Skies of Arcadia "Sacrulen Shroud" 5:12

Happy 4/20 Day! Time to blaze forth and cheekily celebrate with 4 suitably appropriate tracks, depending on your state of mind. :-D (If you're a stick in the mud, just call them quirky and leave the rest of us alone.) First up, Michael Hudak transforms an ambient Skies of Arcadia source into something that got the judges fired up! Hudak didn't mean to be snooty here, but, admittedly, even he's having a hard time moving beyond those appearances:

"There was an awful lot going through my mind when I made this, but not much I want to actually say... I approached this piece like I was painting a picture as much as I was making a piece of music (I'm an awful visual artist). That's often how I work, but, for a ReMix, I'm a slave to the source, so it's exciting to find more ambient sources that I can find a reflective quality in that also happen to be from a game I love.

The source is based around the following (seemingly endless) arpeggio progression:

Ax6, Bx6, Cx3, Ax4, Bx7, Dx7, Ax3, Ex6, Fx6, Gx3, Hx3, Ix4, Jx3, Kx6, Lx6, Ax6, Mx6

I don't know what these chords are, but essentially what I did was this - line them up the proper order, use some as arps, use some as held chords, test out instruments with different granular synth and reverb sends (sometimes just using the sends' audio and ditching the instrument VST audio after bouncing them separately into the track), and start painting. Lots of field recording snippets. I faded out a lot of the transients in lieu of the smeared nature of the song, but kept some because I like how they sound and the rhythms they generate.

There are all kinds of extra bits of melodic content floating over top of these arps in the source, and I was happy to ignore them, aside from the magical bit at 1:58 that appears at the very end of my version.

It's a quiet master, but it's ambient/post-rock/room noise/whatever, so I think it's fine. The dynamic range is much more important to me in this particular case (I think it's around 15 LUFS of range). Originally, I had a bit more in the subs in the mix, but I rolled them back because they were too overpowering and IDM-like. The granular plugins I used were Fritz Granular Engine, which is part of the Reason rack, and imagiro autochroma. This write-up looks a little pretentious reading it back. A couple of the songs I listened to while making this were "New Grass" by Talk Talk and "In a Silent Way" by Miles Davis. Now it looks even *more* pretentious!"

Nothing wrong with self-awareness, Michael, it's a strength. ;-) Judge Chimpazilla didn't describe this in cannabic terms, but she stuck with caffinated products, so she's in the ballpark!:

"Ooooooooooooooo. This is utterly luscious. The beautiful long-release-heavy-on-the-reverb arps and chord beds are then mangled, tastefully, with glitching and sudden surprises. I always say this, but this will not be everyone's cup of tea..... but for me, it is a delicious chai tea with just the right amount of honey and cream and some spicy cinnamon sprinkled on top."

In other words, she thinks it positively tea-riffic, nyuk nyuk nuyk! :-D Who here likes Disasterpeace's soundtrack to Fez? Once you hear Hudak's opening, you'll be right at home. Oh ho, a wild Emunator has appeared and it looks he's responsible for Chimpa's initial review; Emunator himself seemed to resonate with this on another plane of existence:

"Every so often, Michael drops a submission where I immediately feel compelled to share it with someone else, just to make sure I didn't hallucinate it. In this case, before I'd even done a source check or looked at the song through a critical lens, I messaged Chimpazilla and said "you HAVE to listen to this." As a submissions evaluator, this is perhaps the best compliment I can give - in that moment, my personal enjoyment as a listener grabbed the wheel and superseded my role as critic.

There are a few moments that resonated with me which I want to highlight. The first :50 seconds set the stage with the types of sounds and techniques you would go on to explore, but the wash of sound at :49, and the few seconds of trickling ambiance that precede it, felt like the floodgates suddenly burst open. This was the most emotionally cathartic moment of the entire arrangement and had me hooked. The simple legato melody at 2:26 similarly offered a moment of solace before delving into the most challenging, emotionally fraught part of the arrangement. Such a simple touch, but it feels like a lantern that I can carry with me through the turmoil that comes within the next minute.

Then we arrive at 3:27, and as everything faded to silence, I found myself yearning for the experience to continue. I wasn't ready to leave. So it was such a pleasant surprise to realize that it did, indeed, have several more minutes of time left on the clock. The last two minutes don't necessarily introduce any groundbreaking new musical ideas or sound design techniques. In fact, what follows feels comparatively straightforward and unassuming compared to the experimentation that came before it, which on paper, could easily seem like unnecessary padding to an arrangement that already said what it needed to say. Yet somehow, by the time we actually reach the end of the final arpeggio, I found myself completely content. Something about the decision to play the rest of the song straight with nothing but uninterrupted arpeggios and field recordings for nearly two additional minutes hits perfectly.

I could try for days to articulate why this all works from a compositional level and still probably come up short, which tells me that this is the kind of piece you just need to *feel*."

Whoooooo boy, this is an audio gummy if I've ever heard one, so bask in Hudak's musical glory and be kind enough to pass it on!