Assault On Precinct 13
In the 2000s, in the early days of Record Makers, our brilliant A&R Sinclair Godon wandered one night into one of the few remaining video rental stores on avenue Ledru-Rollin looking for a good flick. It was an old-school shop full of VHS tapes stuffed into greasy, falling-apart boxes that he often frequented for the variety of B movies it offered. He took home a copy of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 as soon as he saw the cover with its big red lettering, and watched it in his little studio apartment in the 11th. He immediately recognized the opening synth theme, with its first three rumbling notes, from a late 80s new beat hit that had interpolated it, Megablast, an Afrika Bambaataa song that sampled it, and even from the video game Xenon 2. Naturally, he went looking for the soundtrack. It wasn’t on Discogs (then just a database), and there were rumors about it on various internet forums mentioning some bootlegs, but nothing conclusive. The next day he told me: “I discovered a score that’s at the origin of all of today’s sound.” It was the early 2000s, Electroclash was a big thing. So we got to work on releasing it ourselves, for the first time.
At first, Sinclair got a hold of John Carpenter through his website, who said he was down for Record Makers to release the score, but that he didn't have the masters for it (which explained why it had never come out). Our quest began. Someone pointed us to the studio in LA where the score had been recorded. I'd wait until the end of the day in Paris, and then I'd pick up the phone book and dial all the numbers I could find around the studio's address, until one day I came across someone who told me that no, the studio where it had been recorded had burned down and everything was gone. Eventually, we reached the film’s production company, New Line Cinema, enthusiastic about the project, but also masterless.
Then a pair of soundtrack geeks we met through Hypnolove who ran a record shop in Toulouse, l’Âge d’Or, told us they’d been hanging out on some forums where they'd been chatting with someone from Hollywood who was in possession of the original film reel and had fabricated a sort of cobbled-together mastering. He'd obtained the New Line mastering and isolated the music from the original film reels onto a CD. The Toulousians, in the meantime, had even come up with their own cut-up, homemade cover for the soundtrack and had segmented and titled the different tracks themselves.
When we announced the good news to our contact at Assault's original production company – that we had managed to hunt down a sort of DIY mastering of the score – he, by surprise, ran us a master from the film in a specialized lab in LA. That became the source for the first official release of Assault on Precinct 13. For the white label promo copies, we’d stamped “ASSAULT” in red letters at the cobbler's down the street.
When it officially came out, it was clear that we'd finally filled a void. We received a postcard from Miss Kittin, and DJ Assault was in awe. It was obvious that people had been waiting years for an official release. Carpenter himself sent Sinclair a thank-you letter which we printed on the back of the vinyl. Back in the 70s, Carpenter was a pioneer, working in his home studio with his associate Alan Howarth to create something singular for cheap. By doing so he created an influential score that needed a proper release...