Skyhigh 21 Music review

Music review


MUSIC REVIEW
MUSIC REVIEW

of the c64 music-competition at

THE PARTY V
THE PARTY V

Hosted by: Metal



INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION

Welcome once again to this chapter, where I either
proclame the comming of a new star in the c64 music
scene - or I simply tear your work apart.. It's a
dirty job, but someone's gotta do it.. :P

This time I've thrown away my piece of paper with my
review-scale, so I've had to either do that scale
again, or come up with something new - and since the
scale wasn't *that* good, I figured out a new way
to rank my reviews. This new system is quite simple -
I devided the review into 3 parts - Skills, Ideas and
originality. Within these categories I can rate the
composer and his work from 0-33.3% - this way I
think the review is guaranteed to be more reliable
instead of *just* reviewing the tune(s).

This time we finally get to present you with a review
of the tunes presented at The Party 5 music comp.
I had hoped to be able to review tunes from the
just held parties X96 and Symposium, but somehow
there were no music competitions held at either
parties - what a shame.. Well, that's not all true,
coz there were a few tunes released at Symposium,
but not enough to make it into this column.


THE REVIEW
THE REVIEW

I will conduct the review in the order, the tunes
were placed in the competition - from 1 to 12.

- 1. place -------------------------------------

Composers:  Mitch/CZP/Crest & Dane/CZP/Triad
Title:           "Listen and learn"

This is a tune sparkling of talent, musical skills,
and not to forget a lot of great ideas. I especially
like the way the tune constantly changes style -
without loosing control. Indeed this tune deserves
the rather boosting title "Listen and learn".

Skills: 30%
Idea: 28%
Originality: 30%

TOTAL: 88%


- 2. place ------------------------------------

Composer: Jeff/CZP/Camelot
Title:        "Unknown"

I was able to review this piece, as I got it along with
my preview of the Cyberzound Editor. It's a tune,
which you immidiately can hear is made by Jeff. The
reason for this is ofcoz his stunning ability to
create instruments in multispeed tunes. The tune
itself doesn't have that much melody to it - after
all - it IS techno. I very much like his baseline(s)
in this tune, especially the part where it sounds as
if there's some distortion fx on the base - fabolous!

Skills: 32%
Idea: 25%
Originality: 25%

TOTAL: 82%


- 3. place ------------------------------------

Composer: Fanta/Bass/Oxyron
Title:        "Freshjive"

This is a very melodic tune, that if you took away the
lead has some chord-structure, that sounds very
good. I think, however, that this piece from Fanta is
one of the best, that I've heard - at least his
melodic tunes are better than the usual stuff. I
think it's a good tune, but it gives me a headache to
listen to it for too long..

PS: If you haven't heard Fanta's tunes for the Relax
april issue, I urge you to do so - it's some very
great tunes!

Skills: 25%
Idea: 25%
Originality: 25%

TOTAL: 75%


- 4. place ------------------------------------

Composer: KB/The Obsessed Maniacs
Title:        "Gates of Texlan"

The tune is very original, as the genre "trance" is
very hard to do on the c64. Actually I'm not too sure
if it really  -is- "trance"..? Anyway, I don't think the
tune is carried out too good. The chords are ok, but
the basic idea is lacking.

It's very limited how much music I've heard from this
guy, but after I heard KB's multichannel module from
the pc-music competition, I was even more disap-
pointed about this entry, as the pc-module was a
very neat carried out piece of classical- music!

Skills: 22%
Ideas: 20%
Originality: 20%

TOTAL: 62%


- 5. place ------------------------------------

Composer: Syndrom/The Imperium Arts/Crest
Title:        "Unknown"

Oh well. this is a tune from the skilled Syndrom. And
as usual, you're never surprised with the quality,
which Syndrom seems to be able to keep in all his
tunes. This particular tunes doesn't contain any new
or special ideas, infact it's very basic, but also very
melodic, and I think he did a good job with his
harmonies. Even though I personally think he has
done better tunes than this one, I rate it as follows:

Skills: 27%
Ideas: 23%
Originality: 25%

TOTAL: 75%


- 6. place ------------------------------------

Composer: Rap/Onslaught
Title:        "Save the Kwiatky"

Hmm, this is a strange tune, but I think I'm very fair
when i say, that this tune sucks.. Surely Rap has
some skills, as there's not (that) many errors in it,
but dear me, that lead sounds bad! Listening to some
of Rap's latest work assures me, that I'm not mis-
taking with the following rates:

Skills: 15%
Ideas: 15%
Originality: 15%

TOTAL: 45%


- 7. place ------------------------------------

Composer: Fuben/Oxyron
Title:        "Short Drax-like tune"

Ouch.. this tune is -not- Drax-like at all - it sounds
more like a Tim Follin on LSD. That lead is simply too
crazy - it goes up and down.. up and down.. around a
few notes.. then up and down again.. Anyway, Fuben
does know a thing or two about music, but I think he
seriously lacks control of his tune. If the lead had
been more relaxed, it might have sounded like one of
Drax's less-funky tunes.

