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OCR03670 - *YES* Deus Ex "God from the Machine"


Gario
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Hi,
 
Attached is a submission for OCR. I am Drew Etterle (SuprMelO) and my band mate is Scott Wells (BluuMonk) and together our band is Moiré Effect. We can be reached at  and our website is http://moireeffectband.com . It looks like my user ID is 34268.
 
Our submission is a remix of the UNATCO theme from the original Deus Ex and is titled "God from the Machine". 

The UNATCO music is a serene but mysterious song, perfect for investigating intrigue at the virtually unaccountable global police bureaucracy. We took melodies and progressions and found they served great for examining our behaviors and habits brought on by technology, and the ease of surrendering privacy to the system. The hard rock take added weight to the themes of surveillance and corporatism we were exploring in the song.

[Spoilers for Deus EX ahead] A lot of Scott’s lyrics are lifted and modified from JC Denton’s encounter with the A.I. Morpheus late in the original game. Morpheus presents itself as a system that trawls the internet for people’s information and presents it back to them for their amusement. It seems benign, but it’s not difficult to imagine it as a much more sinister system. And why would we feel the need to create such a system?

We actually cut a music video for the song using footage from various trailers for other Deus Ex games:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_xI3Qs9kuk

Here's the lyrics:

My vision is augmented y’all

Check your status again for the third time tonight
Your face lit up with the pale blue light
Hoping for connection or some validation
Got you tripping & hallucinating phantom vibrations

Eyes dried out but you continue to read
Can’t miss out cause you hunger the feed
The world keeps spinning behind the screen
Lie awake in bed as you serve the machine

Just let me in, come join your friends
I’ll follow your path as you carry me near and far
Just let me in, share without end
And smile for me as I tell you who you are

Keep up appearances, mask what you truly think
Them cookies keeping tabs as you click the link
The ones closest only see what you want them to see
But you trusting Zuck Brin and Bezos implicitly

The signal goes out and it’s passed around
You say you’re putting out knowledge as it’s going down
Stick it to them, ya heard fate favors the bold
They’re saying thanks for the data as the swallow it whole

Just let me in, come join your friends
I want it all, everything that can be known
Just let me in, share without end
Hold me up and you’ll never feel alone

Just let me in, come join your friends
We’re watching and we’ll try to understand
Just let me in, share without end
Accept your judgement from my invisible hand…

I never asked for this

--------------------------------------------------
 
Thanks for taking a listen,

Drew

 

 

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This has 'Linkin Park' written all over it, and I enjoyed every second of it. The rapping paired with the screamo, the quality guitar work against the simpler synths, and the thematic lyrics - it's quite the homage to one of my favorite games. It's unconventional, but it's really quite good.

Different, but really cool. Not enough of this particular style on OCR - hopefully this will fill that space a bit.

YES

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  • Gario changed the title to 2017/01/12 - (1Y) Deus Ex 'Gods of the Machine'

Oh, yeah!  Agreed with Gario on all points.  It's unconventional as a remix, sure, but as punk metal, it's true to form.  My only crit is that the rapping is a little too clean, not quite a match for the rest of the space and genre.  The title's a little bland, too, given the genre and the name of the game.  Otherwise, I love this, and I hope it will inspire imitation.

YES

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  • Liontamer changed the title to 2017/01/12 - (2Y) Deus Ex 'God from the Machine'
  • 1 month later...

The drumming at :11 didn't inspire too much confidence in terms of the texture getting properly filled in, but by :23, things were OK. Not a fan of the vocals at :40, which didn't have much flow, though the stuttering-type effects were fine. Chorus vocals were stronger here.

On the production side, things got very cluttered at :23, and it pretty much stayed like that for the rest of the track any times things got dense, mostly during the choruses; if this could be cleaned/cleared up so that the part-writing behind the vocals didn't mud together so indistinctly, I'd be behind this. The arrangement's an easy pass, but one more pass to tighten up the mixing would solidify this.

NO (resubmit)

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  • Liontamer changed the title to 2017/01/12 - (2Y/1N) Deus Ex 'God from the Machine'
  • Liontamer changed the title to 2017/01/12 - (3Y/1N) Deus Ex 'God from the Machine'
  • 3 weeks later...

Very 2000s Nu-metal, this one.  The rapping sections were pretty weak in my opinion, but the chorus was very strong.  The arrangement and structure are pretty good here, this sounds like a single you would hear at the peak of the nu-metal popularity, though an expressive guitar solo is not something you often heard in the style, here it's a very nice inclusion.  Even the lyrics are similar to the often sad/emotive themes and tropes in the genre.

I see Larry shows some reservations with the production, and I do too.  The dual arpeggios and different effects going on in some points make for a rather cluttered background.  However, I think the mix as a whole is strong enough to go above the bar, even though it could have been cleaned up a bit.

YES

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  • Liontamer changed the title to OCR03670 - *YES* Deus Ex "God from the Machine"
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