Decoder is the sort of underground film that sounds made-up until you realize it actually existed: a dystopian sci-fi shot in Hamburg and Berlin in 1984, directed by Klaus Maeck (alias Muscha), starring Christiane F. - yes, that Christiane F. - alongside FM Einheit of Einstürzende Neubauten as a fast-food worker turned sonic guerrilla. Add Genesis P-Orridge playing a priest of Black Noise, William S. Burroughs as a shadowy salesman of subversive tape machines, and cult actor Bill Rice as a detective, and you get a fever dream stitched together from punk cinema, industrial mythology, and Burroughs’ own theories of language-as-virus. The plot? Muzak, that syrupy anesthetic piped into diners and malls, is exposed as a tool of social control. Our anti-heroes hack it, corrupt it, and replace it with noise - sparking riots, awakening bodies, and scrambling the script of control.

The soundtrack was always more than accompaniment: it was the weapon. Neubauten pound metal into a claustrophobic hymn of resistance. Genesis P-Orridge and Dave Ball (Soft Cell) lace synths with both sleaze and menace, smuggling chaos into nightclub sheen. FM Einheit delivers percussive detonations that sound like a riot playing itself out in real time. William Burroughs’ voice, always half-incantation and half-instruction manual for sabotage, drifts through like a cursed broadcast. Then there’s Soft Cell themselves, dropping “Seedy Films” into this dystopian context, suddenly transformed from louche pop into a document of surveillance and decay. Matt Johnson of The The contributes a track that’s as unsettling as it is magnetic, the pop song as a virus with no cure.

Reissued now after 33 years, Decoder OST doesn’t just resurrect an obscure cult artifact; it reads like a blueprint we forgot to follow. The idea that sound could be weaponized, that Muzak could pacify or radicalize, feels eerily prophetic in an age of algorithmic playlists designed to smooth every edge of our attention. Listening today, the album isn’t nostalgic - it’s urgent, jagged, and very much alive. It whispers that every background track is political, every soundtrack is a script for behavior, and that noise is still the one language power can’t fully domesticate.