Los Angeles, CA (Top40 Charts/ CineMedia Promotions) La-La Land Records will release a limited edition (3000 units) 4CD box set of THE X-FILES Volume One - Original
Soundtrack From the Fox Television Series, composed by Mark Snow (Blue Bloods, Smallville, Millennium). The compendium contains tracks from 40 of the beloved show's 202 episodes - over five hours of music! In addition, the deluxe packaging boasts a 40-page booklet including a track-by-track analysis of the selections with liner notes written by Randall D. Larson.
Brooklyn native Mark Snow has been making music since the 1950s. Following a start in the music industry as a popular recording artist with his band the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble, Mark made the switch to composer for television and film in the 1970s. This prolific composer, best known for his scores for such television series as The X-Files, The Ghost Whisperer, Smallville, One Tree Hill, Kojak, Millenium, Pasadena, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, T. J. Hooker, Cagney and Lacey, Starsky and Hutch, Gemini Man, Family and Hart to Hart, is the only ASCAP composer to receive the "Most Performed Background Music" award every year consecutively since the inception of the award in 1985-6. He has been nominated 14 times for Emmy's for his work on television series and television films including Helter Skelter, Children of the Dust, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and Something about Amelia. Recent film projects include the scores for the X-Files movie X-Files: I Want to Believe, and White Irish Drinkers, an indie film directed by John Gray.
The brainchild of Chris Carter, The X-Files debuted in 1993 and quickly became a fan favorite for FOX. The show starred David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. The duo investigates X-Files - marginalized cases that involve the paranormal. Mulder is a believer in the existence of extraterrestrials and Scully - a Jodie Foster-esque character - is a skeptic.
The main story-arc of the show, involved Mulder and Scully's attempts to uncover a government conspiracy to hide the existence of aliens - the major villains are a shadow element called The Syndicate, usually represented by the Cigarette Smoking Man. In the 8th season, when Duchovny decided to leave the show, his fictional counterpart was abducted and Scully inherited a new partner, John Doggett (Robert Patrick). Duchovny would return for the final episodes of the series in its 9th season and also for the feature film released in theaters in 2008.
As the show matured, the Mark Snow's score did as well. "Musically, the show evolved from being more ambient, supportive music to really getting into some melodic music in a dark, Mahleresque style," said composer Mark Snow.
"Snow's first task when he came on board was to create the show's signature theme," described Randall Larson. "What he came up with was a rhythmic amalgamation of Synclavier and an electronically reprocessed whistler (it's Mark's wife who performs the whistling, which was sampled and doubled with a music software program called Proteus2)."
"That theme doesn't really go anywhere, musically, it just repeats itself, but it's so interesting," Snow said. The echo effect was created by accident. "I played the triplet figure and had accidentally left the Sony delay on, and it made that now-famous repeat."
The eerie, unsettling tone that Snow created helped The X-Files to stand apart from the other shows of its era. "It seems that people respond to my suspenseful music as if it's this really new approach," explained Snow, "but it's really the style of music I've come to love over the years since I was a student - music by Varese, John Cage; all the real atonal material that perhaps I like more than some other composers."
The truth is out there ... and now you can revisit how it sounds with THE X-FILES Volume One - Original Soundtrack From the Fox Television Series (limited edition 3000 units), composed by Mark Snow. The 4CD set from La-La Land Records will be available at www.lalalandrecords.com and other online soundtrack boutiques on May 10, 2011.
