ReMix:Golden Sun "Essence of the Four Elements" 2:16

Newcomer Eliott Tordo brings his skills on the erhu to OCR & to the music of Golden Sun with this short-but-sweet, stirring cinematic take on "The Elemental Stars" by Motoi Sakuraba:

"The erhu is a two-stringed bowed musical instrument which may also be called a Southern fiddle, and sometimes known in the Western world as the Chinese violin or a Chinese two-stringed fiddle.

I tried to keep the spiritual idea of the music and add an epic theme. :)

Recorded, mixed, and mastered at SunTzu Records."

I tried to learn the erhu over a period of about 48 hours once, and my feeble Western brain collapsed under the load. I gave up after failing to produce a sound that I could even charitably refer to as musical, but Eliot's clearly got the hang of it - and then some - as he pairs his flowing performance with an enveloping, persuasive accompaniment. It's good. Judges were unanimous; Rexy writes:

"Now, this sounds very lush! There's an effective use of dynamics across all instruments, the realism drew my attention, and the emotion on your erhu was fascinating to witness. Even though the structure is just one run-through of the theme, I find it interesting that a lot of the source preservation is more on the background elements rather than your main melody - and that gave your lead plenty of wiggle-room to go back and forth between referencing source and doing its own thing.

Of course, the brevity is one issue that is up for concern, but as I said, there's enough personalization within the simple run through, and the fadeout didn't call back to a previous part. It's short, sweet, feels like a complete package, and I can see this on the front page."

Yes, yes, yes, and also (now) yes. We should have (a lot) more Golden Sun coming your way at some point in the future (wink, nudge, etc.), but in the meantime Eliott debuts with a powerful tribute that says quite a bit in 2'21" - great stuff!