By J. Cavacini
Much like the smile without a cat, this is the score without a movie.
This score by Chris Vrenna is a masterwork of atmospheric mood. It holds sounds you recognise and sounds you hope never to meet in the real world, all employed musically or dramatically to heighten the experience of the computer game. The thing is, you might just want to have the music and skip the game.
If you are in love with electronic music (and here I do NOT refer to dance, techno or rave music) you may find this CD to be one of the most important of your collection. Especially if you like film scores, atmospheric and ambient works and general creepiness.
Don’t be put off by descriptive words such as “gothic,” “creepy” or “ambient.” There is genuinely splendid orchestration and structure to be found here, making this stand as a film score and not a crude modern art performance piece.
If you’re one of the persons who purchased the Quake game just for Trent Reznor’s music (and liked it, but thought it would have been nice if it were more thematic and musical) you must get this disc, too. Hey, these two artists worked together in the past, so it is no surprise that if you like the one, you may likewise like the other.
My appreciation of this CD lead me to buy Chris Vrenna’s solo project “Tweaker: the attraction to all things uncertain.” If you like Alice, you may well like Tweaker, altho they are surely of dissimilar upbringings.
This disc is surely one of the most crucial in my collection. Make it portion of yours.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
the power of what is left unsaid
By Jack Kirven
ok, so this is a soundtrack for a game… how much may it in truth have in it?? you might be amazed — the aspect of this music that most interests me is not what the music says directly, but the moods and emotions it conjures indirectly. there is some excrutiatingly cunning use of sampling in this music, and the context of these sounds provides unexpected variations: intimate sounds placed within the dark, brooding landscape of the music become terrifying. even if i had not played the game i would recognize that the intimate had dissolved into the demented. chris vrenna does aweinspiring work, so i’m not shocked to see that he has accomplished these things with his music — what astonished me (pleasantly) is that he would go to the disturb of evoking so a great deal of colors in a soundtrack for a game. he in truth ought to be commended for this project.
12 of 13 humans found the following review helpful.
As atmospheric as it gets – and MORE than the game had!
By Mr Vess
I perfectly loved the thrilling, atmospheric score in the chillingly ambient game, and one of the firstborn things I did upon completing it was extracting it from the game’s libraries and burning it as audio tracks to CDRs (it took two discs), to be capable to be grateful for it anyplace where there was a CD player. 
Some time later I heard when it comes to a planned release of the soundtrack and I was hesitant – I was sure it would merely be a clipped version of what I already made for my use on my own, i.e. just a heap of of the tracks from the game recorded on a CD. As it turns out, it’s much, much more! The music is expanded, partially remixed, and yes, it genuinely sounds substantially better. It surely is worth buying. A genuinely splendid collection of excellent, ambient music. I think even the biggest film music composers of our time, humans of Jerry Goldsmith’s class, would be impressed by it. Too bad this isn’t a double CD release, with *every single* track from the game, but perhaps there is more to come…
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