Synthesizer music was hardly a new phenomenon in 1984, the year of The Terminator’s release, but the movie theater proved a remarkably successful means of injecting experimental electronic sounds direct into the mainstream consciousness. Not that anyone out there expected The Terminator to find such a broad audience. Made for a lean $6.4 million by James Cameron, then a rookie screenwriter and special effects designer with just one directorial credit—1981’s best-forgotten Piranha II: The Spawning—to his name, even the film’s star, Arnold Schwarzenegger was initially cool to it. “Some shit movie I’m doing, take a couple of weeks,” he explained while on the set of Conan The Barbarian. But The Terminator made Schwarzenegger a star and set the tenor for the next decade of sci-fi cinema, its vision of humanity crushed by a malign artificial intelligence backed up by a score that not just dramatized but echoed the sense of a machine army in the ascendant.

This freshly remastered reissue of Brad Fiedel’s Terminator score comes as part of the Milan Records’ Nicolas Winding Refn Presents series, and is lavishly presented, its 69 minutes of music spread across two slabs of 180g red-and-blue spattered vinyl and housed in reflective UV wrap. Such quality production values mean that it’s easy to forget scores like this were often ad hoc, the result of budgetary expediency and on-the-fly invention. Neither a celebrated soundtrack maestro or analogue synthesizer guru, Fiedel’s CV was about as square as it gets: he began his career signed to Paul Simon’s music publishing company and spent six months playing live keyboards for the soft rock duo Hall and Oates before making the leap into TV scoring. The Terminator was his first feature film, and after an intermittent film career that culminated with Cameron’s 1994 blockbuster True Lies, he retreated from Hollywood to pursue his real love, musicals. In an interview recorded for Japanese TV, now available to view on YouTube, you get a glimpse of Fiedel’s sensibility: sat at an electric piano, he tinkles away at The Terminator’s main theme as if auditioning for some Broadway revue.

Still, if the soundtrack still feels special, perhaps it’s because of this unlikely collision: an intermingling of theatric sensibility and emergent technology. The tools Fiedel used were cutting-edge for the period—a Prophet 10, an Oberheim, a drum machine and a sequencer—but still primitive in their workings. This was, just, a pre-MIDI age, so he would synch up his instruments by hand, and you can hear the occasional sense of slip and slide. The film’s majestically dark “Main Title” is a perfect mix of haunting melody and remorseless, mechanical rhythm, the latter in part the result of human error. While looping his Prophet 10, Fiedel missed the complete measure by a split second, but liking the result, kept it. Seth Stevenson’s 2014 article for Slate pins it to the unusual time signature of 13/16, which lends the track an eerie, unheimlich quality: the heartbeat of a machine.

The Terminator was a pulp film with depth, one that critics have gone lengths to decode. In 1995’s Projecting The Shadow: The Cyborg Hero In American Film, Janice H Rushing and Thomas S Frentz read it as a sort of Christian parable, writing that “John Conner, a modern day J.C. born of an ‘ordinary’ mother, is the warrior-king who is prophesied to reconstitute the world, to avert the apocalypse through a fight with a cyborgian devil.” Whether Fiedel recognized it or not, his music echoes something of this eschatological struggle: the implacable rhythms and cold choral swells of “Terminator Arrival – Reese Chased – Sarah on Motorbike” gesture to both the ruthless march of an automated future and the cold solemnity of the Catholic mass.

Elsewhere, Fiedel weaves around to capture the film’s sense of cat-and-mouse pursuit, shifting beats between simmering tension, lurching pursuit, and brief but precious glimpses of redemption. There are moments when the limited sound palette dates it—see the gurgling, acidic arpeggios of “Matt & Ginger Killed – Sarah Calls Detectives” and “Tunnel Chase.” Elsewhere, though, it feels eerily timeless: the dark ambient investigations of “Arm & Eye Surgery”; or “Reese Dreams Of Future War,” which with its racing synth progressions, harsh stabs and rumbling martial percussion might have slotted seamlessly onto Prurient’s Frozen Niagra Falls.

Perhaps the root of Fiedel’s success here, though, is the way his score holds close to the main theme’s central melodic and rhythmic motifs, remaking and remolding them to keep a sense of narrative continuity even as he shifts around sound and tone. From the metallic march of “‘I’ll Be Back' – Police Station & Escape” to the yearning piano of “Love Scene,” a firm backbone runs throughout, and when the end credits ushers in a cold dawn, Fiedel holds back on fireworks or tidy emotional resolution. As Sarah Connor loads up the Land Rover and disappears into the desert here is no salvation here; just a cold dread for what is to come.