ReMix: Doom 'The Dark Side of Phobos'

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In the beginning, there was Relics of the Chozo. Then came Kong in Concert, and the people saw that it was good. Next came the blue pill, Hedgehog Heaven, followed soonafter by the pink pill, Rise of the Star. Now, on the 8th day of the 8th month of the year of OCR, 2005, project coordinator Mythril Nazgul (Navid Azeez) and company bring you The Dark Side of Phobos, "a 23 track, two disk album with remixes of music from the original DooM game for the PC". OCR's fifth site project is our first from a computer as opposed to a console title, and tackles Bobby Prince's beloved soundtrack to the game that vaulted id to worldwide fame and fortune (even though Wolfenstein deserves some lovin', too); with a name nod to the classic Pink Floyd album, DSoP features work from 19 artists, many of whom are no strangers to the premises of ocremix, and while not every track may end up here, as always we can start you off right with the title track from Mr. Baranowsky, whose menacing, cinematic orchestral arrangement would be right at home in, say, a Doom movie - at least this way if it suffers the same fate as most game-to-movie translations, we can vicariously dream up the film that might have been while listening to this arrangement, no? The pulse of the piece is the deep, running strings, at least up until the three minute mark, bearing a thematic resemblance to Elfman's intro to Beetle Juice, only much more ominous and aggressive. Dynamics are key, as rhythm is established via accentuation rather than note length. We intro with an ambient, breathing cloud of sound, as strings enter and build up to the first hit at 0'23", joined afterwards by tremolo articulations and then some psycho-esque string lines. Snares comes in around 1'04" and things continue building, as stark, heavy percussion dots a legato and staccato string landscape. Piano begins to play a bigger role, and then around 2'30" the pulse begins to abate and we segue into a somber, ivory-led, percussionless, melodic ending; beyond just punctuation (although there's a bit of that, too), this final section is almost like the eulogy for whomever fought and hypothetically died in the first half of the mix, and the two distinct areas of the composition serve as complimentary thematic foils, without sounding cliched or smashed together. This mix injects the dark, hell-infested world of Doom directly into your cerebral cortex and intravenously feeds you both apocalypse and requiem in lethal doses; Dan's done an excellent job of providing the project with a memorable and appropriate opening mix. There's more where that came from, so head on over to doom.ocremix.org to get the full story, or start downloading (please help us seed!) the torrent right now, site unseen, like the greedy cacodemon you know you are. Welcome to Mars, soldier.

― djpretzel