EMIL AMOS - Zone Black [lp]

Emil Amos was originally commissioned by the legendary KPM music
library to make this music for use in television and film. But after the
executive overseeing their experimental wing exited the company,
Emil brought Zone Black to Drag City and re-mixed it into a proper
full-length album. While the record was originally inspired by old
school 70's television music, like the grim, descending riffs that took
us to commercial as the running back strained in anguish for the ball
in slo-mo, it became a genuine attempt to reach towards a new kind
of library music.
Emil (Grails, OM and podcaster supreme) carves out a much more
personal interpretation of what we think of as "music for television"
with Zone Black. Taking classic, dark pieces that he grew up with as
inspiration, like the "Lonely Man Theme" from the original Hulk TV
series, he fantasized an alternate environment where composers were
allowed to explore more extreme states of mind, while on much witchier

drugs...fully separating library music from its outmoded commer-
cial constraints. Imagine Brian Eno recording Another Green World

equipped with Madlib's gear and a much darker sense of humor...or
Kafka creating The Castle with a Juno keyboard and sampler instead.
In the spirit of classic synth-based soundtracks like Firestarter
or Midnight Express, the instruments narrate the experience. Urban
landscapes in noirish chiaroscuro, fatal encounters unfurling beneath

the persistent glow of riot lights, last-ditch meetings in pre-dawn disco-
theques...all evoked with synths, harpsichords and mellotrons drifting

over drum machines and the arachnoid radiation of FX disappearing
up into the darkness. Every track illuminates a different corridor of
Emil's brain, but A.E. Paterra and Steve Moore of ZOMBI periodically
step in to contribute sax solos and drum beats to amp the coloration up.
Zone Black is a fully inhabitable world, its episodic narrative divided
into an improbable balance between morbid, ambient anthems and
insouciant hip-hop instrumentals. Emil hadn't heard it done quite this
way before, so he took it upon himself to make the sound real. And
if you don't hear it in the next, big horror feature (or in a new Zone
Black game done up for Xbox, yeah!), it'll make great mood music for
tripping in the bathtub while dreaming of a new horizon of music to
take drugs to. Listening to Emil Amos' Zone Black

Vinyl release of Emil Amos - Zone Black [lp]. Released through DRAG CITY and available on LP.