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:
- Obituary on Variety
- Fellow composer and friend Sean Callery
- La-La Land’s MV
- Alex for the Mark Snow Facebook page
- Matt for the XF Lexicon
- Gold Derby on an oral history of the TXF theme (a compilation of past interviews)
- Podcasts re-air past interviews with Mark Snow: The X-Cast; Conspiracy/Sammensværgelsen
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…
