ReMix:SaGa Frontier "Abomination" 4:28

about:blank (Chris Bouchard) returns after a twelve year hiatus with this dark, glitched out, industrial-horror take on SaGa Frontier:

"My original idea for this was to make a remix with the vibe of an 80s horror movie, something along the lines of a John Carpenter score or the soundtrack to Romero's Day of the Dead, since the original music plays in a laboratory full of deadly science experiments. That original idea morphed into something a bit different and probably isn't noticeable in the final product.

The biggest composition difference is that I go from A to B (in the original, these would be the sections that respectively begin around 0:29 and 2:06) with a new melody that begins around 57 seconds into my remix and leads into the "B" section differently than the original. Aside from that, the source is (hopefully) very much recognizable throughout. Hope you guys like it."

Some really cool sound design going on here, with some truly thunderous & abominable impacts, generous glitching, and an unrelenting sense of doom/despair/dread.... it may have evolved sonically from its 80's horror roots, but the spinge tingles are still there, along with some nice part-writing hidden between all the scary distortion & FX monsters. Larry writes:

"Chris is great at glitching as well as fashioning weird soundscapes, so it's great to have him back in action on OCR with a sophomore mix, and I liked the intensity here. This purposefully de-empahsizes the "Alone" melody to focus more on the evolving textures, but a perceptive listener will always hear "Alone" in play well, well before its most overt section at 3:42 after the dropoff; with the main melodic line as well as the chorus always referenced throughout. Sit back and enjoy!"

This isn't something you're gonna hum in the shower... or probably anywhere... but for a cinematic listening experience that conjures dark corridors & palpable terror, it's pretty effective. This is of course thematically appropriate for a mad sceintist's laboratory, but it also conjured some outer space horror scenery for me, ala Event Horizon or Dead Space. Unexpected & truly unique work, not something I saw coming, but it hits hard & held my attention, transporting me to somewhere terrifying but aesthetically interesting as well!