Featured Live Music Artist of the Week - Alan Howarth Live From Flashback Weekend

Two weeks ago, I attended Flashback Weekend Horror Convention. It happened to be a celebration of the "Halloween" film franchise this year - complete with a Drive-In Style Outdoor screening of the original "Halloween".

In addition, in attendance to sign autographs, talk, and be photographed was film music composer, Alan Howarth. Alan worked with John Carpenter (who is not only a Director but also a Composer himself) on the score for the original "Halloween". On "Halloween II", as Carpenter was working on other projects, Alan was given the lead composer role.

Alan has since composed the scores for Halloween 4-6 (of which he calls his own style - as opposed to working directly with Carpenter), Halloween III : Season of the Witch, in which he experimented with a more electronic sound - "Halloween meets the future" as he put it, as well as movies like Escape From New York, THEY LIVE, Prince of Darkness, Big Trouble in Little China, and Christine, to name a few. You can read all of his credentials on this wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Howarth_%28composer%29 .

Now, to the real point of this article - LIVE MUSIC. On Friday night, Alan performed a special LIVE concert for the Flashback Weekend attendees.

Not too many fans were quite sure what to expect - would they be an orchestra? Would it just be him playing arrangements on a keyboard? What exactly?

What the fans got was an awesome multi-media presentation!!! Alan had taken film footage from many of his movies and spliced them together and turned them into a "video". These weren't just clips, they were shaded and colorized and special-effected and tape-looped, and edited and so forth. Essentially becoming a multi-layed video extravaganza of movie clips.

Alan started out with a clip from They Live in which there is an on-screen narrative, and the began playing the keyboard LIVE in person, and at the at point the special arranged score synced with the video. The music, like the video, moved from movie to movie and back to movies already shown and to movies not yet shown. The music had highs and lows, crescendos and mellowness. Each score perfectly phased into the next. Truly a mark of a great composer who can take two disparate songs and tie them together seamlessly!!

Then, if that wasn't enough, he switched to electric guitar for other parts of the epic montage score, and then back to keys, and back to guitar.

During this, he had also programmed a computer to include very specific sound-effects at the exact right time matching the video and the music.

All of the keyboard and guitar was done live - and everything - every last component was perfectly in sync. It was absolutely amazing listening to the scores merge from one movie the next - while having a video light show going on at the same time. And, above all, watching Alan perform the music on stage with an indescribable amount of passion and excitement and enjoyment!

One of those rare moments in the world of live music and film. A one of a kind experience!!!
Thank you Flashback Weekend and Alan Howarth for providing the amazing 90 minutes of music, film, and fun!!!

http://www.flashbackweekend.com/