Peter Holslin has come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and he’s all out of bubblegum
The filmmaker John Carpenter is of course celebrated for a long list of murky, dystopian flicks from the ’70s and ’80s—The Thing, They Live, Halloween, Big Trouble in Little China, etc. But at this point he’s known as much for his film scores as for the films themselves. Electronic heads and hip-hop producers in particular take inspiration from his minimalist style, in which he’s often built suspense and sustained tension using a battery of droned-out, arpeggiating synthesizers.
Carpenter told Rolling Stone recently that he’s relatively untrained: “I don’t write music. I don’t read music. It’s all improvised.“ That’s seemed to work towards his advantage, as one of his best scores, Assault on Precinct 13, is also his most brutally stripped-down. But I’m sure he’s being a little modest there, too. He certainly knew what he was doing in The Fog; the track “Matthew Ghost Story” sets a lingering drone tone against a series of brief, unpredictable piano plinks, making it feel like even on a quick evening run to the car you might end up taking a detour into the netherworld.
In any case, the 66-year-old composer’s new song, “Night,” is quintessentially Carpenterial. It’s the second single off his forthcoming debut solo album Lost Themes—set to be released on Sacred Bones Records on Feb. 3—and it sends the listener on a dark and dreary odyssey. The bass-line, sounding deliciously chunky, pulses in a steady motion. Meanwhile, a two-fingered keyboard chord sequence unfurls slowly like a man’s last dying breaths. Invariably , we return right back to that original bass-line, synths quaking ominously in the background, teetering on the line between entrancement and terror.
