Austin band Survive‘s masterful synth soundtrack to Stranger Things is available now digitally and at your local independent music shop on vinyl! Meanwhile, the surviving members of Tangerine Dream, a primary influence on Survivor’s Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, released their own covers of the Stranger Things score! Listen to them below. And here’s a bit from an excellent interview that Billboard’s Gil Kaufman conducted with Dixon and Stein:
How did that main theme come to life?
It’s an old demo Michael had, but it’s nothing like what you hear… nowhere near as much of a piece of music as it is now. That was just some random thing that ended up in the library they had and when they found it they were like, ‘what if this was the main title?’ We thought it could be good, so we built it out. We’ve been wanting to get into music for TV and film for a long time, but we had no idea how. We’ve been passively creating libraries, weird droney noises… so we had this collection of songs that we were trying to figure out how present to people in film….
Without that previous (soundtrack) experience, how were you able to create music that spoke so deeply to the characters in the show?
They said our music was actually used to help cast the show. During the demo period they said, ‘we know you can do dark and epic, but this is a show about a group of kids, so we need to show the producers that you can do the more lighthearted, sentimental stuff.’ So a lot of the demos were like that. They made the decision to play our music over the auditions and that was the deciding factor in casting.
Tangerine Dream plays Stranger Things: