Gil Melle - The Andromeda Strain, Tome VI, Waterbirds + (2022)

May 2022; due to numerous requests, and in the spirit of celebrating Creel Pone's 17th Anniversary with a bang, here is a completely revised replica edition of this time-tested title, with the original Kapp 10"/LP issue of "The Andromeda Strain" OST augmented with Melle's two other relatable issues of Jazz-Electronics from the vinyl era: "Tome VI" & "Waterbirds" across two discs (plus a short bonus track of a "Demo" of the Percusotron III!)
Creel pone of one of the most legendary Early Electronic music film scores (right up there with Bebe & Louis Barron’s “Forbidden Planet”, Bernard Hermann’s “The Day The Earth Stood Still”, and Oskar Sala’s Trautonium sound design for Hitchcock’s “The Birds”) - mainly due to the scarcity & production values of the original release: a Hexagonal 10” record housed in a six-fold flap-system affixed to the cover of a metallic 12” sleeve which opens up to reveal a set of photos from the film & the liner notes.
All well & good, but the attraction for me to this suite of pieces by jazz composer Gil Mellé has always been the bizarre invented electronic instrumentation (like the Percussotron III - a primitive drum machine) and lo-fi / distorted Musique Concrète techniques (the first piece alone consists of ten tape-transformed piano parts and the ambience of a bowling alley). For early 70s Hollywood film-score material, this stuff is pretty damn far out ... most of it sounds like a more free/European take on the Patrick Gleeson collabs on Herbie Hancock’s “Sextant”, other parts sound like the weird Finnish jerry-rigged electronics of Erkki Kurreniemi or even the more far-out segments on the first two Kluster records.
No matter how you slice it, this is an important set; rife with sound-research oriented takes that situate it well within the Creel Pone canon.