Not many film directors write the scores for their own movies. John Carpenter is an exception; his soundtrack for his 1980 film The Fog has been reissued on CD by the Silva Screen label with a second disc compiling everything omitted from the original album release. Most movie music nowadays is more irritating than inspiring, but Carpenter’s eerie piano and synthesizer is subtly unsettling, rolling across the imagination like the dangerously enveloping fog of his film. It sets the mood but also stands as a modernist composition in its own right, minimal and effective.
