Volker Rapp turns Douglas Trumbull’s ‘Silent Running’ into an 18-track album
Volker Rapp releases “Silent Running” on Cyclical Dreams on 14 August 2026, an 18-track album tracking Douglas Trumbull’s 1972 film, on digital and CD.
German electronic composer Volker Rapp released “Silent Running” on 14 August 2026 through the Argentine label Cyclical Dreams. The 18-track album follows the narrative of Douglas Trumbull’s 1972 science-fiction film of the same name, and is out digitally and as a CD edition.
Rapp traces the project back more than fifty years. He states: “Silent Running has been one of my favorite films ever since I saw it on German television on April 26, 1974.”
How Volker Rapp built ‘Silent Running’
The tracklist reads as a synopsis. It opens with “The last forests of Earth” and “The arks Berkshire, Valley Forge, Sequoia and Mojave”, introduces “Freeman Lowell, gardener and guardian”, then moves through “Daily Routine”, “Service robots Dewey, Huey and Louie”, “Order to destroy the domes”, “What are we doing here”, “Lonely Decision #1”, “Realising the Domes”, “Silent Running to Saturn”, “The Lord of the Rings”, “Through the Rings and Louie is lost”, “Berkshire is calling”, “Remorse”, “Lonely Decision #2”, “Preparing the Last Dome and Dewey”, “Valley Forge and Lowell are lost” and “Infinity”.
Those titles track the film closely. In Trumbull’s picture, Bruce Dern plays botanist Freeman Lowell, who tends the last of Earth’s forests in domes aboard the freighter Valley Forge near Saturn, assisted by three service drones he names Huey, Dewey and Louie. Trumbull had supervised the special photographic effects on “2001: A Space Odyssey” in 1968; “Silent Running” was the first of only two features he directed, the other being “Brainstorm” in 1983. He died on 7 February 2022.
Rapp built the record around period-correct instrumentation, working with the ARP 2600 and SEM alongside a Juno 6, Prophet 5, MS-20, DX7 and Synclavier, plus Arturia software. He is explicit that the album stands on its own rather than functioning as a replacement score, noting: “This version is not synchronized with the film; it runs 73 minutes compared to 85 minutes in the 2002 DVD version.”
Cyclical Dreams handled the artwork; Amp Puttipong supplied the photography.
About Volker Rapp
Volker Rapp was born on 10 October 1964 in Wuppertal, Germany, and works as a composer, musician, photographer and writer. He ran the Demo Art project from 1992 to 2005 and has also recorded as part of the duo Volker & Volker.
His recent output has come almost entirely through Cyclical Dreams, the Buenos Aires label founded in early 2020 by Pablo Bilbao, Lucas Tripaldi and Esteban Menash, which concentrates on Berlin School, ambient, soundscape, space music and drone. Rapp’s titles for the label include “d7-d5” in March 2023, “Blade Runner 2099” in July 2024 and “Phase IV”. Earlier self-released records include “Mars Missions 2021”, issued in February 2021, along with “Declination”, “DUNE Spots”, “Valletta (il-Belt)”, “St. Petersburg” and “Session 8 – My Tribute to Klaus Schulze”.
Film and space themes run through most of that catalogue, and Cyclical Dreams has released comparable long-form work by other artists in the same field, including D*Time’s “Nightwoven” in May 2026 and Christian Wittman’s “Andromeda” in January 2026. “Silent Running” is Rapp’s longest sequence for the label to date and his most direct treatment of a single film.
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