Fans of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 sci-fi masterpiece “Solaris” can finally rejoice as this month sees the first ever release of the film’s groundbreaking soundtrack.

Created by electronic music pioneer Eduard Artemiev, the film’s soundtrack utilizes the unbelievably rare ANS synthesizer. Art Info has more on this amazing device.

According to the writer Max Cole, who wrote what appears to be the most comprehensive history of the ANS in the English language, the synthesizer took 20 years to build and only two were ever constructed. It was a passion project for an inventor named Evgeny Murzin, who risked arrest for his electronic inventions (at the time, you could not purchase electronic components in the USSR), and named his machine after Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, a controversial musical figure around the dawn of the 20th century who developed atonal music systems based on what appears to be occult beliefs.

Both the film and the soundtrack were way ahead of the curve when first released in the early 1970’s. The fact that the soundtrack has never seen a proper release is dumbfounding, but thanks to Superior Viaduct, we can enjoy Artemiev’s compositions on this true gem of a machine. It could be one of the last times we hear something from the ANS on this scale.