What do you do when your favourite film isn’t quite Kubriky enough? If you’re Dan Chamberlain, AKA Gold Punks, one of Atlantic Canada’s foremost synthesizer pioneers, you craft a 26-minute long supplemental soundtrack that taps into the classic ‘Berlin School’ sound of Tangerine Dream.
Buckle up, because we’re going interstellar with Gold Punks’ Contact-inspired synthesizer-powered sci-fi odyssey, “Vega.”
For the last twenty years, Dan Chamberlain has been a stable of Saint John’s music scene, with a musical resume including the likes of Penny Blacks, USSE, and SHRIMP Ring. But this story goes back just a bit further.
In 1997 Robert Zemeckis directed the science fiction film, Contact, starring Jodi Foster, and based on Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel of the same name. It was also scored with an original 44-minute long orchestral composition by Alan Silvestri that sounds like literally every other science fiction film of that decade.
The film clearly left an impression on Chamberlain, despite the score.
“In a lot of ways, it’s standard sci-fi. An alien message leads to fantastical discovery, which leads to a leap forward,” says Chamberlain. “And Jodie Foster was just great in it!
“It really got to me in all the right ways; good balance of science and not quite science! For some reason, I just keep coming back to it. I watch the movie every year or three and listen to the audiobook constantly.”
The song, in retrospect, grew out of Chamberlain’s love for the film.
“The song didn’t start out being linked to contact in my mind, but as it developed, it just kept reminding me more and more of it.”
As Chamberlain describes it, “Vega” is intended as the soundtrack of our maiden voyage to our neighboring star. At 25-lightyears away, Chamberlain says he expected the journey to take no more than forty minutes but somehow managed it in a brisk twenty-six.
The composition, however, took him weeks to put together, before the final piece was recorded straight to hardware in a single live performance.
“You know the part of a lot of space movies where you are flying through that sort of tunnel effect of lights? That’s where I am,” says Chamberlain.
In the great scheme of Contact, “Vega” occupies a space in the film covering the point where the ship is ready to ‘launch’ until it comes back to earth. Sadly, Chamberlain notes that the song does not perfectly sync up with the film.
“I thought about that as I was nearing the end, and the only way to really do it was an artificial re-write… or a bit of mushroom tea!”
Sonically, “Vega” has a very very distinctive and familiar sound. This has been crafted at the Altar of Moog, the grandchild of legendary composer and proto-synth artist Wendy Carlos, the final product of the Berlin School, and one band in particular: Tangerine Dream.
Chamberlain had discovered Tangerine Dream for himself by reading magazines, like Keyboard, who had idolized the pioneering German electronic band that had been founded by Edgar Froese in 1967. It would be years before Chamberlain would be able to even hear the band with his own years but, in turn, he would come to worship them himself. He names songs like “Run to Vegas” and “Huckabee’s Dream” as major influences on both his own work and the genre as a whole.
“The Berlin school, to me it all starts with Tangerine Dream in the ’70s: minimal, incessant music. All performed live on great big modular synthesizers. Motifs that would develop over minutes, with slow methodical changes to the sound,” says Chamberlain. “What I find truly special about Tangerine Dream was how they took that sound and firmly implanted it in western culture. Some of the members went on to score a ton of movies in the ’80s.”
“I had a mental image of that sound. Nothing concrete, yet I was always chasing it,” he adds about Keyboard’s writing staff. “It was probably a decade before I knowingly heard it! But man, credit to those writers. What was in my head was pretty darned close to correct. Of course, I hadn’t realized I had been hearing it all along in T.V. and movies that had been scored by offshoots of the band!”
“It’s funny how it goes in waves, and the ’80s wave, in general, is strong! Some other more modern bands have certainly tapped into the sound.
“It’s one of the classic genres for us synth folks, you know? Our ‘classic rock’ or whatever.”
Chamberlain points out that a clear example of the echoing effects that Tangerine Dream has had—and can be heard clear as day if you listen for yourself—is the famous Stranger Things theme. Contemporary bands, like Redshift, continue to similarly tapped into the strong orchestral vibes of the classic Berlin School while incorporating modern production techniques, but the thread running through all of it is that they translate extremely well as epic science-fiction soundtracks.
“For me, it was the soundtracks,” explains Chamberlain. “The original Blade Runner, while maybe not properly classed as Berlin, was an amazing Berlin School bit of stuff! Anytime you hear a percolating synth, with another higher synth line floating above it… oh, boy!”
Comparatively, Chamberlain says that the Gold Punks contribution to the genre contains more of a vintage sound, but 1997 wasn’t exactly yesterday either. If we can travel 25 lightyears, what’s a little trip back to the ’80s?