|
How many times you
had to answer the inevitable question "What kind of music do you like?",
and almost excusing yourself you answered that you really enjoy soundtracks, not
those horrible song compilations but the underscore tracks? Now imagine a
worse scenario: you have to confess to the girl you love that, besides liking
games, you also likes... game music? Be cool and try to calm her down
explaining that the market of game soundtracks is in expansion, score albuns
from Shadows of The Empire, Medal of Honor, Final Fantasy,
Streets Of Rage and Resident Evil were released, lots of them
with high quality music that many times equals the music for the movies. And
today it´s common to have big orchestral music in game soundtracks. Two
recent efforts fit in this category, Christopher Lennertz´s Medal of Honor:
Rising Sun and Erik Lundborg´s Enter
the Matrix. The last one is the
first videogame of the Wachowski franchise, where Erik Lundborg incorporated
into his own music Don
Davis' swelling brass effects and nervous contrapuntal energic theme music
from The Matrix.
Lundborg was a logical choice for the task since he
also has arranged and orchestrated Davis' scores for the nine animé short-film
prequels collectively titled The Animatrix, and the two
theatrical sequels The Matrix: Reloaded and The
Matrix: Revolutions. In addition to those Matrix efforts Lundborg has arranged
and orchestrated for Don Davis on films like Behind Enemy Lines, House on Haunted Hill and
AntiTrust. As a
composer, Lundborg has scored several features including Return to
Sender, Analog Roam and The Sun and Serpent. Enter
the Matrix contains some techno music and excerpts from the original Reloaded
score, but Lundborg´s writing prevails. Since the music for the game had to
keep the orchestral mood and signatures from the series, it wasn´t easy for
Lundborg to write something really unique. But there´s one
great plus here: if you like the scores from the movies, you will like the Enter
the Matrix orchestral music too.
Erik Lundborg explains the difference between
scoring a videogame and a feature film: "Game music is designed to
enhance and sustain action, while film music contains a varied range of
emotional experience." From this point of view Erik Lundborg undertook the daunting task of
creating a unique type of music for the videogame while staying true to the
music that is Matrix. He wrote 130 minutes of music and this promotional CD
includes only 46 minutes of them. Faithful to his own concept of game music
Lundborg composed a very nice collection from what I call "generic"
music where the individual tracks are labeled as "Action/Fighting",
"Suspense", "Impending Danger", "Asian Wind"
and "Cineractives" (these heard in the movie sequences integrated
to the game, a must for Matrix fans).
All the music in the album is
nicely performed by the Seattle Symphony conducted by Lundborg. I really
think that this score worths a regular release. If not it
will be a shame because Erik Lundborg made a good job which deserves a
wider recognition - not only among game players.
|
