One of the weird crossed wires in my brain is that almost every song feels like it should be the soundtrack to a movie scene. A lot of the time, for me, that’s the very first seed of what will eventually become a story. My flash piece ‘Newsroom — Horizons Interstellar’ is no exception. Check out some of the songs that inspired it here:
Read - NEWSROOM — HORIZONS INTERSTELLAR - available on Sci-Phi Journal!
(or, alternatively, on YouTube)
SOUNDTRACK NOTES:
Your Touch | Nine Inch Nails
From the opening notes of the song, the first thing I see is a spaceship arcing gracefully towards a star, white engine plume streaming out the back like a comet’s tail. There’s hope and beauty and wonder, but also that Nine Inch Nails edge that makes you worry that things are about to get a lot more messed up soon (and spoiler alert, in the story, they do).
Descent | Makeup and Vanity Set
I first learned about Makeup and Vanity Set from the game Brigador. Side note, if you like sci-fi, space stuff, mega-corporations, and spectacularly explosive violence, you’ll probably also dig Brigador. It also reminds of John Carpenter’s amazing soundtrack to The Thing, which may or may not have partially inspired some of the ideas for the Kepler aliens in Newsroom — Horizons Interstellar *cough* chest jaws *cough*.
Run Like Hell | Nine Inch Nails
Another track from the recent Ghosts albums, it feels like a complex world falling apart as chaos and fear take hold. On a personal note, this was also my soundtrack to understanding the initial days of the Coronavirus Pandemic in early 2020. One of the things that drives me to write is to cut the harsh world of the real with some sort of fantastical element, take the edge off by reimagining reality. I think that’s what fiction does at its best - it gives us satisfying narratives that also help us process and re-interpret the frequently mundane, sometimes frightening, complicated feelings we go through in our real lives.
Here Come the Robots I Stoned Jesus
In my head, I like to imagine that each of the self-designing, self-constructing, murderous warforms of the Autonomous Robotic Safety Network (the ARSN) play hard rock as they go about their cheerful mission of purging the universe of life.
Strange Things Happening Every Day | Sister Rosetta Tharpe
I love credits songs. To me, a good credits song can make or break a movie, being that perfect final note to a story, that setting of tone as the lights come up and you begin to emerge from whatever distant world you were just immersed in and return to your regularly scheduled programming. For Newsroom — Horizons Interstellar, Strange Things Happening Every Day is that song.