Hear about L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth along with an excerpt of the Battlefield Earth album.
The album reflects exactly that: a new era of music. To convey the drudgery of a forced-labor mining camp, for example, the clatter of mining equipment, transformed into musical phrases, is used to augment the piano, sax and clarinet. “And that was actual mining equipment,” explained the album’s producer, “meaning we went out and recorded real pickaxes and sledgehammered rocks.” While to help convey the typically clamorous saloons of such camps, “we also recorded clinking bar glasses and popping corks from cheap wine bottles.”
No less effective are the natural sounds employed to convey an ominous invaders’ “March of the Psychlos,” including: deepened war chants and the tread of real jackboots. While for the Psychlos’ laser gun blast, “We combined the crack of a real rifle with the scream of a ricochet and a shrill electric burst from a synthesizer.” The net effect is to project the mood and atmosphere of those creatures right into the music, “which even those of us working on the album hadn’t quite conceived until we did it.”
Similarly, the syncopated tap of hoofs becomes a truly integral part of a song in praise of the hero’s horse, while the clamor of real pistons works to convey the mood and atmosphere of the Psychlo’s death-dealing “drone.” Additionally, interwoven through instrumental melodies are plaintive cries of wolves and coyotes, surging rocket blasts and sighing wind through grass. The net effect is what one critic described as, “engagin futuristic sound,” with a sense of atmosphere and mood that is almost palpable; for with the CMI in the hands of LRH, one is not hearing either a symphonic suggestion of such sounds, nor even a synthesized approximation. Rather, one is hearing the actual sound transformed into music. Quite literally, then, all that can be imagined as music becomes so. Also quite literally, Ron was at least twenty years ahead of his time.
“We had the Fairlight,” explained a musician at work on Battlefield Earth, “but like virtually everyone else, we had no idea of its possibilities until LRH taught us how to use it. We thought in terms of instrumentation and synthesizers, but who would have imagined a natural sound incorporated into the very fabric of a song?”
“With REAL natural sound, in the hands of a true artist,” Ron proclaimed in early August 1982, “the CMI will revolutionize music and is right now doing so.” Of course, he was absolutely correct, and one need only review today’s Top Forty hits for proof of his prediction, “that people will be listening to real artists doing computer music as the basic music ongoing from this decade until the 90s.” Yet what is ultimately most important here is not what followed in the wake of Battlefield Earth, but the album itself.
“I set trends,” he very truthfully explained, “not follow them.” And the fact is, when he commenced work with the Fairlight in 1982, the CMI had still been an unknown commodity (primarily a novelty among graduate students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where musical robots had briefly gained headlines). With Ron’s pioneering infusion of artistry, however, all that suddenly changed; and Battlefield Earth became not just a glimpse of what would come, but the first realization of "where music is about to go in the future without losing anything of the past."
