We open with a row of black smokestacks belching fire. The sky is almost totally black, and one has the impression that the city, which is far down below and has lights like stars stuck in tar, hasnât seen the sun in a century or more. Suddenly, a bolt of smog lightning. After the rumble, other fireballs rise and roar as a flying car approaches and buzzes by. Itâs heading to two massive pyramids in the distance that project columns of light into the night. The pyramids, which look Mayan, are the color of a dying day, and have thousands of cascading office windows. Do people actually work here, or even live in this industrial megalopolis, whose factories dwarf William Blakeâs âSatanic millsâ?
This is one of the greatest opening scenes in the history of cinema. The movie is, of course, Blade Runner (1982). The pyramids are the headquarters of a biotech corporation, Tyrell Corp, that manufactures androids (replicants) to work hazardous jobs on harsh off-worlds. The flying car is a spinner (a police vehicle). The city is Los Angeles in the year 2019. And what brings the scene together and makes it more sublime, more hellish, more galactic, is Greek-born electronic musician/composer Vangelisâs futuristic score. Itâs immersive and expansive. It gives us a sense of a city thatâs incomprehensibly largeâbillions of people, all living somewhere beneath the smokestacks, the corporate pyramids, the flying patrol cars.
The director, Ridley Scott, explained during a Making of Blade Runner interview that he shot the movie at night and used lots of smoke and rain because he didnât have the budget to directly show the size of this impossible LA. It was beyond the darkness, the rain that never stops, the blasts of smoke from utility holes, passing vehicles, and wall vents. These elements isolate each sceneâRick Deckard (Harrison Ford) crossing a wet street, or waiting for ramen, or entering a spinner. As for the rest of LA, itâs in the music.
Vangelis scored less a movie and more an invisible metropolis that spreads out in all directions and has numberless street lights and boulevards, flying billboards, grounded billboards, nightclubs, strip clubs, bazaars, storefronts, vendors, Vid-PhĹn videophone booths, power wires, apartment towers and windows. â[If] youâre not [a] cop, youâre little people!â Officer Harry Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh), the head of the LAPDâs Blade Runner Unit, tells Deckard, a specialized copâa Blade Runnerâwho has grown tired of âretiringâ rogue androids manufactured by Tyrell Corp. Only a fraction of these âlittle peopleâ are seen on the screen; the rest are in the music, they inhabit the score like Spinozian modes in the substance of a god whose face is the âwhole universe.â
Vangelis, who died in 2022, composed the soundtrack in his âcontrol room,â Nemo Studios, which he operated in London between 1975 and 1987 (his peak years). He primarily used the best synthesizersâhis workhorse, the Yamaha CS-80, had a central place in his studio. When we enter the Blade Runner world, we hear the Yamaha CS-80 accompanied by sound effects processed by a digital reverb machine. In fact, his studio, with its computer monitors, synthesizer setup, and mixing console, looks much like the spaceship that slowly approaches the openingâs pyramids.
The genius of hiring Vangelis to score this science-fiction film is not that itâs set in the future, but that he was, at the time, one of the few mainstream musicians who was familiar with the new instruments. As with Brian Eno, synthesizers and electronic production had been his bread and butter for a decade. And so, the idea was not to make the future city sound purely high-tech and unfamiliar, but like a place that combined the old and the new, advanced technologies (flying cars) and old technologies (bicycles), dilapidated buildings with gigantic corporate towers. Vangelisâs music was made with the latest machines from Japan, but in the then-new artificial sounds we hear echoes of the immemorial. This was the city in 1982; this is the city in 2019.
If you are going to perform Vangelisâs Blade Runner score, you must use electronic instruments, which is why the UK-based Avex Ensemble employs, for their live performance of the Blade Runner score, synthesizers, electric strings, electric bass, and electrified drums. Indeed, the Avex Ensemble specializes in electronic film soundtracks, because cinematic worlds such as Blade Runnerâs would sound and feel all wrong with traditional orchestral instruments. We would not feel the haunting immensity of Deckardâs LA with the music of, say, Bernard Herrmann, whose masterpiece, Taxi Driver, is set in a New York City thatâs as gritty as the streets of Blade Runnerâs LA. But we see the people and the city in Taxi Driver. They are not in the music. Vangelisâs people are invisible; they are specters in a haze thatâs as synthetic as the androids Deckard hunts down and kills with his futuristic blaster.
Though Avex Ensembleâs performance will be synchronized with the 1982 version of the movie, it could be played to a blank wall in Benaroya Hall. And I think this is Vangelisâs greatest achievement. His score is so masterful, so immersive, so urban in its mood, that it doesnât really need the movie itself, with its world-weary detective drinking whiskey on a balcony miles above the streets, with its artificial femme fatale whose memories are not real, with its pack of cyclists in the rain and smoke. The score can stand on its own, a fact made plain by the Esper Editionâa bootleg version of the soundtrack that was released in 2002, has 33 tracks, includes dashes of dialogue and sound effects from the film, and runs for 113 minutes (the first official soundtrack, released in 1994, is pretty worthless, as itâs missing many important tracks; the second one, released in 2007, is better but also missing important tracks).
The Esper Edition version, which I often sleep to, is the cookie. Itâs all one needs to see-feel Vangelisâs incredible city.Â
See Blade Runner Live in Concert on Saturday, January 17, 2026, 8 pm at Benaroya Hall.
