Moroder’s synths rise in volume as Billy sprints through the crowded streets and fall away when he ducks inside a poultry stall, two detectives in suits and aviator shades hot on his tail. When he accidentally overturns a crate of chickens, the tune comes rushing back in an explosion of metallic clang and zapping lasers. The scene’s finale takes place on an empty staircase, synths fading as Billy looks around and grins, thinking he’s free. But the camera pans to reveal the American’s pistol pointed at Billy’s head. “You seem like a nice enough kid to me, Billy,” he drawls in a Texan accent, both hands clutching the gun. “But you try it and I’ll blow your fucking brains out.”
The whole thing is over in less than three minutes. The song is actually a slightly incongruous choice for the film; while the bass arpeggio instills the requisite drama and suspense, the main melody—which the film’s editor barely uses—is jaunty and major-key, more in keeping with Moroder’s rivals Kraftwerk. It’s on the soundtrack album that “Chase” truly shines, at its full eight-and-a-half-minute length. And on the dancefloor, of course: Discothèques primed by the robotic throb of the previous year’s “I Feel Love” now convulsed to the equally rigid yet sensual pulse of “Chase.”
When Parker requested a song in the style of “I Feel Love,” Moroder clearly delivered: “Chase” is in a similar key, and rides a similarly hypnotic arpeggiated bassline that chugs away with motorik determination. Part of what had made the previous year’s Donna Summer hit so beguiling was the delay Moroder applied to its synth bass, making the ostinato figure seem to vibrate in midair—he uses the same effect to even more extreme ends on “Chase.” As the bassline churns away atop a muted 4/4 kick, backlit by a flanged synth pad, slapback delay blossoms around it, turning the timekeeping woozy and gelatinous.
As he did with the stereo panning on “I Feel Love,” Moroder does the same thing here, with reversed cymbals hissing in the right channel and open hi-hats in the left. The groove is actually less rigid than that of “I Feel Love,” thanks in part to a snare that sounds like the work of a human drummer, deep in the pocket but never mechanically so.
The song’s central feature is its contrapuntal melody, which periodically rises up above the bassline like a pair of Renaissance Faire pennants—a call-and-response between a squelchy synth figure and an answering riff that sounds almost like an oboe. It’s as catchy as anything Moroder ever wrote. He has said that Wendy Carlos’ Switched On Bach was his introduction to the synthesizer, and “Chase” bears that out: The friction between its classical air and the song’s trance-inducing, proto-acid throb—filters in constant motion, drums dissolving into dub delay—that makes the whole thing so intoxicating.
The Midnight Express soundtrack won an Oscar—Moroder’s first—though Puttnam, the film’s co-producer, told American Film that he suspected the Academy granted it the award in part because voters had failed to nominate the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack the previous year. “Too many questions were asked of the Academy’s attitude toward modern music,” he said. “So, to an extent, Giorgio had the Bee Gees to thank for that.” Moroder went on to a successful career in Hollywood; in fact, throughout the 1980s, he was more prolific as a soundtrack composer than as a solo artist, scoring films like American Gigolo, Cat People, Flashdance, Scarface, and The NeverEnding Story, for which he also wrote era-defining hits for David Bowie, Irene Cara, Blondie, and Berlin.
