Listen to 22 minutes from the Into Darkness soundtrack

Star Trek Into Darkness is now out in some parts of the world, but there's still a week to go before any of us can enjoy the soundtrack. If you're craving the music, you're in luck though, as Michael Giacchino recently appeared on WQXR's Movies on the Radio show, to talk about his work on Into Darkness, and also played twenty-two minutes of music from the film, including the tracks: "Logos/Pranking The Natives", "London Calling", "The Kronos Wartet" (with Klingon choir!), "Ship To Ship", and the "Star Trek Main Theme".

In addition to those tracks from the album, a piece called "Odo to Harrison" was played; the same haunting beautiful track we heard performed a while ago at a Star Trek concert. It sounds so much richer with the proper recording of it. If this isn't part of the album release, I really hope the full soundtrack comes along soon, because this track is stunning! Have a listen:



In addition to all the commentary on the music from Giacchino in the above radio program he was also recently interviewed by Film Music Magazine. Ha made a nice comparison to Star Wars, in the way he has gone about using some of the themes established in the first film:

The ultimate examples are in John Williams’ scores for “Star Wars” and “Superman.” Hearing those themes again was like seeing your old friends, which always made sense to me, Themes need to accompany the appropriate moments as you continue telling different stories with the same characters. Both J. J. and I felt right from the get go that we were going to bring back those particular themes, mainly the “Enterprise” and “Kirk” ones. But we also wanted to use them in different ways, and expand on them this time. So it was fun to play around with them as well.

He also talked a bit about the theme for the USS Vengeance:

We’ve always called this one “The Black Ship.” There’s a theme associated with that as well. But it wasn’t so much about size of it as it was the craft’s intent. Why is it even in existence? That’s the question our characters are trying to answer along with trying to figure out who the heck Harrison is. There’s a lot of questions throughout the story which the characters are constantly trying to catch up to. The first movie’s Narada was just about “Oh shit, this is a massive ship and I can’t deal with it!” This one’s more about, “Yeah, it’s a big ship, but it’s more about what is it trying to do?” This film is about the undercurrent of what was happening, as opposed to what you are seeing happening.

Read the full interview on Film Music Magazine. And if you missed them before, check out my previous reports for covers and a full track listing for the Into Darkness album, and samples from each track.

PS. Find out everything you need to know about Star Trek Into Darkness and its tie-ins, on my Star Trek Into Darkness guide page.