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The Day the Earth Stood Still (Bernard Herrmann score)
The sound of the 1950s flying saucer starts here. Herrmann, in his first job after moving to Los Angeles, augmented the orchestra with two theremins, an electric violin, cello and bass, two Hammond organs, pianos, harps and an expanded brass section. The theremins carry the alien wail everyone now associates with the decade, but the real pleasure on record is how hard and modern the rest sounds: pianos set octaves apart in "Radar", crystalline harps under the space motif.
It is short, tightly built and strange in a way that still feels like design rather than novelty. Start with the opening titles and let the brass and theremins collide.
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Forbidden Planet (Louis and Bebe Barron score)
There are no instruments here at all. Louis and Bebe Barron designed and built electronic circuits, giving individual circuits to particular themes and characters, and the film credits the result as "electronic tonalities" rather than music. It is widely described as the first entirely electronic film score.
What survives on record is a bank of pulsing, sighing, bubbling tones that behave more like living things than melodies. It works best as a mood piece: put it on in the dark and it is still unsettling, nearly 70 years later. The album came out long after the film, issued by the Barrons themselves.
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Planet of the Apes (Jerry Goldsmith score, 1968)
Goldsmith made his alien world sound primitive rather than futuristic, and did it almost entirely acoustically. He brought stainless-steel mixing bowls from his own kitchen, used a cuíca to imitate ape hoots, had French horn players reverse their mouthpieces and blow air through the instruments, and let a shofar blast over the title. The only electronics were an Echoplex, echoing percussion and pizzicato strings.
The result is one of the boldest atonal scores Hollywood ever backed, and it earned an Oscar nomination. On album it is restless and percussive, closer to modernist concert music than to a conventional soundtrack.
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Solaris (Original Soundtrack) by Eduard Artemiev
Artemiev recorded this on the ANS, a Soviet photoelectronic synthesizer that turns images drawn on glass plates into sound, and built it around variations on Bach's Chorale Prelude in F minor, a somber piece for solo organ. The contrast is the point: a devotional melody from centuries ago surrounded by tones that drift, smear and hum like weather on an alien ocean.
It sat unreleased officially for four decades; the 2013 album was its first authorized release. It is slow, foggy and closer to ambient music than to anything Hollywood was making in 1972, which makes it ideal for long, quiet listening.
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Star Wars: A New Hope (1997)
Released
After a run of electronic and avant-garde experiments, the boldest move in 1977 was a full symphony orchestra playing unashamedly romantic music. Williams wrote it for the London Symphony Orchestra, recorded it at Anvil Studios in Denham in March 1977, and gave characters and ideas their own recurring themes, a sound rooted in the grand Hollywood scores of earlier decades.
That is why the album plays so well on its own: themes return, combine and develop like a concert work. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Score, and the AFI later named it the greatest American film score. If the main title is too familiar, go straight to the finale.
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Close Encounters of the Third Kind (John Williams score)
Released the same year as Star Wars, this is the other John Williams: a score whose most famous idea is five notes that the film treats as an actual language. Accounts of how many versions he wrote before Spielberg chose one differ, but they run to hundreds.
Around that signal sits some of the most daring orchestral writing in a blockbuster, atonal and clustered, with passages that recall Ligeti's dense micropolyphony before the strings finally open into warm, tonal release. On album that journey from dread to wonder is the whole appeal. The expanded editions give a fuller picture than the original 1977 LP.
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Alien (2007)
Released
Goldsmith's Alien is a horror score made from breath and wood. He used a conch shell for the planet's eerie low wind, a didgeridoo for drones, the serpent, a wooden horn with a brass mouthpiece, for guttural low notes, and an Echoplex tape delay to smear strummed violins and basses into echoes.
The album matters here because the film does not tell the whole story: Ridley Scott had cues rewritten and replaced, some with music from Goldsmith's earlier Freud. The complete release sets out the original score, the rewrites and the film version side by side. It is cold and difficult listening, and the composer's own ending is the reward.
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Blade Runner (1993)
Released
Vangelis's own soundtrack album, first issued in 1994
Synthesizers have rarely sounded this human. Vangelis built a rain-soaked noir out of huge, slowly decaying electronic chords, with the voice of Demis Roussos on "Tales of the Future", and the mood is melancholy rather than menacing.
Check which edition you are buying. The first official album in 1982 was an orchestral re-recording by the New American Orchestra, and Vangelis's own soundtrack was delayed some 12 years until June 1994. That album leaves out a good deal of the film's music and adds pieces that are not in the film; the 2007 25th anniversary set added unreleased material.
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Tron (2001)
Released
Wendy Carlos treated synthesizer and symphony orchestra as equal partners rather than layering one politely over the other. She performed the GDS and Moog synthesizer parts herself, the London Philharmonic Orchestra played under Douglas Gamley, and the result sounds like a computer world with a cathedral inside it.
That makes it a fascinating bridge between the orchestral and electronic halves of this list. Be aware that the album also includes two songs by Journey, so it is not pure score from start to finish; skip those and the rest holds together as one of the most inventive hybrid scores of the early 1980s.
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The Terminator (Brad Fiedel score)
This is the cheapest-sounding score on the list, in the best sense. Fiedel worked largely alone with synthesizers, and the famous clanging, metallic hit came from a big cast-iron frying pan struck with a hammer in front of a microphone. The main theme lurches with an off-kilter rhythm that feels mechanical, relentless and slightly broken, which is exactly the film's villain.
