CD Cover

About the Album
"Babylon 5: Third Space"

"I want to hear a Theremin," I said.

The room went silent. The occasion was the audio spotting of "Thirdspace," January 9, 1998, with composer Christopher Franke and our sound design people. Blank faces came back at me. "A what?" someone asked.

How quickly they forget.

They forget Gort stepping out onto the starship in "The Day Earth Stood Still," accompanied by the eerie wail of a Theremin, an electronic musical device that creates unearthly musical sounds that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up... notes and melodies that made their way into a host of other science fiction movies back in the 1950s and 60s. It's a sound I have always associated with aliens beyond human comprehension. An unworldly sound, and "Thirdspace" was to be about encountering just such aliens.

So I wanted to hear a Theremin in there somewhere. I didn't care if it was out of fashion, I didn't care if half of the people in the room didn't know what it was... I wanted it in.

And Chris, bless his heart, has always been willing to try something new, no matter how nutty it sounds when I first suggest it. So he went out, and bought a Theremin, and used it in the soundtrack you are now holding in your hands.

And you know what? It achieves the goal: it makes the hair on my neck stand up. I just wish I had more hair with which to do it.

And best of all, after all he was done with it... Chris gave me a gift: the Theremin he had purchased.

I'm very, very happy.

The neighbors, however, are very, very creeped out by the sounds emanating from my house in the middle of the night.

J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI
Creator/Executive Producer
BABYLON 5


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