Blade Runner Trilogy: 25th Anniversary 3 CD Soundtrack release on UMTV

Speaking of biosociality and electronic music, I previously had no idea there was so much new music in preparation for the Blade Runner anniversary. Unsurprisingly, the bootlegs I've heard haven't contained all this material, including a cameo by, of all people, Roman Polanski!!:

"Universal Music TV is set to release a stunning 3CD collection to mark the 25th Anniversary of Blade Runner on December 10th, 2007. Featuring previously unreleased music from the film, bonus tracks and a brand new album of Vangelis material inspired by the film with sleeve notes written by Ridley Scott.
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, with its apocalyptic depiction of LA in 2019, has become one of the most celebrated sci-fi releases of the 20th century. It’s one of those films where all of the constituent parts - the set, the lighting, the characters, the sparse dialogue and of course the music - work uniquely together to produce a cult masterpiece.
The music has always been a key element of Blade Runner and there have been various versions of the soundtrack over the years, some ‘official’ and some bootlegs. But they have all either been incomplete or have suffered from poor sound quality, until now. Blade Runner Trilogy: 25th Anniversary is a 3CD set which - for the first time - puts all the pieces together, providing the complete music from the film and a lot more besides.
CD 1 features the original and remastered soundtrack as it first appeared in 1994, twelve years after the film was released. The second CD contains all the remaining music from the film that did not appear on the original 1994 soundtrack, plus two bonus tracks ("One Alone" and "Desolation Path"). None of this material has been released before.
The third and final disc will be of real interest to Vangelis fans - as it contains an entire album of newly written material composed by Vangelis to mark the 25th anniversary of Blade Runner. The music is strong and flowing, and retains the dark, atmospheric sense of the original score. There are some intriguing spoken word contributions too, from Ridley Scott, Roman Polanski, Oliver Stone and a host of distinguished actors, personalities and world dignitaries.
Full track listing details:
CD 1: Blade Runner Original Soundtrack Album Track 1: Main Titles (3': 42")
Track 2: Blush Response (5': 47")
Track 3: Wait For Me (5': 27")
Track 4: Rachel’s Song (4': 46")
Track 5: Love Theme (4': 56")
Track 6: One More Kiss, Dear (3': 58")
Track 7: Blade Runner Blues (8': 53")
Track 8: Memories Of Green (5': 05")
Track 9: Tales Of The Future (4': 46")
Track 10: Damask Rose (2': 32")
Track 11: Blade Runner (End Titles) (4': 40")
Track 12: Tears In Rain (3': 00")
CD 2: Blade Runner Previously Unreleased and Bonus Material Track 1: Longing (1': 58")
Track 2: Unveiled Twinkling Space (1': 59")
Track 3: Dr. Tyrell’s Owl (2': 40")
Track 4: At Mr. Chew’s (4': 47")
Track 5: Leo’s Room (2': 21")
Track 6: One Alone (bonus track) (2': 23")
Track 7: Deckard And Roy’s Duel (6': 16")
Track 8: Dr. Tyrell’s Death (3': 11")
Track 9: Desolation Path (bonus track) (5': 45")
Track 10: Empty Streets (6': 16")
Track 11: Mechanical Dolls (2': 52")
Track 12: Fading Away (3': 32")
CD 3: BR 25
This is the album with the new music, composed by Vangelis for Blade Runner’s 25th anniversary.
Track 1: Launch Approval (1': 54")Spoken word: Scott Bolton, Bryce Bolton
Track 2: Up and Running (3': 09")Spoken word: Sir Ridley Scott
Track 3: Mail From India (3': 27")Ney: C. Lambrakis
Track 4: BR Downtown (2': 27?)Spoken word: Oliver Stone, Akiko Ebi, Cherry Vanilla
Track 5: Dimitri’s Bar (3': 52")Spoken word: Akiko Ebi, Oliver Stone, Saxophone: Dimitris Tsakas
Track 6: Sweet Solitude (6': 56")Saxophone: Dimitris Tsakas
Track 7: No Expectation Boulevard (6': 44")Spoken word: Rutger Hauer, Wes Studi, Bhaskar Balakrishnan (Executive Director of the Asian Heritage Foundation), Shobhana Balakrishnan, Laura Metaxa, Sir Ridley Scott, Zhao Yali (Ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to Cyprus)
Track 8: Vadavarot (4': 14")Spoken word: Irina Valentinova, Florencia Suayan Tacod
Track 9: Perfume Exotico (5': 19")Spoken word: Edward James Olmos
Track 10: Spotkanie Z Matka (5': 09")Spoken word: Roman Polanski reciting excerpts from the poem "Spotkanie z Matka" by Konstanty Ildefons Gaczynski
Track 11: Piano In An Empty Room (3': 37")
Track 12: Keep Asking (1': 29")Spoken word: Bryce Bolton
All music composed, arranged, produced and performed by Vangelis.
"One of the great experiences of my directing career was working on the music for Blade Runner with Vangelis at his Marble Arch studio in London where he would perform rough demo film cues for me on the fly, obsessing over every detail and capturing every moment with exceptional beauty...the final result took us far beyond my expectations." - Ridley Scott, sleeve notes
This CD release ties in with some significant DVD products launched to coincide with the 25th anniversary. On December 3rd, 2007 a 5 DVD set ‘Final Cut: Ultimate Collectors Edition’ is released, which contains all 5 versions of the film, plus interviews, a documentary on the making of the film and a letter from Ridley Scott".