Away from the screen it plays as cold, pulsing industrial electronica, with a few acoustic piano passages for relief. The 2016 Milan album, The Terminator (Original Music), was remastered by Fiedel from the original tapes and is the cleanest way to hear the score on its own.
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Symphonic Suite AKIRA (1988)
Released
Nothing else in science fiction sounds like this. Shoji Yamashiro and his collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi, largely made up of non-professional singers, drew on Indonesian gamelan, Japanese Noh theater and Buddhist chant, and set them against synthesizers. The future Tokyo of the film becomes something ritual and ancient as well as electric.
This is the 1988 suite, not the separate soundtrack release mixed with film dialogue, so it plays as a complete concert work. The percussion and massed voices are thrilling at volume, and the gamelan passages are hypnotic enough to work as background for long stretches.
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Ghost in the Shell (Original Soundtrack) by Kenji Kawai
Kawai answered a story about bodies, machines and souls with voices. His main theme, "Making of Cyborg", has a choir chant a wedding song in ancient Japanese following Bulgarian folk harmonies, and it makes the digital city feel haunted rather than shiny. Accounts of exactly who sang it differ, so the method is clearer than the personnel.
Beyond that theme the album is sparse and atmospheric, with long stretches of murky electronic texture between the chants. It is short and best heard straight through, as a mood rather than a set of tunes.
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Moon (Original Score) by Clint Mansell
A small film about one man alone on a lunar base gets a small, obsessive score to match. Mansell's music is predominantly electronic, broken up by solo piano and a small string ensemble, and it keeps circling one idea: the repeated piano figure of "Welcome to Lunar Industries", which returns in a ten-minute version that closes the original album.
That repetition is what makes it work as a record. It feels like routine, isolation and a mind slowly coming loose, and it rewards a late-night listen far more than its quiet surface suggests.
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TRON: Legacy (2010)
Released
Daft Punk's first film score is the entry for anyone who comes to soundtracks from dance music. The duo assembled an 85-piece orchestra recorded at AIR Lyndhurst Studios in London, then fused it with their own synthesizers, so pounding arpeggios and huge string chords push in the same direction.
It is a clear heir to Wendy Carlos's Tron, and the album is more coherent than the film: short, driving cues with clear themes that hold up without the pictures. Released by Walt Disney Records in December 2010, it also earned a Grammy nomination for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media.
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Under the Skin (Original Soundtrack) by Mica Levi
The most unnerving record here, and one of the most original scores of its decade. Levi wrote it electronically, mixing MIDI strings with real strings, flute and percussion played by around a dozen musicians, and much of it is microtonal, so a small group sounds like an uncontrolled swarm.
The effect is of human music heard by something that is not human: strings that slide, buzz and refuse to settle, motifs that return like a lure. It is not comfortable, but it is gripping, and it proves how much of an alien presence can be built from ordinary instruments pulled slightly out of tune.
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Interstellar (2014)
Released
Zimmer gave space travel the sound of a church. The signature instrument is the four-manual Harrison & Harrison organ of Temple Church in London, played by Roger Sayer, the church's organist, alongside a comparatively small ensemble that emphasizes strings and woodwinds rather than the brass wall Zimmer is known for.
Nolan began by sending Zimmer a typed letter about the film's theme, and the music keeps that intimacy: slow organ swells and a sense of scale that never needs volume to land. The album situation is complicated, and the expanded two-disc edition gives the fullest account of the score.
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Arrival (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Jóhann Jóhannsson
A film about learning an alien language gets a score built from the human voice. Jóhannsson worked with the chamber choir Theatre of Voices and with experimental vocalists, using both choir and soloists and treating the voice as a textural instrument rather than a carrier of melody, so phrases overlap like speech just out of reach.
Heard alone, it is slow, grey and enveloping. One caution for anyone who loved the film's opening and closing: that string music is Max Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight", not Jóhannsson's, and its prominence is why his score was ruled ineligible for the Oscar.
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Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Released
Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch went back to the machine behind the 1982 original: a Yamaha CS-80, the temperamental analog synthesizer Vangelis relied on. Wallfisch described the aim as a more contemporary sound using 40-year-old technology, and they paired it with other synths, effects and a double bass played unusually high.
Where Vangelis is warm and nostalgic, this is vast, bruising and cold, with brutal low swells alongside fragile, Vangelis-like passages. Jóhann Jóhannsson was originally announced as composer before Zimmer and Wallfisch took over. Hear it after the Vangelis album to appreciate how differently the same instrument can speak.
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Annihilation (Music from the Motion Picture) by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow
The surprise here is a simple acoustic guitar riff with a slight country and bluegrass twang, set against synthesizers that each take on a different tone. The folk-like guitar keeps the story human while the electronics bend and refract around it, matching the film's shimmering zone where nature mutates.
Salisbury and Barrow, the latter a founding member of Portishead, save the defining musical idea for "The Alien", the 12-minute finale, where the score turns into something hypnotic and overwhelming. It is the best single cue on the list for showing how far a modest palette can travel, and worth hearing loud.
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Dune: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (2021)
Released
Zimmer says there is no orchestra anywhere in Dune. Most of its sounds come from specially commissioned instruments and new synthesizer modules: Pedro Eustache built a supersized contrabass duduk, Chas Smith made metallic percussion, one piece from an alloy used in cryogenic storage tanks, and 30 bagpipe players were recorded remotely in an Edinburgh church. Zimmer spent more than a year with three singers, including Loire Cotler, whose raw war cry is the album's most startling moment.
It sounds ancient and alien at once. Zimmer released two albums: the Dune Sketchbook of long original suites, and this soundtrack, which assembles those elements into the film score.
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