musical genre.
- Moreover, if these
tracks make us feel that a trend is being cynically jumped upon, then
they are only mirroring the way much sci-fi traditionally works. Along
with horror, sci-fi has stood proudest as the genre most likely to be
cost effective, exploitative, and malleable to contemporary (often teen)
tastes, traits which need not necessarily work to an aesthetic disadvantage.
Leonard Nimoy’s “Music
to Watch Space Girls By” glares forth as exploitation
at its purest and most unabashedly parasitic. It uses a musical standard
as its safe foundation and slap-dashly plasters it with some airy organ
sounds and vocal choruses to imply the added word of “space.”
As this track and many others in Brain in a Box point out, the
exploitation angle is not solely drawn upon to appease the adolescent
audience. Lounge-y Les Baxter also leaps on the bandwagon with “Saturday
Night on Saturn” (which is extra-terrestrial in bank-rollable name
only) and “Lunar Rhapsody” (which deviates only from his house
style courtesy of an inorganically tacked-on theramin section).
- Of course, what
space had to offer the suburban cocktail set was not the thrill of the
lurid B-movie, but the opportunity to show off one’s brand new
luxury home stereo. Postwar domestic decadents evidently delighted in
what the vastness of space could be translated into musically, from
its sophisticated wide-ranging orchestration to, more importantly, the
up-to-the-minute panning and swooping of which such pieces as Russ Garcia
and His Orchestra’s “Nova (Exploding Star)” take advantage.
The cutesy twinkles of electronica in Perry Kingsley’s “Cosmic
Ballad,” although of the same genre, betray a much more experimental
bent to the space theme, one which afforded a host of composers the
chance to push their ideas to the outer limits.
- In many ways, space
and all its unknown dimensions licensed a form of orientalism in its
best and worst forms. For example, Russ Garcia’s “Frozen Neptune”
patterns the “other” of outer space on oboe and flute motifs
which are stock phrases and timbres that Hollywood composers and lounge
bands alike often used to evoke the “non-Western.” Yet, just
as sci-fi in the form of, say, Dr. Who and The
Thunderbirds has imaginatively exceeded the limitations
of tiny budgets, the genre has done the same for composers who, far
from fearing the encroachments of science, have embraced them in specifically
musical ways. The warped pulsing and pattering of the Forbidden Planet
soundtrack is a non-“melodic” landmark in popularly received
music, being one of the first scores to rely primarily on electronically
generated sound. According to the Brain in a Book, Forbidden
Planet’s score “was billed not as music but as ‘electronic
tonalities’ reportedly because the musicians’ union, back
in 1956, would not accept electronic sounds as music” (17). Similarly,
the texturally visceral tickings of the Fantastic Voyage soundtrack
mingle with “other worldly” laser sounds; Frank Coe’s
“Tone Tales From Tomorrow” stretches at the semantic boundaries
of “music;” and the Andromeda Strain score uses the
excuse of a paranoid film narrative to build a nervy serial piece up
to a climax of electronic fuzzes, bleeps, and blurs.
- What arises time
and time again on these tracks is that the labeling of electronically
produced sound as inorganic was—and still is—the strongest
signifier of “technology.” Although electronic intervention
is unavoidable in reproduced music at least in terms of amplification
and recording procedure, conventions of understanding still assume electricity
to be futuristic. Thus even films without avant-garde pretensions (such
as The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Incredible Shrinking
Man) meld electronics with an orchestral sound in their scores.
While some spheres of music-making have shunned the obtrusive use of
electronic hardware, the potential for sci-fi to symbolize “the
unknown” through unfamiliar instrumentation has consistently offered
these types of equipment a forum.
- Of these, none
is more prized than the theramin, a device invented in the early 1920s
and virtually unused outside its role of “space-signifier.”
The ethereal glissandi and smoothly textured timbre of this instrument,
one of the few where one touches air rather than keys or strings, seems
ideal for bringing to mind the cold expanses of outer space and the
swooping space ships which travel across it (something which is similarly
conveyed by the breezy electric organs on The Tornadoes’ “Telstar”
and steel guitars and tremolos on The Ventures’ “Fear”).