http://www.elsew.com/data/latest.htm

The Liberator

Recent events have conspired against me occupying the Space Jockey's chair for a while. They have ranged from the trauma of exposure to Tom Clancy- type masculine object relations (I plan to write this up on Acheron) to more positive personal stuff I won't talk about here yet, to hopefully getting an update this coming Wednesday on the publishability (or not) of my article on English nationalism and the Barmy Army (fingers crossed). Yep, my fascination (love/hate) for the United Kingdom continues unabated!! Having trouble processing the emotional relationships between all this stuff, have tried using music, particularly Mark Hollis, Marc Almond and Gary Numan's The Pleasure Principle. An eclectic assemblage to be sure, but it seems to be working. I never doubt the healing power of music during a personal crisis, especially anything from the Golden Era, personified by the aforementioned artists. Afterall, this was the music I grew up with, and continue to grow with.

What is unbeatable to me is hybridisation before forms have crystallised into new orthodoxies. For example, who the fuck wants to politely listen to John Cage, who is only an avant garde formalism, when you could be hearing The Human League's Reproduction? The sheer wonder of experimentation, importing underground electronic forms into a pop song. Likewise, I still feel that "United" is Throbbing Gristle's best work....BTW, I appreciate Simon Reynolds writing Rip It Up & Start Again, but does anyone know if he's ever written anything about Talk Talk/Mark Hollis? I think he has an archive site so I must remember to follow this up.

Anyhow, I'm starting to ramble incoherently (again). But this howl into the void is therapeutic to me....One of the more noteworthy items I've come across in recent times though is The Liberator. I hesitate here regarding the appropriateness of the metaphors I've used thus far, hybridisation, in that context. Others such as creolisation come to mind, and have received theorisation from, if memory serves correctly, the likes of Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall. I stand by the inclusiveness of the "experimental"tag though. Witness the range of film and music coverage, in combination with the shrewd social analysis:

http://www.liberatormagazine.com/backissues/

Briefly, in other news, a prediction. Haven't checked out ballardian.com for a while, but what are the chances that, given its interest in micronations, this might lead to a turn towards a new journal, Island Studies?:

http://www.islandstudies.ca/journal/isresources.html

Meanwhile, The Guardian is generally good value, but this piece on why philosophy grads are coming into vogue in the employment market really took me surprise. Could it be a confirmation of the complexity and contingency marking the social sciences, that this is coming about during an increasingly bioglobal, neoliberal era? As markers of certainty start to disappear, bioethicists start to sit at the same table as economists.........:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,2213665,00.html

"Shark"

The Czech Republic's David Cerny is one of the country's most original but also most provocative visual artists. His work includes the giant black babies that crawl up Prague's Zizkov TV tower and the famous Pink Tank - the Soviet tank, a memorial to the liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945, which David Cerny painted pink overnight.

But this time, it is David Cerny's sculpture called "Shark", which caught the attention of the citizens of the Belgian town of Middelkerke. It features a life-size Saddam Hussein in underpants with his hands tied behind his back, floating in a large glass tank filled with the embalming fluid formaldehyde. The sculpture was supposed to be exhibited on one of the town squares as part of this April's Beaufort 2006 Modern Arts Festival.

Running the Numbers An American Self-Portrait

"This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. My underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

"My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned."

~chris jordan, Seattle, 2007

Skull With Cigarette, 2007 [based on a painting by Van Gogh]72x98"
Depicts 200,000 packs of cigarettes, equal to the number of Americans who die from cigarrette smoking every six months.

The World According to Jello Biafra

Pleasing evidence that the contrarian spirit lives on in Mr Biafra...

Pay celebs maximum wage
"Maybe $200,000, then we get payback. Finally America would have the money to build a proper rail system, free healthcare, free education. People who get obsessed with making more and more money are like crack heads. Wealth addiction dwarfs the damage done by drug addiction. But if people like Tiger Woods, David Beckham and Paris Hilton were put through rehab, through a maximum wage, I bet even they could someday do good."

http://music.guardian.co.uk/rock/story/0,,2203139,00.html

Investigation and Analysis of a Reported Incident Resulting in an Actual Airline Hijacking due to a Fanatical and Engrossed VR State

Abstract
We define Chronic Alternate-World Disorder ( CAWD ) as “ A state in which a person is no longer able to distinguish the real world from virtual space, due to his or her isolation in virtual space for an extended period of time with no contact with the actual world. ” The case report is about a patient who hijacked a jumbo jetliner in order to fly the airplane on his own, after developing CAWD from the use of flight-simulator virtual reality system. We believe symptomatic cases of CAWD will increase as virtual-reality (VR) spread throughout our society. In view of this, our objective is to propose precautionary and preventive measures for providers of VR system for patients with schizophrenia or personality disorders, from psychiatric and sociological perspectives

"Investigation and Analysis of a Reported Incident Resulting in an Actual Airline Hijacking due to a Fanatical and Engrossed VR State"
Ichimura Atsushi, Nakajima Isao, Sadiq Muhammad Athar, Juzoji Hiroshi