Skills: 20%
Ideas: 18%
Originality: 17%

TOTAL: 55%


- 8. place ------------------------------------

Composer: Zyron/Swemix/Antic (now F4CG)
Title:        "Four & Twenty"

Woh! This is a guy with a taste of weirdness!! This
tune is definately not one of his best, mainly be-
cause of the chords, which are not handled too well.
Anyway, this tune has some of those very charac-
teristic 'space-noises', that Zyron does so well, and
despite the lack of chord-structuring skills, this
dude has some pretty good ideas and the originality
is unique - simply because he is the only one daring
enough to make such a tune.. Oh, btw. I forgot to
mention, that there's some false notes too.. ooops,
hehe.. ;)

Skills: 13.8%
Ideas: 24.7%
Originality: 22.7623%

TOTAL: 61.2623%


- 9. place ------------------------------------

Composer: Gangstar/+H/LXT
Title:        "Unknown"

This tune is a very average tune with an average of
well, everything actually.. The lead is a bit special,
but besides that, there's no new ideas and nothing
new on the originality-scale either.

Skills: 18%
Ideas: 15%
Originality: 15%

TOTAL: 48%


- 10. place ------------------------------------

Composer: TMG/Motiv 8
Title:        "Unknown"

This tune is just like Gangstar's tune, a very
average tune, however the lead tends to not all-
ways follow the rest of the tune's harmonies. Not
much more to add really..

Skills: 10%
Ideas: 18%
Originality: 15%

TOTAL: 33%


- 11. place ------------------------------------

Composer: Bordeaux/Acrise*Excess
Title:        "PC-Sux"

Ouch - techno supposed to be in the same style as
PVCF.. hmm.. well, as I'm not a too big fan of PVCF's
music, I don't like this tune either. The general idea
of this tune is, to make it short.. Drums: Boem Boem..
Base: Dadadadadadadadi.. and that's it.. booooring! If
you absolutely had to make hardtrance or what-
ever this style is (hard to tell really), I think you
really should have made it on a PC, instead of
calling the tune 'PC-Sux'.. Anyway, if I -have- to be
creative here, I might aswell throw some percen-
tages off:

Skills: 10%
Ideas: 10%
Originality: 10%

TOTAL: 30%


- 12. place ------------------------------------

Composer: Sonic/APS
Title:        "Totally freaked up"

When I first loaded this tune, I wondered if this was
a fake entry or something, coz it sounded like some
of the music made in 1986 or so! However, it seemed
to be a serious entry, so I'm ofcoz very puzzled
about why the f... someone would enter a tune like
that into a music-competition? Well, I have to be
objective, so I can only throw away my percentages,
but I think there must be some kind of a misunder-
standing here... seriously...

PS: If I may add before counting the votes - I was
extremely kind, when giving these percentages..
after all, I'm not in the business of taking away
people's lust to make music on the c-64 - On the
contrery - the more the merrier ;)

Skills: 5%
Ideas: 5%
Originality: 2%

TOTAL 12%


THE RESULTS
THE RESULTS

Well, this last piece of text is to make a conclusion
on this review based on the percentages given by
me. My aim with this is only to find out, if the results
made in a real-time happening music-competition
match the ones made almost half a year after by a
(hopefully) qualified musician. Let's put'em up!


#    TP5#    Composer:          Title:                   Score:
---------------------------------------------
1       1 .       Mitch & Dane      Listen & Learn         88%
2      2.       Jeff                   Unknown                  82%
3      3.       Fanta                 Freshjive                75%
5.       Syndrom             Unknown                  75%
5      4.       KB                      Gates of Texlan       62%

6      8.       Zyron                 Four & Twenty         61...%
7      7.       Fuben                Short Drax-like...     55%
8      6.       Rap                    Save the Kwiatky     50%
9      9.       Gangstar            Unknown                  48%
10    10.       TMG                    Unknown                  33%
11     11 .       Bordeaux           PC-Sux                    30%
12    12.       Sonic                 Totally freaked..      12%

That's the score.. that's it... catch you all next time
where I'll most likely conduct the reviews of the
Assembly music-competition or, in case there'll be
an issue of Skyhigh before that - something else..

/METAL.VIBRANTS.CAMELOT.AVANTGARDE
/METAL.VIBRANTS.CAMELOT.AVANTGARDE.
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(under construction!)