You have the opportunity to pick up something really cool right now. Today marks the cassette tape release of the OGRE and Dallas Campbell rescore of George Romero’s classic 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead.
Just a couple days before Cassette Store Day, Vehlinggo reveals John Bergin’s stunning artwork for the killer release, which you can buy right now. The art’s designed to look like the Roland synth they used to score the film.
Lakeshore Records and Megatapes have teamed up to release a limited cassette edition of the rescore, which Lakeshore released last year to major acclaim. OGRE and Campbell have crafted a score that reanimates the film, replacing the original symphonic music with their own, well-regarded variety of nuanced synthesizer mastery. On cassette, their wizardry sounds superb.
The original symphonic score, interestingly, was culled mostly from stock music on hand at a division of Capitol Records. Even the title theme had been used in the show Ben Casey in 1961, according to an interview Living Dead actor Karl Hardman gave some years ago.
This time around, OGRE and Campbell have retained the foreboding and terror that permeated the original, but have nixed the orchestra and dialed down the histrionics. As we’ve come to expect from them, they’re all about the synths and often subtlety. This isn’t an outright dark ambient score, though. Pulsating arpeggiators, assertive drum-machine rhythms, and memorable synth leads are all there.
Cassette Details
For those looking for particulars: the cassette’s slipcase is a zombie-apocalypse keyboard, and the insert is a blood-splashed modular synth. There’s an O-card slipcase with a four-panel, J-card Norelco box and a smoky, black cassette shell. All artwork and design is by John Bergin, the art director for Lakeshore Records.
The cassette’s runtime is 100 minutes. You can buy the tapes directly from pop-up cassette label Megatapes, which is also the outfit behind cassette releases of the Drive soundtrack, the Synchronicity score, and Bergin’s Crash & Burn, Vol. 1.
About OGRE and Dallas Campbell
Chances are you’re familiar with OGRE and Campbell, two composers who together and apart have crafted some of the most compelling synth-based music in years. If you’re not, check out their biographies below.
OGRE (AKA Robin Ogden) is a UK-based composer and Campbell is a West Virginia-based producer on the border with zombie capital Pittsburgh.
Despite living 3,594 miles apart, and having never met in person, they collaborate online by the wondrous power of Facebook chat. Night of the Living Dead is the third installment of their transatlantic collaborations to see the light of day. Both men are longtime admirers of each other’s music and close friends, sharing a passion for all things analog, tape machine, and a mutual nostalgia for the halcyon years of John Carpenter and GOBLIN-esque soundtracks and cheap horror movies.
Ogden has provided music for film, games, and more. Campbell (Dallas Campbell, Magic Happened) boasts a supremely massive collection of analog synthesizers.
