Tyler Newman - Zonekiller

After listening to this soundtrack album for the last few weeks, I can definitely tell you that the movie is going to kick ass. It's being made by Digital Matrix, a group of Tokyo / San Francisco based film makers and not scheduled to be completed until 2015. Anyhow, I'm reviewing the music, not the film. And it's an album that is saturated with a very warm retro vibe that brings to mind films such as Bladerunner or Tron.

"Initial Visualisation" gives us our first taste of just how juicy the production is on this record. The bass is tight but not overwhelming, setting the perfect foundation for mellotron type choir sounds to weave beautiful melodies. Every element of the production sounds old school, from the retro beeps and warbles, to the classic drum machine percussion elements and electro industrial edge.

A chiptune like barrage of beeps introduces the track "Armor Piercing", before it evolves into a masterpiece of harmonic synth work. Listening to this takes me back to every classic video game soundtrack that I grew up with: it's a futuristic cyberpunk type of sound that is uplifting and very atmospheric.

The intro to "Nonlinear Zoom" begins with a huge, brooding bassline with a gently oscillating filter cutoff. The effect is tight, controlled, and very cool to listen to. There's some very clever sound design going on here - bell like leads that slowly warble away into the background. Then the main theme of the track hits, and it's an explosion of blissed out melodies. The song writing really is one of the standout features of this release, hearkening back to the days where melodic content often outshone the current obsession with cutting edge digital synth programming.

This is a soundtrack album that could have been recorded 20 years ago, in all of its analog glory. That is, if you convinced Alan Parsons to lend you a 96 channel Neve console and a room full classic synthesisers. Then sat around with a razor blade cutting tape for hours... it's one of the great boons of modern recording technology that we can now hear albums like this, that have been made on realistic budgets. Which is not to say that this album sounds dated in any way - the production is to my ears very good, with subtle automation adding a great deal of interest to the synthetic layers all the way through the album.

I'd recommend this to anyone who enjoyed albums such as mind.in.a.box's R.E.T.R.O. or Daft Punk's Tron Legacy Soundtrack. Dec 04 2013