For a long period after the movie's original release in 1982, the music to "Blade Runner" remained one of the great unreleased soundtracks. Various theories have been offered over the years for why this should have been - the one that convinces me most is that Vangelis sided with director Ridley Scott in a dispute with Warner Bros over various artistic aspects of the movie, such as its ending and whether to use a voice-over or not. Vangelis has repeatedly stated that he abhors any interference into his own musical projects by "artistic nobodies" from the music-industry so he must have empathised with Scott and the fact that Scott finally got the version of the movie he approved of released in 1993 clearly prompted the soundtrack release the following year. This becomes even more clear from the personal note in the booklet from which it follows that it was Vangelis' very own decision to release the music at this point and not earlier, even adding some new pieces in the process of re-evaluating the movie plus music, a process which is itself very unusual as Vangelis hardly ever revisits past projects.
The movie is based (albeit very loosely) on a novel by cult SF writer Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) one of whose main literary concerns evolved around the tricky philosophical question "What is Human ?". This question and Dick's answer to it (i.e. "Human means Empathy") also form the basis of "Blade Runner" and manifest themselves at various points in it. So on one level there's the actual story with a few action-packed sequences but on a deeper, more relevant level there's the slowly evolving picture being painted of a future commercialised out-of-joint society where real people resort to transferring their hopes and ambitions to artificial animals cq. humans with a constantly blurred boundary between what's real and what's not.
All this must have appealed to both Scott and Vangelis whose contemplative music style appears tailor-made for the visually overwhelming and philosophically uneasy atmosphere of the movie. Examples of those atmosphere-enhancing pieces are both the Main and End Titles and the wonderfully loose 'Blade Runner Blues'. Others denote specific scenes, like the romantic 'Love Theme' which together with the 'End Titles' appeared earlier on the compilation album 'Themes' (incidentally: 'Memories Of Green', a Scott favourite, comes from the 1980 album 'See You Later'). The album fittingly ends with the emotional 'Tears in Rain' which accompanies the scene where the final runaway replicant Roy extends his empathy to pursuer Deckard just before termination.
Some vocals are provided by Mary Hopkin, Demis Roussos and Don Percival and a few key dialogue-samples from the movie are interwoven with the music here and there, but never in an obtrusive way.
As a conclusion: "Blade Runner" is possibly the best soundtrack album by Vangelis - the music, the movie and the ideas behind them certainly form another example of the many-levelness in which he revels.
