Year of the Spectre (arc-yots.it)

 Completed in 2002, but not released until 2021.

Some background: Operation CWAL was a group of bored teenagers that formed in 1997 as a creative outlet during the run-up to the release of Starcraft. I was a member. We wrote comic stories, mostly in script format, about invading Blizzard Entertainment and to steal the completed version of Starcraft from their evil clutches. As time went on, the stories got more elaborate and bizarre. Most of them were funny, or at least as funny as bored teenagers could make them. After Starcraft came out, the group continued to write stories, sometimes becoming longer and more serious in tone.

In early 2002, or maybe late 2001, a CWALer named GAVAL was working on a story called Year of the Spectre. It was an epic CWAL spinoff, and extremely serious. He decided to make In the Hall of the Mountain King the main theme, and was looking for variations of it to play (the songs would be embedded into the story via browser plugins).

Since he knew I could do music, GAVAL asked me to make a version of In the Hall of the Mountain King, and gave me some specifications for how he wanted it to progress. I obliged, and came up with this. He never finished the story, and while I did give him the song, I never released it publicly.

Until now. A few months ago, I realized I still had the song on my computer, and so I decided to put some finishing touches onto it and release it. The final touches were pretty simple: I changed the soft vocal sample to something more in tune, added stereo panning, and touched up a few bits here and there. And so, here you have it: my most recent mod file, even though I made most of it in 2002 (I’m writing this in 2021). I may have written this in Impulse Tracker originally but later edits were made in ModPlug Tracker (now known as OpenMPT). My recent updates to it were made in OpenMPT and Schism Tracker (for stereo panning, since I prefer its visualizer).

It’s not an original tune, of course, but you knew that. GAVAL asked me to do the following progression: Slow start with a build up, a big loud section, a moment of tension, and then another big loud section for the finale. I made some curious choices (I’m not so sure about the conga drums in the bridge section) but I do like how the vocal samples turned out.

So I can’t really say this is a new song, since I made most of it 19 years ago. But, like Led Zeppelin did with Travelling Riverside Blues, I released one of my older unreleased works for the public to enjoy. (Note: I’m not quite as good at music as Led Zeppelin was).

So my most recent original mod at this point is still Leaving it All Behind, although I did make Walking the Walk in 2018 - it’s not a mod, though, and can’t be uploaded to the Mod Archive unless I make a version of it in IT format (maybe I will someday).
- arcturus