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Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

Mark Snow in memoriam + THE X-FILES: THE UNRELEASED RECORDINGS

Martin “Mark Snow” Fulterman died on July 4 at 78 years old in his home in Connecticut. May he rest in peace and may we remember his work for a long time.

This is one of the big ones. I consider him one of the most important people involved in Ten Thirteen Productions, perhaps the most important after just a small handful of people — Carter, Goodwin — this is the biggest loss for the Ten Thirteen family since Kim Manners in 2009. If there was any remaining doubt, you can be certain that whatever happens to the X-Files brand in the future, it will feel very different from what came before.

Although he was very prolific with plenty of TV shows and TV movies and movie scores, Mark will certainly be remembered for his main themes and scores for The X-Files and Millennium.

Mark Snow’s music gave Carter’s shows a unique identity, instantly recognizable, often copied but unmatched. The music, like the shows’ scripts, balanced the routinely procedural with the philosophical, the horror and unsettling with the ethereal and hopeful. Beautiful piano solos over ever-present synth moods progressively shifted to a dark ambience and harsh percussion. And the music was everywhere — some 20 to 35 minutes of original music for every 43-minute episode, well above all television shows, and with nearly no repetition across almost 300 episodes and two movies. Certainly some specific compositions stand out as notable works, but it was the overall feel that was important, a feel that could transport you in other worlds and lose you there. Snow’s 100% synthesizer music didn’t sound like 1990s synthesizer music, a tribute to his skills as a musician and as a master of his tools.

But this is also a particularly shocking news to me. I listen to him almost every day for the past 30 years. Mostly atonal ambient electronic television soundtracks…there are literally dozens of us, dozens, that listen, no, live with it. It was so much a fixture of daily life that it never occurred to me that Mark would leave us. Apart from submitting a couple of questions to interviews to him I never got to interact with him, I never felt in a hurry. I will continue having Mark part of my daily life.

Some more homages for Mark Snow:

To celebrate Mark’s career, what best than to listen to his compositions? After 1996’s foundational “The Truth and the Light” album, from 2008 to 2020 La-La Land Records released a total of 16 CDs for TXF (Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3), 4 for MM, 1 for Fight the Future, 1 for Harsh Realm/The Lone Gunmen, plus 4 for TXF’s revival seasons. Diminishing returns on additional issues and a shrinking market for physical releases meant that La-La Land decided not to release even more music. What we got was amazing. But they were not everything! What we need is…:

THE X-FILES: THE UNRELEASED RECORDINGS

Despite fan requests, a lot of Mark Snow’s music remains unavailable commercially, and unavailable in any other form than from directly recording the sound from the DVDs or BluRays. The best we can do is extract that audio and clean it up with more or less complex tools. Courtesy of Benjamin Cochia, a friend of the website and the man behind TXF Unreleased Score, we are happy to bring you the complete unreleased recordings of Mark Snow’s music for The X-Files.

The tracks that are available in LLL’s records are removed, leaving only the parts that are otherwise unavailable. No copyright infringement is intended whatsoever, this is purely for the enjoyment of fans, and is made available here without profit. If you are a representative of Mark Snow or a copyright holder of The X-Files and wish me to remove any of this music, please contact me by e-mail. Even better, if LLL releases more of this with a clean sound, I’d be more than happy to take this offline!

The unreleased tracks here are just called “unreleased” given that we don’t have access to the full official music sheets that include specific cue names and lengths. I hope that someday we can fill the gaps.

We start with season 1.

  • Total tracks length: 11:06:32
  • Total released tracks length: 2:33:00
  • Total unreleased tracks length: 8:33:32

By episode / total / unreleased:

