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OCR04475 - *YES* Xenogears "Spirit of the Desert"


Emunator
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  • 1 month later...

Great sound, great beat. Nice mix of techno and ethnic-sounding synths. A lot of fun to listen to.

My one concern is repetitiveness. Now, it's trance, and trance is supposed to be repetitive. And there's not much copy-pasta here. It's progressive trance, done the way progressive trance is supposed to be done. It works for me, with the genre consideration.

YES

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  • MindWanderer changed the title to 2022/10/29 - (1Y) Xenogears "Spirit of the Desert"
  • 4 weeks later...

hard to not hear Pillar of Salt when i hear this original.

some old-school synth sounds in this track. the hats and the 303 bass at about 1:25 or so are super retro and i love it. the subsequent stutter in the lead at 1:34 was perfect. around this point i noticed that there's no actual pads in the track - talk about progressive, that's a long time for additive arrangement - but there's some background synth work right after this so that's great.

there's a 'drop' at about 2:40 that functions as a great palate cleanser and allows some new synths to come in. i liked the shift a lot as a method to drive the track forward. that said, around the 4:00 point i again was getting ready to hear something else. there's a shift at 4:28 towards more sustained synths which was a nice contrast to what we've seen to this point.

there's a recap with the same three over two pattern to a drop that leads to the outro, which is extended as expected for a track that's as patient as this one is. the actual end (the reversed filtered gong) is a little weird, but it's a fine way to cut off the ending vs. just a kick/snare combo like you'd normally see.

this is a fun track to listen to. it doesn't go anywhere fast, but it's nice work with synths and sounds great when really pushed up volume-wise. nice work.

 

 

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  • prophetik music changed the title to 2022/10/29 - (2Y) Xenogears "Spirit of the Desert"
  • 3 weeks later...

Heavy kicks at :40; interesting combination there along with the arranged melody. Boom-tss arrived at 1:06, and in my opinion, it was mixed too loud over the arranged melody. To some extent, I can live it with a personal issue, but then more original techno writing was added over the to at 2:01, and the balance wasn't making sense. I also felt the textures were too basic, so when elements finally started dropping out at 2:41, 2:47, and 2:53, it was a very welcome change in terms of the dynamics.

More overly loud kicks at 3:08; I'm put off by how simplistic and empty these textures are, for example from 3:07-3:34, where it just feels like whole parts of the "real" track have mysteriously been muted out, if anyone gets what I mean there. Texturally, this didn't feel sophisticated enough.

From 2:55-on, the next 3 minutes were iterations of a liberal treatment of :57's section of the source, varying up the leads every so often. Then good dynamic contrast in changing the mood, as 5:53-on was inspired by the drum writing from the very start of the source, partially employing the same rhythms, then changing others.

I'm not enjoying all of the choices here, because, while this piece was loud and attempting to fill out the soundscape, I felt the sections with thinner textures still sounded too empty (especially 3:07-3:34), and I was never of a fan of the kicks and trance groove being louder than the arranged melody. I would love this being given another mixing/producton pass, but I'll not make the perfect the enemy of the good. The arrangement's interpretive, and production's decent enough. Though this did drag out sometimes, in the big picture there's enough variation in the writing that it wasn't a huge problem. Nice to have you back, WhoAmI? WhoAreYou though? ;-)

YES (borderline)

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  • Liontamer changed the title to 2022/10/29 - (3Y) Xenogears "Spirit of the Desert"
  • 4 weeks later...

This has a classic trance feel all the way through - the drum machine sounds, the acid bassline, and simple synth design is all taking me back to the early days of progressive trance. It's not going to wow anybody in terms of sound design or technical mixing quality, but I don't think it needs to, either. There's plenty of movement in the arrangement by way of filtering and percussion fills so that it doesn't ever stagnate, and the core melodies are banging. There's plenty of room for growth in future submissions to flesh out your soundscape further, but I love what you've presented here!

YES

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  • Liontamer changed the title to OCR04475 - *YES* Xenogears "Spirit of the Desert"
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