BuySoundtrax Records is proud to announce the release of the Blade Runner - 30th Anniversary Celebration available at for pre-order at www.buysoundtrax.com on September 5th and digitally and via other soundtrack boutique retailers on September 19, 2012.
The dystopian film, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford in his second starring role after Raiders of the Lost Ark, Blade Runner has become a cult film favorite. Loosely based on a Philip K. Dick novel, Ford stars as Rick Deckard—a bounty hunter assigned to terminate four replicants who have come to earth to find their maker.
Through the years, however, multiple edits of the film have been created for the home video, DVD and Blu-Ray markets. Similarly Vangelis' score has been released in several different incarnations, but none of them are accurate representations of what was heard in the original 1982 film.
"Largely because of a dispute between Vangelis and Scott over the director's use of his music in the film, a proper soundtrack of the music as it is heard in the film has never been commercially issued (despite the promise of a soundtrack album from Polydor Records given in the film's end titles)," described Randall D. Larson in the liner notes of the BuySoundtrax recording.
BuySoundtrax Records seeks to rectify that, with this new recording faithfully recreating the original music from the film, which proved a difficult task. Vangelis' score was composed entirely by performing on keyboards and recording it directly, so no written transcriptions exist. Edgar Rothermich was charged with reverse engineering the score—listening to the original music and a 1982 album mock-up and transcribing it by ear. He also had to recreate the sound of 1982 synthesizers and decipher if noise heard was due to recording on tape or stylistic choices by the composer.
"Blade Runner is the most difficult kind of score to deconstruct," said BSX producer Ford A. Thaxton. "Symphonic music can usually be determined because the instrumental palette is known. But the 1970s-era electronic technology and the improvisational style in which Vangelis created the score made it especially difficult. But we feel Edgar's made a very close replication of what the score sounded like in the film. He's true to the sound the original but he's brought it into today's world."
"The objective from the very beginning was to be as close as possible to the original score as heard in the film," Rothermich said. "It was never a case of my interpreting the soundtrack. It was essentially a re-recording of the soundtrack music."
Born in Germany, Edgar Rothermich studied music at the University of Arts in Berlin and graduated in 1989 with a Master's Degree in piano and sound engineering. He worked as a composer and music producer in Berlin and moved to Los Angeles in 1991 where he continued his work on numerous projects in the music and film industry (The Celestine Prophecy).
For the past 20 years Edgar has had a successful musical partnership with electronic music pioneer and founding Tangerine Dream member Christopher Franke. Recently in addition to his collaboration with Christopher, Edgar has been working with other artists as well as on his own projects. December 2010 marked the release of his first two solo albums Why Not Electronica and Why Not Electronica Again followed by Why Not Solo Piano, the first release in 2011.