Quantazelle's "Late Blazing Kinch Theme"
This review has been a long time coming. I met Quantazelle on Orkut, Google's invitation only social community. As I have found, it's a great place to find people all around the world with similar interests. Quantazelle happened to be a member of the Demoscene community, and her profile states that she writes music and does a lot of DJ work. So I had to check out her personal website: http://www.quantazelle.com. As it turns out, she's got a lot of music, and most of it is for sale. But like any good and talented independant recording artist, she had a lot of free tunes available for download. I grabbed a bunch of her tunes, but one in particular grabbed my attention. It was called "Late Blazing Kinch Theme". If you want to purchase the album, you can get it from her site. The album is called "Coaster".
On a personal note, I usually try to contact the author of a song I'm reviewing. I have yet to meet someone that wouldn't let me review their music. But Quantazelle was especially easy to communicate with. She was prompt to reply, she was very friendly and very professional in our communications. She told me quite a bit about the tune and how it was created; information that is always useful when reviewing a tune. I know that the song was created in Cubase SX, not a tracking program like so many demoscene releases. But I also know that she is no stranger to the ways of tracking, as she got her start with Impulse Tracker modules. Her influences come from all sides. You can listen to this particular song and hear the demoscene influence. But you can also listen to the song and realize that she got a lot of inspiration from outside the demoscene. But before I even began this review, I was excited to do it. It's the least I can do to expose more people to this independent recording artist.
The primary instrument in "Late Blazing Kinch Theme" is a plucked harp. But before you jump to conclusions, this is not harp music. The woman sitting at this harp would not be wearing the flowing white dress with flowers in her hair. This harp player is in an electronic rock band, and she's probably wearing jeans and a t-shirt. All right, so there probably wasn't a real harp player at all, as this was all sequenced. But you get the idea. Nay, this song is not typical harp music. This tune has some wild percussion using non-traditional samples. This tune has a bass line that is punchy, simple and strong. And that's all before the interesting industrial, drum and bass and trance samples come into play.
From a technical point of view, this is a great song because of two major elements: Harmony and repetition. Quite often, the harp is being played in two parts, harmonizing and playing off of each other. And some of her obscure samples seem to compliment the harp as well. As for repetition, there are certain elements that are repeated throughout the song. I'm not talking about repetitive bass lines. I'm talking about how she takes a simple riff on the harp, and plays it several different ways: At different octaves, with different timing and with different harmonies. This is no randomized sample placement as is so common with electronic music. Quantazelle thought every bit of this tune through. I can imagine she tweaked and prodded this song into its lovely form for hours. A lot of time has been spent just on note placement alone. That attention to detail is not missed by this reviewer.
Classification of electronic music is always fuzzy. If I were to classify this tune, I would classify it as a progressive trance. Some may classify it as drum-n-bass. Regardless, it's a solid song with a very strong intent. It would definitely be worth grabbing.
Song Information:
Title: Late Blazing Kinch Theme
Author: Quantazelle
Release date: Unreleased
File Size: 4.2 MB
Source: http://www.quantazelle.com