ReMix:Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights "The Glass Tower" 4:52

It's a rainy, dreary evening here in Atlanta, but it's my kind of weather; I genuinely enjoy sitting in the darkness, nothing but the glow of my laptop as I search for things to say about the talented musicians in this community. I had the perfect choice handy today, that being Michael Hudak's ambient & glitchy rework of Yamato Kasai's music for the gloomy indie hit Ender Lilies! I certainly hope Hudak's gained enough listener equity based on his catalog here, because if you bypass this on account of not having played Ender Lilies, you'll miss out on the delicate, crystalline textures formed by the piano, glitching, and subtle SFX. :-) As wild as Michael's work can be (and, boy, do we have a doozy for the near future), Hudak's also successfully gone the melodically conservative route as well, someone who is, as evidenced by his comments, equally at home chopping up a theme as he is delving into novel sound design:

"An experimental take on "North" from Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights. Ender Lilies is a game with tremendous care taken to atmosphere, and it has a few pieces of music that are sublime (and I definitely hear a little Sakamoto in them - might be a correlation there). "North", which plays while exploring a snowy, walled fortress, is one of my favorite songs.

I wrote this ReMix in the style I employed in an EP I put out in 2021 called Polar. This ReMix is kind of an unofficial part of it, since the first minute or so is similar to a song on that release called "A Hunt".

I wanted this to be evocative without necessarily being cinematic. Otherworldly, but using tactile sounds. I wanted to recreate the strings from the original, but I didn't want my mix to become an "epic" orchestral thing, so I purposely filtered them to have them sound more incidental. I used different reverb sends to simulate different rooms, with granular engines attached to said reverbs, feeding back into the track (a lot of other techniques were used too, but I already forgot half of what I did).

Source breakdown:
The original source has a Section A that comprises the first 52 seconds, then it's Section B and Section C looped back and forth repeatedly. This pattern is recreated section-for-section in my mix until 3:16, when Section C repeats a second consecutive time. The chords of the strings in my version are essentially the same as the source, just with some inversions.

0:00-2:05 in source is 0:00-2:13 in ReMix.
1:32-2:05 in source is 2:14-3:14 in ReMix, then again from 3:16 to 4:08; after that, the notes begin to overlap and overtake the melody until fade out.

I used the save room version of this theme, too, which is the exact same song minus the strings. The left hand of the piano during my trumpet section at 3:16 might be easier to hear in the source save version (at 1:32).

Thanks again, as always."

Hudak's still learning, but I'm shocked & astonished how he casually forgets half the stuff he did, likely because he's so busy filling his brain with new inspirations, ideas, and experiments. :-) We just posted judge Emunator's sunny, serene Minecraft mix, which was also melodically conservative, and I felt this was a fitting bookend together with Michael's shadowy, somber Ender Lilies mix -- two similar approaches, two different moods pairing off the light and the dark. Serendipity's been achieved, as Emunator actually evaluated this one and may have found a kindred spirit:

"Whenever I see a new submission from Michael, I automatically assume that I will be faced with a completely out-of-left-field arrangement that stylistically deviates about as far from the source material as possible, so it was a surprise to hear just how similar this was to the Ender Lilies soundtrack (which, by the way, is absolutely gorgeous in its own right)! Both rely on sparse, intimate piano and strings and a repetitive left-hand bassline, to the extent that the opening seconds sound nearly identical to one another.

That said, this is far from a simple retread of the source material, iterating and expanding on techniques from Michael's signature box of production tricks to great effect. However, this goes much further than his past submissions in terms of ambiance and sound design, even employing organic instruments such as strings and trumpet to flesh out the soundscape in unexpected ways and distinguish his take from the original. There is a tasteful dash of dissonance present in the piano starting at 3:50, which accentuates the off-kilter feeling that was established earlier but never compromises the prevailing beauty that defines this arrangement.

I believe this is one of Michael's most fully-realized submissions to date, demonstrating how far he has come as a sound designer and arranger in such a short time. Despite a surface level similarity to the source material at first glance, this is truly transformative, transcendent, and stunningly beautiful."

Couldn't help but smile reading Emunator's final sentence about Michael; it equally applies as much to Emu himself if he ever chose to hold up the proverbial mirror. Two tremendous talents who have taken advantage of OCR as a platform for meaningful artistic growth -- not so different as much as being two sides of the same shiny, valuable coin. :-)