Fred Myrow and Macolm Seagrave
Here it is, BOY!!!! The spacegate to infinity. The proverbial Philosopher's Stone of original motion picture soundtracks incarnated as elusive shiny black wax. The if-you-only-own-one-soundtrack-make-it-this-one phantasmagoria of terror that drills itself into your worthless skull like a silver sphere from some nightmarish infrared rift in the space-time continuum. From the moment Intro/Main Title slithers into a cymbal/drum roll and those haunting Carpenter-esque keyboard notes take hold of your soul you know this ain't gonna be your typical Critter Skitter. The morbid organs of Welcome to Morningside are like the moodier parts of Skepticism (a very good 90's band that also experimented with tritonal intervals and predated the current snooze trend toward one-note-per-hour funeral doom) and effortlessly transition into the Milford Graves percussive clamber of Hand in a Box before completely decomposing into that electronic maggots squirming sound that I love so much- it actually sounds exactly like the scene in Lucio Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters where the festering undead shamble through Matool in broad daylight and the camera swirls dizzyingly a la Brian DePalma before zooming in on one particularly hapless bastard's missing ear (that's right, the one track the numbskulls at Death Waltz omitted from their recent reissue that can be heard in all its glory on the 1998 Blackest Heart Media tribute CD as The Dead on Main Street/Voodoo Rising). And speaking of Fulci, there's no way Frizzi was not inspired to some degree by Phantasm when he wrote his wonderful score for The Beyond. Just listen to Hearse Inferno released two years earlier and tell me you don't hear it. According to the liner notes, Myrow and Seagrave composed this music for "a battery of exotic percussion instruments including bells, chimes, bowed gongs, scraper sticks on cymbals, and virtually the entire percussion section of a symphony orchestra, together with a Yamaha YC30 Synthesizer, Clavinet, Fender Electric Piano 88, Mellotron utilizing voice and flute tracks, and an old upright piano." Damn. See what can happen when you don't spend all day updating your Facebook status? I suppose you want me to address Silver Sphere Disco? What can I say? A lot of horror soundtracks from this era had some sort of disco theme (Ortolani's Cannibal Holocaust, Lalo Schifrin's The Amityville Horror and Harry Manfredini's Friday the 13th Part 3 immediately boogie to mind) because even the most high/low-minded cult art house film is mired with inherent fiscal considerations and the thinking was probably that infusing a soundtrack with popular dancey bullshit gave 'em a fighting chance with mainstreams who stumbled into the theater unawares. I'm shaking my ass to it right now. By the way, "morbid organs" is a great band name. You can use that.
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