Whispers'n the night (djisox-w.xm)

Posted by drq on Tue 18th Jun 2002, rated 7 / 10.

This piece begins with the quiet chirping of birds, but after only a few seconds a string orchestra appears out of nowhere and scares the poor things away. The strings start playing a fairly simple chord progression, upon which more instruments are added as the song proceeds. The listener is first introduced to some very good drumming - great use of panning here, and the congas add to the feeling of primitive, natural rawness that the birds established in the intro. Percussion flows very nicely, good job with that. A bass soon enters the mix. It's panned to right, which doesn't sound right to me. I prefer having my basses in centre position. Otherwise, the bassline fits the tune. Some echoed electric piano tinkling is added as well. Sounds nice, although the sound so far is quite monotone. The way the song builds up is very basic and the background arrangement isn't really interesting enough to stand on its own; it needs a melody. Apparently the composer realized this too, and decided to add... ...the flute. Ahhh yes, this is a pretty good melody. Perhaps not instantly memorable, but it grows on you. It's nicely tracked and has a full and rich sound, thanks to some delay and the fact that two different instruments play in unison. However, it is slightly repetitive. It actually adds to the monotone feeling by following the chords slavishly. More variation would be very welcome in this part of the song, both in melody and underlying harmonies. At 1:40, the chords and instrumentation change and give the music a lighter feel. There's some really sweet guitar here, as well as some piano. The flute comes back, playing a new theme. This is definitely my favourite part of the tune; it's quite repetitive here as well but somehow it feels justified. The song comes to an end at almost 3 minutes - it was probably a good choice not making it longer than this. A good song overall. It starts out decent and becomes highly enjoyable towards the end. Not exceedingly original, but still. I like it. No major flaws here. Panning is used in a professional manner, with the possible exception of the bass which I mentioned earlier. Echoes are used to great effect, giving the song a big, yet smooth sound. The flute leads sound excellent with the gentle vibrato and variations in volume. Tempo changes are used quite frequently, but it never sounds odd or awkward. There's a shitload of different samples in this song - 72, to be precise. They're mostly 16 bit and of good quality, fitting nicely together. They could use some finetuning, perhaps, but that's not too obvious. To summarize; the composer did a good job tracking a good piece of music.