MOTM

Yikes! How did I forget Morton Subotnick!?! One has to at least have "Silver
Apples of the Moon" on the shelf! :)

Thanks for some of these other recommendations. I hadn't heard of a few of
these, and I will be checking them out.

Regarding the 'Blade Runner' soundtrack, the one you're referring to is
still not the "real" release of the score. This is a long story buried in
science fiction legend at this point, but for anyone interested, the short
form is that Vangelis and director Ridley Scott came to blows over how the
soundtrack should be used in the film, so although the end credits say
"Soundtrack available on Polydor Records," it was never released. Scott
didn't own the score outright, but he did have rights to the "notes," so an
orchestra later did an acoustic version of the electronic soundtrack (what
an odd twist!), which was grabbed up by fans of the film as 'something,' but
wasn't Vangelis, of course.

Then over the years, Vangelis would tease audiences with scraps from the
soundtrack appearing here & there. Just enough to be aggravating.

A few years ago, he released what was supposedly the "real" Blade Runner
soundtrack. However, it's a fairly short album with actually very few cuts
from the film, the rest being more contemporary stuff that he filled in. On
top of that, in a move considered blasphemous by soundtrack aficionados, he
shoved dialogue from the film all over the music. So if you listen
critically, there is only one single track on that album that is actually
from the film that is not soiled by dialogue. But honestly, a good third or
more of that disc is not from the film, despite what it says on the cover.

The bootleg to which I'm referring has 78 or so minutes of music from the
movie, plus the audio from the movie trailer. In fact, if I'm not mistaken,
it's only missing the "blimp woman song," left off because of disc capacity,
and that can be found elsewhere---it is an excerpt from the classical
Japanese opera "Ogi No Mato" and is easily found on the web.

I'm getting long-winded again, but I'm one of those people who waited 20
years to get my hands on this music. Bottom line---that new Vangelis album
is worth getting, and has some nice, NEW pieces, but if you want the REAL,
complete soundtrack, you need to look elsewhere.

I agree: Thief, Opera Sauvage, China, & Spiral are great albums.