���Out of all the deluxe vinyl soundtrack reissues that have come out this summer, I was most excited over this new double Lp edition of Simon Boswell's score to the cult early 90s cyberpunk art-splatter film Hardware. The first feature film from visionary director Richard Stanley (who had previously cut his teeth on acclaimed documentary work and music videos for The Fields Of The Nephilim), Hardware is still one of my all-time favorite films from the early 90s, a stylish, splattery cyberpunk nightmare about a piece of lethal military robotics that ends up in the possession of a metal sculptor, then proceeds to reactivate inside of her apartment and go on a spree of death and destruction. Hardware featured a heady mix of psychedelic visuals, some wonderfully stylized visions of a near-future hellscape, a pounding post-punk soundtrack that featured songs from Ministry and Public Image Ltd., and some seriously gnarly death sequences that included copious robotic skull-shredding and bisection by pneumatic door. Yikes!

��� If you've seen Hardware, you already know that much of the film's power is derived from Simon Boswell's unique score, a mixture of moody Spaghetti Western soundtrack influences, harsh industrial textures, and fearsome orchestral sounds that Boswell had perfected with his previous work in the horror genre with Italian directors Argento, Soave and Bava. The film's music manages to be at once sorrowful and unsettling, and remains one of the most distinctive sci-fi/horror scores from the era. Boswell's opening title theme, which played out over scenes of a nameless "zone tripping" desert crawler dressed in black (played by Fields Of The Nephilim frontman Carl McCoy) first unearthing the dreaded M.A.R.K.-13, is a perfect mood setter, introducing the film's doom-laden atmosphere and twisted sensibilities with a mixture of cold futuristic synth ambience, gorgeous slide guitar twang, and swelling, ominous string sections, the bleak ambient backdrop punctuated with bursts of terrifying digital noise. As the score progresses, the music continues to nurture Stanley's ever-present vibe of impending doom, with orchestral strings laid over bone-rattling synth bass and gleaming electronic drones, while bits of other sounds take on a malevolent cast, like the tinkle of a child's music box. Electronic riffs on Indian classical sitar music are entwined around those twangy electric guitars on tracks like "Acid Meditation", and elsewhere Boswell layers his synthesizers and minimal electric guitar into skin-crawling episodes of mounting tension , smearing the grim ambience with heavily processed blasts of squealing jazz horns or dissonant orchestral samples. Otherworldly tracks like "Droid Attack" and "Shower " employ harshly arranged synthetic orchestral samples and choral voices, while the stunning black majesty of "Feathers" has a soaring, almost Floydian feel with its streaks of bluesy guitar, and the grim New Agey beauty of "Herbal" rides on waves of lush synthdrift.

��� It's an extremely experimental score, drawing heavily from industrial and electronic music to evoke an overwhelming sense of despair and hopelessness, and is as perfect a soundtrack to a ruined earth as I've heard. Never before released on vinyl, Boswell's Hardware has been reissued by Flick in a comprehensive, deluxe double LP set that contains both a "clean" version of the score without any dialogue, and a version that includes effects and dialogue from the film, as well as the radio spots from Iggy Pop's DJ Bob and dialogue from Motorhead frontman Lemmy, and some cool spoken word pieces featuring the voice of director Stanley that ultimately didn't appear in the film. The records are beautifully packaged in a heavyweight gatefold jacket with printed innersleeves, with artwork from the great Graham Humphreys and liner notes from both Boswell and Stanley, issued in a limited edition of one thousand copies.