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Mar 07, 2012 Ben Salisbury By Cody Ray Shafer

Geoff Barrow, founding member and instrumentalist of Portishead, is uniting with composer Ben Salisbury on an electronic soundtrack inspired by 2000 AD, a British Sci-Fi comic featuring the long running character Judge Dredd. The album will be called ‘DROKK’ Music Inspired by Mega-City One and will be released on May 8th by Invada UK. It was recorded over six months in between Barrow’s tour with Portishead and Salisbury’s work at the BBC.

Both long-time fans of the comic book, they looked to Judge Dredd’s futuristic urban setting for inspiration on this project. With a few exceptions, the entire album was performed on an old 1975 keyboard, the Oberhiem 2 Voice Synthesizer. There is also an appearance from another Geoff Barrow side project, BEAK>.

2000 AD began publishing Judge Dredd serials in 1977. The comics take place in the album’s namesake, a massive metropolis called Mega City One. The character was also adapted into the poorly-received 1995 film Judge Dredd, starring Sylvester Stallone. This September a new Judge Dredd film, simply titled Dredd, is due out and set to star Karl Urban (Dr. “Bones” McCoy in 2009’s Star Trek reboot) as Dredd.