Prime Audio Soup: The enduring influence of The Matrix soundtrack

The Matrix is the first 15-rated film I can recall seeing. I’m not sure exactly when – I’d hazard it was around 2000/2001 when I was seven or eight years old – but I remember the context well. As a young child with a lack of personal freedom, clandestinely getting stuck into inappropriate and forbidden experiences like watching violent action films is a pursuit you crave. Right up there with staying up past 10pm and stealing a repulsive swig of lager from your Dad’s glass among The Holy Grail of playground brag activities that had all your peers in awe and legendary status achieved for at least one Key Stage 1 lunch time.

Back in the early 2000s my older (but still under aged) brother had sneaked a viewing of The Matrix via the well-trodden path of a much older, and therefore much cooler, family friend who owned a healthy collection of graphic DVDs. My jealousy was extreme, and he tantalised with tales of the illicit content, and drilled quotes into my head so that they became as familiar as if I’d watched the film on multiple occasions. “Morpheus believes [Neo] is the one,” is one of those recurring phrases that to this day still ricochets around my mind, permanently lodged into the lining of my memory banks and coming to the fore at inexplicable intervals.

One afternoon when school was out a few weeks later I found myself in the care of the aforementioned family friend. This was my opportunity. I recall my reckless benefactor toying briefly with the ethics of showing a film to someone whose entire lifetime would have to be repeated for it to become legally age appropriate, but in time my pleading and his teenaged apathy won out.

The film was thrilling. A hurricane of high-octane action, bullet time visuals, doomsday machines, with no mind given to the philosophical themes coursing through the plot. But the visual spectacle wouldn’t have made half the impression it did without the backing of the film’s frenzied soundtrack. My listening habits at the time mainly comprised the music my parents played: A combination of 80s alt rock and contemporary soul. I was conditioned to think electronic music was worthless – stigmatic even.

The Matrix, and its blistering, warped, twisting soundtrack, changed that. In that initial club scene where Neo and Trinity first meet, I was on the edge of my seat, sucked into an unknown world of hedonism, strobe lights and eccentric dressers. Red pills and blue pills. All fuelled by the force of thrashing drums and skewed synths that heightened blood pressure and dilated pupils in focused awe. The two minute clip above alone barrels a Rob Zombie remix into The Prodigy, with the layering of Richie Hawtin’s eerie ‘Plasticity’ audible to strained ears in the background. It was an unconscious introduction to the power of mixing records together.

Other highlights included the irresistible, bassline big beat of the Propellerheads in that iconic lobby shootout, the trepidatious, anthemic darkness of ‘Clubbed to Death’ and Meat Beat Manifesto’s simultaneously adrenaline-charged and woozy ‘Prime Audio Soup’. The sounds were earth-shattering – opening up a world emancipated from guitars and mournful lyrics, with the ingrained intent of the music purely to exhilarate. A seed was born that would bloom into a consuming love for electronic music.

I know my experience is not singular. 18 years on ‘The Matrix Soundtrack’ remains one of the most influential and beloved in recent history. Fans and prominent figures in the dance music world continue to gush about its life-changing impact, including Mixmag cover stars Nastia and Rødhåd.

The latter artist was in part inspired by The Matrix to name his record label Dystopian, and likened experiencing the film to the intense stimulation of clubbing. “When you show people who are observed by a bigger authority, like in those movies when society is divided, I’d always identify with those people who would be living hidden in the underground. When you went to Tresor or Berghain it was like entering a new, unseen society. Everything dark, the sound of machines. It was a perfect aesthetic: visually and in sound,” he said.

The influence of 'The Matrix Soundtrack' endures, and, with a new vinyl release announced in the last month, looks primed to continue to inspire and delight ears across the world for years to come. So thanks for that, The Matrix. Shame about the other two films though, hey?

Patrick Hinton is Mixmag's Digital Staff Writer, and is planning to watch The Matrix in bed this weekend, follow him on Twitter,