As a kid growing growing up on Vancouver Island, Panos Cosmatos spent hours at his local video store, which was then still a new kind of business in North American suburbia. He would browse the endless racks of VHS boxes, especially curious about the fantastical illustrations that lined the horror and science fiction sections. His mother and father (a cinematographer and director whose most famous credits are Rambo: First Blood Part II and Tombstone) wouldn’t let him watch scary movies, but as Cosmatos told Filmmaker Magazine, he would “spend hours looking at the box covers… just imagining my own versions of them.” Decades later, those made-up stories would eventually coalesce into his first feature-length film, 2010’s Beyond the Black Rainbow, a mesmerizing period-piece headtrip sci-fi horror thriller that inevitably became a cult favorite.
As origin stories go, that’s a good one. And it’s borne out by the film itself, which borrows liberally from the past but proves less specifically referential than, say, any Tarantino flick. On first viewing Beyond the Black Rainbow seems visually arresting yet thematically vacuous: The story crawls, yet (or because) each frame is meticulously composed and shot. There’s a strange doctor treating a young woman who is so sedated she can barely speak and whose long, black hair obscures her face to give her the appearance of a j-horror wraith. There’s the suspicious Arboria Institute, straight out of a Cronenberg flick; there are red stormtroopers called sentionauts, two doomed heshers, and the coolest Lotus Esprit since The Spy Who Loved Me. On repeated viewings, however, all of these fantastical elements begin to push forward certain themes—generally, an older generation preying on a younger one. More specifically, it seems to locate the roots of the present generation’s addiction to mood-altering drugs in the Baby Boomer’s pursuit of enlightenment through mind-altering hallucinogens.
Because the film delivers so much of its information visually rather than through expository dialogue—a trick more filmmakers should try—the music must be both bold and nonintrusive, gingerly reinforcing the imaginary 1983 milieu without rendering it as novelty. Working under his Sinoia Caves alias, Jeremy Schmidt has crafted a soundtrack that nods to the early VHS era but is never too specific in its nostalgia; this is music made to tell a story, or at least part of one. Schmidt, a member of the Canadian indie-prog outfit Black Mountain, knows this territory well: In 2002 he released his Sinoia Caves debut, The Enchanter Persuaded, which expertly mixed cosmic synths and kosmische sequencers. Schmidt took a few years to subtly and meticulously rearrange the major suites from his Black Rainbow score into a work that alludes to the movie but should work for people who’ve never even heard of Panos Cosmatos. In doing so, he has done what neither Daft Punk nor M83 could pull off: He has created a soundtrack that works as an imaginative and often moving standalone album.
Just as Cosmatos drew from his own memory to craft the movie, Schmidt seems to have composed this music based on hazy memories of old soundtracks. There are sly nods to John Carpenter and Goblin, Jan Hammer and Jon McCallum. He uses voices well, an old trope that horror flicks have used to imply some ritualistic terror but here sounds more benign—as though Schmidt is peopling Cosmatos’ often empty frames. On opener “Forever Dilating Eye”, a bodiless choir sings the wordless theme, then fades into a quick pulse of dwindling syllables. The effect is that of humans being broadcast via unreliable technology. Those strange vocals reappear at times throughout the album, until they are finally answered by a mechanistic monotone from the movie about better living through chemistry.
“Elena’s Sound-World” recalls Giorgio Moroder’s work for Oliver Stone, but what’s more impressive is how sympathetic the song is toward the title character, imprisoned in the weird Arboria Institute. The pulsing sequencers and bodiless choir of voices not only sound startlingly tender (echoing the sensitivity with which Cosmatos finally shows her face), but the song grows larger with each measure, as though imagining a wide world beyond the confining walls. On the other hand, “Run Program: Sentionauts”, with its towering organ riffs and prismatic synthesizers, conveys nothing but danger and dread as it reimagines a Popol Vuh Herzog score as a teen slasher soundtrack.
In other words, this is music that tells a story—that, crucially, makes its own powerful statement—even when detached from Beyond the Black Rainbow. It ebbs and flows in dramatic arcs, from the fluttery hush of “Arboria Tapes – Award Winning Gardens” to the foreboding synths of “1983 – Main Titles.” The album builds as it proceeds, such that the errant drones and earth-rattling chords of the seventeen-minute “1966 – Let the New Age of Enlightenment Begin” supply rising action and the eerie prog bombast of closer “Sentionauts II” creates a climactic conclusion. In both the film and its soundtrack, there is a constant sense of opening out: Elena’s world grows larger and larger as she ventures from her cell into the wide world, while Schmidt’s score similarly sounds like it is forever dilating, at least until the last synthburst fades.
