Mind - and reality-bending drugs factor again and again in Philip K. Dick's hugely influential SF stories.

'A Scanner Darkly' cuts closest to the bone, drawing on Dick's own experience with illicit chemicals and on his many friends who died from drug abuse. Nevertheless, it's blackly farcical, full of comic-surreal conversations between people whose synapses are partly fried, sudden flights of paranoid logic, and bad trips like the one whose victim spends a subjective eternity having all his sins read to him, in shifts, by compound-eyed aliens.

The antihero Bob Arctor is forced by his double life into warring double personalities: as futuristic narcotics agent "Fred," face blurred by a high-tech scrambler, he must spy on and entrap suspected drug dealer Bob Arctor. His disintegration under the influence of the insidious Substance D is genuine tragicomedy. For Arctor there's no way off the addict's downward escalator, but what awaits at the bottom is a kind of redemption--there are more wheels within wheels than we suspected, and his life is not entirely wasted.

This new 22-track score is composed by Graham Reynolds and features the Golden Arm Trio on cuts such as 'Strawberry Pie,' 'The Dark World Where I Dwell,' and 'Escorted To The Bright Lights.' 'A Scanner Darkly' is released on Lakeshore Records June 27, 2006

To give yourself the chance to win one these brand new CDs, just answer this easy question: Name one (1) Philip K. Dick film that Spielberg turned into a movie?!

Send us your answers and if you're correct you'll be in the running to win one of these wonderful new CDs! Just send us an e:mail here before August 1st with your answer and the subject title 'SCANNER DARKLY CDs' to: exclusivemagazine@flash.net