Ice Breath (ice.it)

Posted by TMA Placeholder Account on Fri 28th May 1999, rated 8 / 10.

This song knows its role, and performs quite well, if just the slightest bit repetitively. To appreciate the song requires a good deal of patience, as the entrance lasts for the first minute and a half, and spends the next minute fading into the main body. Stop-beat echoes and something that sounds like the music of the howling wind open the piece, and it's very aptly named as the mood it evokes is of frost growing across a windowpane, vapor condensing and crystallizing instantly, note by note. The word "haunting" is all I can use to describe it as it goes through its various phase changes, entering a few different styles, though never straying far from its original intents. It does get repetitive, as the same theme is repeated many times, although it does vary a bit near the end. If that variation had happened earlier and more intensely, it might have made this piece much better, but it is still very musically descriptive. This is one of those pieces that is a joy to watch as well as hear, by examining it with Impulse Tracker. The panbrello is used to its best abilities, the samples are all precise and pitched together, everything fits together like a finely-woven tapestry. The only comment that I could add would be to suggest that GottCL learn to spell out his messages in the instruments bar, instead of only in the IT info window, so that his info would be accessible to those who use other mod players. Overall, this piece is excellently done to convey a scene and a mood, and is tweaked well enough by a practiced hand to keep its file size down tremendously - 881Kb for a six and a half minute song. This is worth listening to if you need something to keep you just barely on edge, if you want a break from a day's hardcore listening, or any other reason to grab something that's soft, yet far from mellow. Its intensity lies in what's hiding beneath the surface.