NUTS4R2

L’Umanoide Soundtrack by Ennio Morricone 1979 GDM CLUB CD 7078 Limited to 500 copies

Just relistening to this recent arrival... Morricone’s score for the Richard Kiel/Barbara Bach/Robot Dog-lets-all-ride-the-wake-of-Star-Wars Italian Sci-Fi mess that was... “The Humanoid”.

I have only the vaguest memories of seeing this with my mum as a kid at a cinema in Wood Green. So I have to say my appreciation of the music of this quite bizarre score is in no way coupled with the way the music worked with the imagery of the movie.

That being said... I do know Morricone’s music pretty well by now and this has got to be the album that has the least of his usual musical signatures on it. What a strange selection. It’s like listening to the music of the far future... as imagined in the 1960s... but it’s a late 70s score!

The opening track, “Un Uomo Nello Spazio” starts off with some not quite atonal bloopity bloopity bloop electronic notes which, over the space of the 6 minutes and 48 seconds of the track, open up into something more sweeping and recognisably Morricone... but this album is all over the place.

That’s not a bad thing though. I get bored easily so an unpredictable album like this is good for my “modern man” attention span.

There’s even a track on here (Track 6: Incontri A Sei) that takes this very firmly into the realm of Walter/Wendy Carlos’ doing the famous electronic version of Beethoven’s Ninth for the Clockwork Orange score. Very much a sparky robots doing chamber music kind of feel. And then later, to my ears, there are some snatches and refrain which get very close to the composers score for Queimada... but then it starts jabbing at the melody with little bursts of Nymanesque musical raspberries.

Very interesting stuff.

The GDM Club edition is limited to just 500 units and is available at www.hillsidecd.co.uk

Would definitely recommend this if you’re a die hard Morricone fan and want to hear something a little different but possibly not for anyone else.

Personally I think it’s great and it’s going straight onto my i-pod!