If you are a particular type of movie fan, John Carpenter is one of your spirit guides. He’s the man responsible for directing some of the greatest and most iconic B-movies of the past 40 years: Halloween, The Thing, Escape From New York, They Live, many others. He also composed the dark, percolating synth scores for many of those songs; the eerie theme for Halloween is one of his. But even though he’s made some great music — and some great bootleg compilations are floating around on the internet — he’s never released a proper solo album. That’ll change early next year, when he drops his Lost Themes LP. He’s releasing it on Sacred Bones, the New York indie that introduced people like Zola Jesus and the Men to the world. First single “Vortex” is a brooding, ominous instrumental that could’ve easily soundtracked one of his great old movies. Listen to it, set to a bunch of clips from Carpenter movies, here. Below, check out the album’s tracklist and read some words about the project from Carpenter.

Carpenter writes:

Lost Themes was all about having fun. It can be both great and bad to score over images, which is what I’m used to. Here there were no pressures. No actors asking me what they’re supposed to do. No crew waiting. No cutting room to go to. No release pending. It’s just fun. And I couldn’t have a better set-up at my house, where I depended on (collaborators) Cody (Carpenter, of the band Ludrium) and Daniel (Davies, who scored I, Frankenstein) to bring me ideas as we began improvising. The plan was to make my music more complete and fuller, because we had unlimited tracks. I wasn’t dealing with just analogue anymore. It’s a brand new world. And there was nothing in any of our heads when we started other than to make it moody.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Vortex”
02 “Obsidian”
03 “Fallen”
04 “Domain”
05 “Mystery”
06 “Abyss”
07 “Wraith”
08 “Purgatory”
09 “Night”

Lost Themes is out 2/3/15 on Sacred Bones.