he Outer Limits, for anyone who doesn't know, is the lesser-known cousin of the old The Twilight Zone series. Like The Twilight Zone, OL enjoyed a resurgence in popularity which led to the launching of an updated version in recent years. The music from this modern production (currently airing on Showtime) is to be found on this CD, offering 16 selections that total well over an hour of songs, themes and sounds to chill the spine.
The Outer Limits theme is there, of course, as are its closing credit music and a re-mix of the theme to wind the whole thing up. The rest of the music comes from some of the better-known (and in some cases, Emmy award-winning) episodes. A brief roll call: Valerie 23; Sandkings I; Sandkings II; Message I; Message II; Message III; Quality of Mercy; Quality of Mercy II; conversion; New Breed I; New Breed II; I Hear You Calling; Stitch in Time.
This isn't the first television series to offer its accompaniment, but unlike many, the selections offered here qualify for genuine, recognizable music. Overall, the CD is classical in flavor, its pieces seemingly designed to stand alone, not to function solely as background support. This isn't a CD built around sound effects, musical bridges between scenes, or the main theme rehashed 12 different ways. These are passages and longer pieces, introduced at the beginning by the familiar words, "...we control the horizontal, we control the vertical..."
Not The Twilight Zone, not The X-Files
What is most striking about this CD is how good the music is, and how scary. The CD is listenable, in the way that a true soundtrack is, enabling the audience to analyze passages and consider musical detail: it's more orchestral, more complete, more complex, using structure and layering to deliver the goods. These pieces might be expressionistic, but they are not sound images -- they quite definitely have meter and identifiable instruments.
While the CD has structure, it is not slave to it, allowing moodiness to build to tension, tension to uneasiness, uneasiness to fear. This CD is more successful than many of its peers in establishing its desired emotions (and managing them) because it takes composition seriously. Too often abstract is an excuse for mediocrity, as those with middling talent dump unfinished, poorly designed nonsense onto the canvas. Not here, not so.
But of course, besides being listenable by itself, the music must complete its primary mission: is this music appropriate for the series? Yes. It concentrates on all the modulations of fear, and succeeds because it isn't determined to invoke heavy-booted terror. Terror paralyzes where fear yet allows the mind to wonder and worry, and it is to this ambiguity that the CD plays. Additionally, The Outer Limits, as a series signature, was basically about fear in the face of the unknown. Comparatively, The Twilight Zone was more broad: all the range of human emotion in strange and familiar settings. And The X-Files is not about emotion at all, but quasi-concrete things, like conspiracies, UFOs, and mysterious phenomena. Composer Van Tongeren knows this cult backcountry, and aims true. The result is NFFO -- not for fans only.
