The last collection to date of soundtracks from a single Doctor’s adventures, Music From The Seventh Doctor Audio Adventures puts together music from three of the 2001-2002 stories starring Sylvester McCoy. The music collected from each of these three adventures is pretty diverse – it may well be the only CD in my collection that has trance music, theremin and someone playing the spoons on the same tracklist – and it’s also a first in that it contains contributions from the seventh Doctor himself. But more on that in a moment.

The first seven tracks consist of selections from Dust Breeding, and they’re the only straight-ahead, soundtrack-ish cues you’ll find on this CD. In the liner notes, composer Andy Hardwick says he was trying to achieve a “breathy quality” to act as a motif for the dust, but as a standalone listening experience, it’s the moody piano work that stands out the most. The “breathy” synths, when they do appear, actually give the proceedings an almost dated sound.

The most surprising, and enjoyable, music included on this CD are the techno tracks from The Rapture, a story which centered around an Ibiza dance club of the same name with a sinister secret. The multi-talented Jim Mortimore, who has also authored and even illustrated Doctor Who novels from the New Adventures range, gets to work Doctor Who into his “day job” as a techno musician with some lively tracks; the various pieces of “source music” here are woven into a continuous suite whose component parts stand just as well on their own. I was really surprised by how good some of the music for The Rapture was. I also have to give mad props to whoever edited together the extended-length trailer for this story – normally I skip the story trailers because, well, I’ve heard the stories in their entirety by now at least once. I’m always up for listening to The Rapture’s trailer again though – it’s that good.

From there we go into an all-out SF musical parody. I was particularly looking forward to hearing the music from the comedy story Bang-Bang-A-Boom! by itself, just to see if Russell Stone had worked any clever musical nods in there somewhere that weren’t immediately apparent under dialogue. If anything, Bang-Bang-A-Boom! stops just short of being a disappointment; while the story itself lampoons everything from Buck Rogers to Space: 1999, the music is decidedly more modern. Stone seems to be trying to make fun of the more droning passages of the music from Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5, but he’s trying too hard, and winds up with music that, for the most part, is far more droning and catatonic than anything that the composers on either of those shows could’ve managed – sort of a case of okay, we get the joke. Things are livened up considerably with the various entries from the Intergalactic Song Contest, featuring Mr. Sylvester McCoy on the spoons. (This may well be the only time that the Doctor featured in one of Big Finish’s soundtrack collections can be counted as a performer in his own right.)

It’s a bit of an uneven listening experience if one tries to go straight through it in a single sitting, but there are some individual gems in the rough on Music From The Seventh Doctor Audio Adventures.

1. Trailer: Dust Breeding (1:35)
2. The Sadness That We See In Him (2:52)
3. Damien Unhinged / Mr. Seta Unmasked (5:43)
4. Like A Tiger, It Toyed With Me (1:52)
5. The Dust Belongs To Me! / No Oil Painting (4:42)
6. Always Knew I’d Die On Duchamp (4:12)
7. The Future Has Already Happened (1:09)
8. Trailer: The Rapture (0:52)
9. Maggie’s Music (1:47)
10. Triangle Chill (4:04)
11. Freestyle (2:50)
12. Brook Of Eden (4:03)
13. Rebirth (1:41)
14. Sorted (2:07)
15. Jude’s Law (2:56)
16. Pink Pulloff (1:47)
17. Crystal Devildance (1:08)
18. Gloves Off (with Jane Elphinstone) (1:29)
19. Trailer: Bang-Bang-A-Boom! (1:57)
20. Welcome To Dark Space 8 (1:22)
21. The Trouble With Dark Space 8 (1:58)
22. I’m Just Not Like The Other Boys! (The Pits Of Angvia) (1:20)
23. Dead Drunk (The Death Of A Scientist) (3:02)
24. This Is The Denouement (Oh No, Sorry, It Isn’t) (2:30)
25. That Peace Conference (2:50)
26. When Gholos Attacks (0:45)
27. That Space Battle (1:04)
28. Galactivision (3:33)

Released by: Big Finish Productions
Release date: 2003
Total running time: 68:31

One of the most atypically-scored science fiction films of the 1990s, Contact is also yet another chapter in the long-running collaboration between director Robert Zemeckis and composer Alan Silvestri (Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Forrest Gump). While not as epic an ongoing partnership as, say, Spielberg and John Williams, the Zemeckis/Silvestri pairing has resulting in some fine marriages between imagery and music, and Contact may well be the best of those collaborations.

Before I get much further with my rantings about how atypical a science fiction movie score this is, it’s also worth pointing out that Contact is hardly a typical science fiction movie. It does have imagination-sparking ideas and some fine action and special effects set pieces, but it’s also a character study at its heart. So given those moments of intense action, and the even greater scenes of awe and wonder, Contact gets a surprisingly subdued musical treatment; a good chunk of the almost eight-minute-long end credits is solo piano, as are some of the other cues selected for the soundtrack album.

I did like Silvestri’s equally low-key moments of menace and revelation, however: “The Primer”, which plays during one of the movie’s most pivotal moments, is one of those cues that just opens up like a flower at a certain point, introducing a slithering, arpeggiating synth motif that shows up a few other times in conjunction with the aliens’ message and technology. That sound weaves its way in and out of what is otherwise a much more acoustic, orchestral score, and while it makes for a noticeable contrast, it’s subtle enough to never quite become jarring.

When the opportunity arrives to do big action scenes, Silvestri doesn’t hold back – “Ellie’s Bogey”, “Good To Go” and “Test Run Bomber” are great examples of those moments, even if they’re not necessarily the heart of the movie or its music.

Overall, it’s probably not quite what you’d expect, but the same could be said of the movie itself. (And for all those who have written me over the years to tell me that Contact the movie bears almost no resemblence to “Contact” the novel, I get the message, thanks.) If not one of the best – that’s really subjective – it’s certainly one of the most interesting SF film scores of the late 1990s, and I recommend it at least for that.

1. An Awful Waste Of Space (1:43)
2. Ellie’s Bogey (3:25)
3. The Primer (6:21)
4. Really Confused (1:18)
5. Test Run Bomber (4:27)
6. Heart Attack (1:31)
7. Media Event (1:25)
8. Button Me Up (1:19)
9. Good To Go (5:11)
10. No Words (1:42)
11. Small Moves (5:35)
12. I Believe Her (2:32)
13. Contact – End Credits (7:59)

Released by: Warner Bros.
Release date: 1997
Total running time: 44:31