A classic of Science fiction cinema, with it’s plot based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and it’s extraordinary visual style created by Mentor Huebner, Forbidden Planet starred the late lamented Leslie Neilson in his then serious mode, and a bona fide old-school movie star in Walter Pidgeon, which took the movie out of the kiddie sci-fi category into serious filmaking.

Forbidden Planet’s innovative electronic music score (credited as “electronic tonalities” ) was composed by Louis and Bebe Barron. The MGM producer Dore Schary discovered this couple quite by chance at a beatnik nightclub in Greenwich Village while on a family Christmas visit to New York City. Schary hired them on the spot to compose his film’s musical score. The theremin (which was not used in Forbidden Planet) had been used as early as 1945, in the film Spellbound, but the Barron’s score is widely credited with being the first completely electronic score. Using ideas and procedures from the book, Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948) by Norbert Wiener, Louis Barron constructed his own electronic circuits that he used to generate the “bleeps, blurps, whirs, whines, throbs, hums, and screeches”. After recording the basic sounds, the Barrons further manipulated them, adding effects, such as reverberation and delay, and reversing or changing the speeds of certain sounds. Since Louis and Bebe Barron did not belong to the Musicians Union, their work could not be considered for an Academy Award‹in either the “soundtrack” or the “sound effects” categories that year. What a bizarre injustice this is will become clear when you hear their wonderful”tonalities”……

Wonderfully yet eccentrically mastered by the wonderful Norman Blake.

Beautiful sleeve by Pepperbox.

Notes by broadcaster and electronic music enthusiast John Cavanagh.

A must for all fans of electronica raw….innovative sounds….Robby The
Robot…just the cover is worth the price of admission, and the sounds…..sublime.