Should a Twitter account primarily filled with notices of watching basketball and playing video games be proof positive that John Carpenter will never make another film, go ahead and take the next-best thing: Lost Themes, an album of new musical compositions that can fill the void in your heart. After releasing a few singles in recent months, he’s debuted all nine tracks on NPR’s First Listen.
The aural connections to his greatest works are, in so many words, strong, but not to the effect that this feels like a retread; it’s instead the sort of thing that will have you dreaming up images from Carpenter films that didn’t make their way to the screen. Give it a listen and read his comments on the project below:
“Lost Themes was all about having fun. It can be both great and bad to score over images, which is what I’m used to. Here there were no pressures. No actors asking me what they’re supposed to do. No crew waiting. No cutting room to go to. No release pending. It’s just fun. And I couldn’t have a better set-up at my house, where I depended on (collaborators) Cody (Carpenter, of the band Ludrium) and Daniel (Davies, who wrote the songs for I, Frankenstein) to bring me ideas as we began improvising. The plan was to make my music more complete and fuller, because we had unlimited tracks. I wasn’t dealing with just analogue anymore. It’s a brand new world. And there was nothing in any of our heads when we started other than to make it moody.”
What do you think of Carpenter’s album? What’s your favorite track?