Thanks to the 1977 film "Saturday Night Fever," movie soundtracks are made to sell pop stars. Because of that film, movie music is not necessarily recorded to augment the imagery on the screen. Not that the Bee Gees didn't cause some serious disco booty-shaking outside the Vinnie Barbarino film. As a pop soundtrack, "Saturday Night Fever" is great.

And, not wanting to hedge any money-making bets, almost every studio released movie since "Fever" has had a pop-rock score backbeat. Experimental or avant-garde film music is rare and if it happens at all, it is typically relegated to a Darren Aronofsky flick or, most likely, as strange psychological provocation for a David Lynch movie.

One of the best recent soundtracks that uses both pop and avant-garde elements can be found in Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut"—combining Chris Isaak ("Baby Did a Bad Thing") and Gyorgy Ligeti (music from "Musica Ricercata No. 2") forming an unsettling sonic backdrop.

But the best soundtrack ever recorded is more than 30 years old, yet remains light years ahead of its time—a soundtrack that actually plays better now separate from the film.

Prolific film composer Jerry Goldsmith has scored more than 250 films and TV shows since 1948, including, but not limited, to "Along Came a Spider" (2001), "L.A. Confidential" (1997), "Basic Instinct" (1992) and a whole bunch of Star Trek projects (he's currently doing the music for 2002's "Star Trek X").

None of Goldsmith's soundtracks have reached the heights of 1968's "Planet of the Apes." Outside the parameters of the movie, it still works as an often frightening piece of avant-garde art.

Electronic dollops, atmospheric blips and the incorporation of "natural" guttural simian noises, Goldsmith's music to the original "Planet of the Apes" plays like a bizarre pop album with each track providing one sonic surprise after another.

Influenced largely by the atonal yet intense works of Edgard Verese, Goldsmith's sounds for the classic sci-fi film not only provide the perfect backdrop to the desolation of Earth in 2000 years, but are exquisite for a schizoid evening between the headphones without the film.

Where many soundtracks recapitulate a specific theme usually found during the opening credits music (think of James Horner's composition for "The Perfect Storm"), Goldsmith's approach is much more subtle. For "Planet of the Apes," the composer mirrors musical notes and sounds, runs familiar woodwind scales throughout many of the pieces—yet listening is never a predictable experience—in fact, the more you listen the more stunning it becomes.

Goldsmith's orchestration is brassy and symphonic but he also incorporates traditional percussion (adding a primitive viscera), chanting, simian sounds and, of all things, mixing bowls and electric guitars.

The tracks on the album run in order of the events as they occur in the movie but, forgetting the film, listening straight through brings images of innerspace and musical mindwalks.

The fifth track#151;"The Search Continues"—is a hallucinatory reach inside the mind, starting with little electric trinkets of stretchy theraminesque expressions with each section of the piece building on top of the other until the bizarre, shiny, metallic mixing bowl conclusion is punctuated by an overwhelming orchestral emotion. The chiming metal sounds evoke a strange atmosphere—one filled with shock. During the early '70s the climactic ringing of "The Search Continues" was the theme music for ABC's Saturday night horror show, "Freaky Films" in the Chicagoland area—and rightfully so. The music was creepy enough to send shivers down the spines of all those preadolescents getting their fill of the Hammer flicks "Freaky Films" presented.

The Verese Serabande CD also includes a suite of music from the third installment of the Apes series, "Escape From the Planet of the Apes," which was Goldsmith's second and last foray into Apedom. The main theme from "Escape" is a time capsule of '70s sci-fi complete with theramin and wacked-out surf guitar—its approach is tongue planted firmly in cheek. But the effect is rousing and plays like a kitschy piece of vintage rock. The theme segues into an extended sitar-driven mix and eventually grows more serious, more doom-like as the tragedy of the story unfolds.

If "Escape" grabbed all the sonic cliches of early '70s science fiction film rock, the music from "Planet of the Apes" holds up as a piece of classical avant-garde art oozing atmosphere—music that has, over the years, influenced musicians such as Air and, to a greater extent, Brian Eno. With "Planet," Goldsmith forges that rare soundtrack—one that works as a cohesive whole completely separate from the film it derived from—one that reaches inside a primitive subconscious without losing its timeless modernity.