ReMix: Tetris Attack 'Final Panic'

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Newcomer Tweek, colloquially known as Brian Arnold, gives us our first coverage from the SNES's popular permutation of Pajitnov's puzzler Tetris. Brian writes:

"This is Bowser's theme from his stage in Tetris Attack. It is a remix of both his normal stage and his panic mode. The song is a mixture of percussion inspired from Tan Dun and orchestration from Klaus Badelt. I'm actually quite happy with how the fusion worked."

Interesting amalgam of influences; I added in links to IMDB specifically so you can check out each composer's oeuvre; Dun in particular I've been a fan of, even though Tiger should never beaten Gladiator for best soundtrack. He's got a very percussive style that's very particularly Eastern, and I think Arnold gets that completely, and succeeds in channeling it. This essentially sounds like the Tetris Attack source material if it had been written for a large Zhang Yimou / Gong Li epic with sweeping vistas, prolonged shots of the Forbidden City, and beautiful-but-impractical martial arts that eschew gravity. Seriously. Anyone into Asian cinema, particularly of the epic variety (see this film if you haven't, btw), has my back. Or should. Larry writes:

"Who are you and why haven't I heard of you before? The orchestration is excellent, the part writing sophisticated. Brian's got a really strong sense of dynamics here, varying both the instrumentation and intensity of the track many times over the course of the 4 1/2 minutes. The woodwinds from 1:50-2:15 were excellent, and I loved the brass and piano doing their own iterations of those phrases immediately afterward. Nice change in the intensity at 3:18, moving into the very active drums. The arrangement was relatively straightforward, but you see how Brian really built new ideas and phrases from the base of the original to really expand the piece."

Production's no slacker, but the arrangement here is where it's at - it's a novel approach, and results in a unique composition that simultaneously pays homage to Tetris Attack as well as Asian cinema, or at the very least its plethora of quality epic soundtrack work. Very smart, but also very enjoyable first sub from Tweek; definitely looking forward to future submissions.

― djpretzel