ReMix: Final Fantasy VIII 'Everything = Nothing'

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Well... things have been really interesting the last couple weeks. Everyone's been busy with finals, I've been gettin into Hot Hot Heat a bit, the most recent episodes of both Naruto and Gundam SEED Destiny rocked out, I'm finally getting around to converting some of OCR's code to use classes and make the best of PHP4's rather weak support for OO, I've been falling in love with Eclipse as an IDE, not only for Java but PHP as well, and whaddaya know, our very own Washington Wizards are finally holding their own in the finals. Good stuff. So, more relevantly, newcomer Bryan Henderson, alias Sefiros, gives us a dramatic, near-seven minute, striking orchestral arrangement of "Compression of Time". Things begin with tentative, deliberate piano chords, as strings edge their way in like the first rays of the sun breaking over the horizon of a clear wintry morn. Sounds like I stole that from a rejected Hallmark card, but visually it actually *is* the image conjured, if not the phrasing. This piece has a dramatic, building, pulsing push to it, not unlike the concluding track off my favorite Goldenthal score, Titus, or some of the work off the singular Requiem for a Dream soundtrack. There's a lot of exposed, stark solo violin, and while sometimes (like the very end) notes are held so long that the vibrato loop becomes readily apparent, overall the production quality is high. There's a lot of emotion here, and you get the sense the ReMixer really felt the original piece when he constructed this arrangement. Larry mentioned potential issues with sustained dynamics at parts, but there are plenty of breaks that drop things down, and constituent elements are often fading in oh so gradually, slowly and intensely building up momentum and force. Despite the very serious mood, I can't help but give the nod to Shariq's quip-prefixed comments:

"The opening reminds me of one of those chinese martial arts movies where they make the pretense of having a really deep love story when it's all just an excuse to do kung fu. Go figure. Yeah this is really pretty stuff. I'm enjoying the slowly moving lines buried within the sustained chords; nice stuff. Dynamics are excellent; lots of highs and lows; those detache strings are wonderfully executed too."

Frankly, no one ever needs an excuse to do Kung Fu. Everyone should Kung Fu freely and with as little discretion and context as possible. This would solve 70% of the world's problems, by my calculations. But in the end this ain't Kung Fu Fightin' music, but rather a serious, transporting opus, nearly a textbook definition of a cinematic "build" piece, and a classy, beautiful initial ReMix from Mr. Henderson.

― djpretzel