In scores like The Day the Earth Stood Still (which combine theramin
with harp and orchestra) and One Step Beyond (where it closely
matches a female choir singing “aahs”), the theramin’s
proximity to the human voice becomes apparent. Similarly, the more recent
X-Files theme spotlights a whistling sound which seems just about
mechanic, but distinctly humanoid. Here such instrumentation excels
where elsewhere it might seem to infringe upon clearly human capacities.
The theramin and its relatives confuse us about their origin at exactly
the point where sci-fi loves to linger—the very question of what
constitutes “the human.” By sounding at once organic and inorganic,
the theramin is a very precise musical indicator of everything the cyborg
has asked sci-fi fans to interrogate about human boundary lines from
Frankenstein onwards.
- Nowadays, the theramin
resides mainly in its temple of pastiche, appearing in deliberately
retro endeavors such as Mars Attacks and The Simpsons
(both featured on Brain in a Box). Yet, while the theramin has
had some of its luster dulled by constant use, its continued recurrence
betrays a strong and easily comprehensible linguistic tradition in sci-fi
music, something which other aspects of this box set also make abundantly
clear.
- One of sci-fi film’s
key features—a devotion to the spectacular—is consistently
paralleled in the sonic register. Just like the image’s awe-inspiring
stunts, these soundtracks encourage us to be enthralled by technology
almost for its own sake, sometimes even at the expense of narrative
involvement. There are distracting exaggerations, quick mood changes,
dynamic extremities and, above all, an expanded sense of musical space.
Octave leaps carry this idea through compositionally, while production
techniques make the tracks seem cavernously vast or overtly directional—like
Bill Carlisle’s “Tiny Space Man” where space ships seem
almost to be whizzing past overhead. Again, the links to sci-fi cinema
are strong. This is not far from the preoccupation that led George Lucas
to insist that his movies only play at cinemas with the most up-to-date
multi-channel sound systems so that audiences might mistakenly duck
X-Wing fighters or feel the thud of AT-AT walkers through their seats.
- But the musical
language of sci-fi isn’t totally focused on technological teleology
and “the new.” Musics conventionally circumscribed as “divine”
through their slightness and ethereality have been hijacked to imply
“things from above” in ways that most people would readily
understand. The most frequently stolen idiom seems, unsurprisingly,
to be nineteenth–century symphonic composition—something that
already bore a popular currency for evoking the majesty that outer space
seems to require and that slotted in neatly with the scoring heritage
of the classical Hollywood period. Soundtrack after soundtrack (The
Time Machine, Them, The Thing, Alien, The
Fly, E.T. and so on) returns to this style to create the
strident questing themes so central to many a sci-fi narrative.
- Yet, as Brain
in a Box also reveals, there is scope to warp these orchestral sounds
under the clause that space is “unknown.” Jerry Goldsmith’s
work for The Planet of the Apes is interrupted with a much less
standard sense of tonality than your average Hollywood soundtrack. The
Outer Limits employs sharp string sounds which imbue even this most
mainstream of entities with a touch of discordance and The Matrix
manages to balance European modernism with more palatable Romantic
ideas. In each of these instances, the sci-fi genre and its obsession
with paranoia, anti-realism, and difference allow free rein to the kinds
of musics that are so often suppressed for the standard popular audience.
- While
musical science fiction bounces from exploitation to experimentation,
symphonic opulence to electronic sparseness, and from pop familiarity
to unnerving atonality, it can only hint through opposition at perhaps
the most pervasive sound of outer space—silence. Sure, we are exposed
to moments without sound in many of these scores and pop tunes, but
silence does not a good TV theme make. In the event of absence (of sound
and of knowledge about what lies beyond), we create a vast range of
musical objects to fill the gap. Here we reach the nub of sci-fi, that
all these interpretations of space say more about us—our fads and
phobias, preoccupations and politics—than they do about “them.”
As mere earthlings, we have specific desires that need to be met. When
it comes down to it, sci-fi audiences demand value—or rather values—for
money, and you can’t really sell a box set full of sonic nothingness.
Kay Dickinson
Middlesex University
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