The Essay: 2019 - The Year of Blade Runner

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The Essay: Blade Runner at 40

The Essay: Blade Runner at 40: The Year of Blade Runner 2: Sounds of the Future Past

The Year of Blade Runner 2: Sounds of the Future Past

Blade Runner at 40

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Blade Runner at 40, The Year of Blade Runner 2: Sounds of the Future Past

Five writers explore Blade Runner's legacy of ideas and images. 2: Frances Morgan on sound

Blade Runner's future is now 40 years old. Five writers explore the film's impact and legacy. Writer and researcher Frances Morgan on the sonic layers of Vangelis' future sounds.

Blade Runner's future is now 40 years old. 5 writers explore the impact and legacy Ridley Scott's 1982 classic where replicants escape to a retrofitted Earth only to meet their end at the hands of the washed out, titular Blade Runner played by, Harrison Ford. Adapted from Philip K. Dick's equally classic 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Both film and book are meditations on what it is to be human but we have been looking through the eyes of the film ever since it plunged us into its acid rain, neon coated, West Coast nightmare of flaming night skies, commercial ziggurats, flying cars and fake animals. Now its future is our present. We live in a world of mass species die off, environmental crisis, rapidly developing A.I., all powerful corporations & extreme divides between rich and poor.

Film and book have bled into our culture in many different ways. Frances Morgan, writer and researcher into electronic music at the Royal College of Art, pierces the sound barrier of a film that defined the future not only in the way it looked but in the ways we heard tomorrow through Vangelis' extraordinary fusion of music, sound & image.

"the first thing I think of is the film’s sonic environment. The main character, the Blade Runner Rick Deckard, moves through the city, from its murky streets up to its corporate penthouses, against a constant backdrop of hissing rain, distant explosions, synthesized voices from billboard-sized screens, bleeping machines, hybrid pop music, multilingual chatter and the buzz of neon. Music ebbs and flows around him: deep drones swelling into gauzy synthetic strings. His apartment pulses with a low hum. Blade Runner is suffused, saturated with sound."

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The Essay explores the dystopian world of Ridley Scott's classic film Blade Runner.

Forty years ago, the future came into focus in Ridley Scott's classic film Blade Runner. All this week, The Essay explores the dystopian world of the film.

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