  • 1X79: Pilot / 27:07 / 18:15
  • 1X01: Deep Throat / 32:21 / 14:10
  • 1X02: Squeeze / 29:55 / 25:22
  • 1X03: Conduit / 26:37 / 16:12
  • 1X04: The Jersey Devil / 29:45 / 23:07
  • 1X05: Shadows / 32:58 / 26:04
  • 1X06: Ghost in the Machine / 33:07 / entirely new
  • 1X07: Ice / 27:47 / 22:00
  • 1X08: Space / 31:18 / 21:21
  • 1X09: Fallen Angel / 28:20 / 22:10
  • 1X10: Eve / 26:45 / 23:00
  • 1X11: Fire / 26:34 / entirely new
  • 1X12: Beyond the Sea / 20:38 / entirely new
  • 1X13: Genderbender / 30:45 / 16:39
  • 1X14: Lazarus / 30:22 / entirely new
  • 1X15: Young at Heart / 26:30 / 16:14
  • 1X16: E.B.E. / 26:11 / 18:10
  • 1X17: Miracle Man / 22:14 / entirely new
  • 1X18: Shapes / 22:09 / entirely new
  • 1X19: Darkness Falls / 23:21 / 15:14
  • 1X20: Tooms / 25:15 / 15:03
  • 1X21: Born Again / 28:50 / 22:20
  • 1X22: Roland / 24:28 / 19:08
  • 1X23: The Erlenmeyer Flask / 31:27 / 23:59

> Mark Snow – The X-Files Complete Recordings (unreleased) season 1 (703 Mb)

Season 2 and beyond to follow soon…

Jedi Knights – The Truth

Since we are on the topic of The X-Files music, here is a fun piece. This electro funk tune from the UK uses samples from the series: the main theme, Mulder from the 1X79: Pilot and Mulder from 1X09: Fallen Angel.

This is Jedi Knights (a collaboration between Mark Pritchard and Tom Middleton), it’s from their 1996 album “New School Science”, track “The Truth”, and it is very 90s. Enjoy!

“The Truth and the Light” video

How many times have you listened to The X-Files: “The Truth and the Light”? I remember all the music and dialogue by heart. This fan dug up the episodes they were taken from and mixed with music from other episodes and gathered everything in a video — a video version of my page from years ago on Eat the Corn.

It’s apparent that some dialogue was taken from the episodes recordings while some other dialogue was re-recorded for the album, often by the same actors but not always (Duchovny standing in for Billy Miles). I know it’s weird but I’ll never tire of listening to this album.

“Dreamland II” song revealed

“A love song from an alien abductee to the alien who disappeared”: here it is, the song heard that was written in haste in a matter of hours for the needs of production of “Dreamland II” finds success 25 years later!… (as reported earlier)

This was not Mark Snow as this was not much in his style, so Dan Marfisi and Glenn Jordan came to the rescue. I’m no fan of country music, but this story is wild!

+ interviews with the song’s writers and with Chris Carter at Rolling Stone.

“Dreamland II” song identified

The mysterious song in the background of the diner scene in “Dreamland II” that has eluded fans for decades has finally been identified!

It’s “Staring At The Stars” written by Glenn Jordan and Dan Marfisi, specifically written for the episode. All thanks to a tweet…

https://screencrush.com/x-files-mystery-song

https://x.com/laurenancona/status/1731900445600161799

X-Files music: Event Series release + more to come

After their impressive multi-CD box sets with music from all Ten Thirteen shows, The X-Files in particular, soundtracks specialists La La Land Records released a set with music from the recent season 10 of The X-Files — or, as it is officially known, “The X-Files Event Series“.

lll_eventseries

The 2-CD set with music by Mark Snow was released on April 25 2017, just over a year after the series aired. Soundtracks for each season of television series have become common practice over the past ten years, so this should not come as a surprise. However, given how scarce Mark Snow XF material was until LLL started focusing on the franchise, it is some event!

2 CDs with a total running time of XXX just for 6 episodes means that this release is close to being a complete score — compare with 12 CDs for 89 episodes covered by the “original series” box sets, there’s a lot more material per episode here. Here is the track list:

[table id=4 /]

The music in the aired episodes is notoriously absent: it is there, but the audio mix has the music sound track usually turned low and the unusual amount of dialogue left very little space for the music to shine (and the episodes to breathe — one major drawback for season 10). This left me disappointed at Mark Snow, but my misgivings were wrong.

A mix of old and new

The music in this set is nothing short of excellent! Mark Snow shines by writing music that feels both modern and in continuation with his soundtrack for the ‘original series’. This is very much intentional: the series might not have been perfect but its clear intention was to try to be modern while attempting to recall the classic, early seasons of the show.

