Waxwork Records, in collaboration with Back Lot Music and Hollywood Records, is proud to present the debut film score vinyl release to M. Night Shyamalan’s Eastrail 177 Trilogy. Composed of Unbreakable (2000), Split (2016), and Glass (2019), the Eastrail 177 Trilogy is a visionary comic-book film series written, produced, and directed by M. Night Shyamalan.
Unbreakable, about a security guard named David Dunn (Bruce Willis) who becomes the sole survivor of a train wreck, posed the question of what would happen if superheroes were real. At the insistence of a mysterious, rare-comic-book collector named Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), who suffers from a medical condition that makes his bones shatter on the slightest impact, Dunn comes to believe that he has super strength and is impervious to injury or illness. Not only that, he has the ability to see or sense the evil deeds of others simply by touching them.
The Unbreakable score, by James Newton Howard, was the second collaboration between Shyamalan and Howard, following their work together on The Sixth Sense. The Unbreakable score experience was unlike any the composer had had before. “Night sat there and storyboarded the whole movie for me,” Howard said. “I’ve never had a director do that for me. He wanted something that was very different, very distinctive, that immediately evoked the movie when people heard it.”
Howard and Shyamalan chose to simplify the score, and minimized the number of instruments (strings, trumpets and piano), with limited orchestrations. Some compositions were recorded in a converted church in London. “You could have recorded the same music in a studio in Los Angeles, and it would have been great, but there is something about the sound of that church studio,” Howard said. “It's definitely more misterioso.”
James Newton Howard is an American composer, conductor, and producer. He has scored more than 100 films and is the recipient of a Grammy Award, Emmy Award, and eight Academy Award nominations. His scores include The Fugitive, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Hunger Games film series.
Split, a terrifying, breakneck thriller, centers on Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a man with dissociative identity disorder whose more sinister personalities (collectively known as The Horde) kidnap three teenage girls. The plan is to feed the “impure” girls to another of Crumb’s personalities, a superhuman creature known as The Beast. The final girl, Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy) is spared because The Beast sees scars covering Casey’s body, markers of childhood abuse. Because Casey, unlike the other girls, has suffered, her heart is pure. “Rejoice,” The Beast tells her. “The broken are the more evolved.”
The Split score, by West Dylan Thordson, became the first collaboration between Shyamalan and the composer. Sonic, sinister and foreboding, the music was unlike any recorded for a film before. “I started by recording several loose takes of some simple harmonic bowing ideas with a cellist and violinist,” Thordson said. “The intention was to heavily modulate the captured sounds. While playing around with an idea in the past, I’d accidentally captured something like this and wanted to explore it more. The resulting sound was extremely chaotic, unpredictable, and scary. It felt haunted and seemed to capture the otherworldly, tortured, animalistic quality I was looking for. I wanted it to feel like “Jaws,” foreshadowing the existence of this malevolent being.”
Glass weaves together the unforgettable narratives of Unbreakable and Split in one explosive comic-book thriller. Bruce Willis returns as David Dunn as does Samuel L. Jackson as Elijah Price, known also by his pseudonym Mr. Glass. James McAvoy, reprising his role as Kevin Wendell Crumb and the multiple identities who reside within him, and Anya Taylor-Joy as Casey Cooke, the only captive to survive an encounter with The Beast. Following the conclusion of Split, Glass finds Dunn pursuing Crumb’s superhuman figure of The Beast in a series of escalating encounters, while the shadowy presence of Price emerges as an orchestrator who holds secrets critical to both men. The film also stars Sarah Paulson as psychiatrist Dr. Ellie Staple.
Composer West Dylan Thordson reunited with Shyamalan for the Glass score. “I wanted to find sounds that felt brittle and sharp,” Thordson said. “Violin and metal percussion became clear voices for me to build from. Mainly, I wanted the combination of melody and dissonance in Glass to play to Elijah’s thrilling and playful energy. The longer gnarled sounds combined with the pristine orchestral elements seemed to work well to represent the melding of light and dark. To me, the score for Glass is largely about discovery and acceptance.”
West Dylan Thordson is an American film music composer. He is best known for his original scores to Joy, The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, Foxcatcher and M. Night Shyamalan's Split and Glass.
Waxwork Records is proud to release the Eastrail 177 Trilogy as a deluxe 6xLP box set featuring the complete scores to Unbreakable, Split, and Glass. Each album is pressed as an exclusive colored 180 gram vinyl double LP. Each 2xLP is housed in its respective heavyweight, old-style tip-on gatefold jackets with satin coating. All three albums are housed in a high-quality, case- wrapped collectors’ box. Pencil illustrations and inks were created by comic book artist Jonas Scharf (Marvel, Boom!Studios) and colors were created by Dennis Calero (Marvel, DC, Dark Horse Comics).