The tone of the music harkens back especially to the early seasons of the show, seasons 3-4 especially, rather than the comedic seasons 6-7 or the horns melodies-heavy seasons 8-9. There are some specific audio libraries that Snow dug up from some twenty years ago and reused them here: that very same paranoid piano melody from E.B.E. (in Founder’s Mutation: A Mother Never Forgets), those pensive horns like in Quagmire, these piano melodies on top of bass synth moods like in Little Green Men, these awe-filling choirs like in All Souls, that unsettling undulating drone like in Colony, even melancholic violins like in Millennium (in Home Again), there is plenty here that feels like home. Even the comedic cues sound like Small Potatoes or Bad Blood.

This is all mixed with the music style explored by Snow in the soundtrack for I Want To Believe: splicing his trademark synthesizer orchestral-like sound together with elements of electronic music. There is a lot of old-school Mark Snow synthesizer mixed with electronic pulsating rhythms and tempo beats here, similar to IWTB tracks A Higher Conscious or Mountain Montage/The Plow.

Six Episodes

Here is the breakdown of the set per episode:

[table id=5 /]

Mark Snow establishes a soundscape for the two My Struggle episodes, reprising some of the music of the first in the second, in particular the music for the teaser (which we might get a third time in the new season?); the sense of rising tension and world-spanning stakes as My Struggle II develops is very palpable and really is X-Files at its most blockbustery massiveness.

Founder’s Mutation alternates between action-oriented music, horror and warmer tones in the William dreams. The music for Home Again, like the episode, is an odd mix between horror music like in Home, and the warmer music of the “relationship” scenes of I Want To Believe. Home Again ending includes a soft rendering of the X-Files main theme; thankfully, Mark Snow didn’t overdo it by quoting that melody too much (unlike the show’s taglines in the dialogue!).

Very unexpectedly, even the music for Babylon was a pleasant surprise — outside of the short comedic cues of which I was never a big fan of (including a quote of Beethoven’s Letter for Elise)– what is there makes one think of a tense, dark episode. Were-Monster gets just a medley, and it is true that its music was not that memorable.

The set wraps up with Snow’s remix of the main theme, with heavy use of electronics, used in the end titles. The opening titles used the original mix of the iconic original theme.

All of this makes me look forward to Mark Snow’s score for the upcoming season.

 


 

Volume 4 and beyond

We are still waiting for Volume 4 of La La Land’s music for the original X-Files, after Volume 3 was released in 2013.

The massive list with requests for cues has been updated — music from 147 episodes!

What was covered in Volume 3 was removed, more requests were added (cues gathered at FSM or sent to EatTheCorn).

The latest news from LLL is that they are indeed considering a Volume 4 given the sales of previous volumes, however indications are that this would be the last volume. The focus is expected to be on episodes not covered in previous volumes, however requests for important cues that were skipped the first time around are so recurring that I hope LLL might reconsider.

Another idea that has been floated by LLL is that of complete episodic soundtracks: the complete score of episodes instead of episode selections, with one CD containing perhaps 2 episodes. This has been attempted before with, for instance, the episodic scores to Babylon 5; the limited edition would be fewer than the 3000 units for the Volumes releases. This approach would make sense once the “best of” Volume 4 will be out, given the amount of material out there and the dedicated fanbase of Snow’s music.

Volume 3 was an odd mix of selected cues and complete episodic soundtracks where precious time could have been saved for short cues that are considered of higher priority. Volume 3 featured a peculiar selection of music, with some excellent material from the first couple of seasons that many had asked for (Deep Throat, GenderBender, 3) but also spending comparatively a lot of CD space on episodes for which a selection would have sufficed (Small Potatoes) or that were not on anyone’s list (El Mundo Gira, Trust No 1) or giving select episodes the complete soundtrack treatment. For example Drive was covered in its entirety with 32 min (only missing: two very short cues that are actually samples of the released cues), and Field Trip and Essence were also very close to complete.

Despite these quips, LLL has been issuing high quality box sets with material that was only the stuff of dreams a few years ago, so the fact that LLL does have plans for more releases to come can only be good news!