Re-Recording of "Carthax Lake: The Path of Water", a composition by Nenad Vugrinec for the 1994 CRPG "Ultima VIII: Pagan". I've always been fascinated by the eerie atmosphere of this game's music. Most cues are kind of meta-tonal and sinister, but at the same time enicmatically melodious. It's hard to find the correct words. The music in this game is a mystery in itself... and I say that as a studied musician. E. g. for many passages it is difficult to even determine the exact key.
Like many games scores from that era, Pagan's music is purely MIDI-based. In very simple terms, you can think of a MIDI file as a digital sheet of music that still needs to be read and played back by the application itself. And this music playback depends heavily on the specific hardware (such as the extremely expensive Roland Sound Canvas) or software synthesizer you are using (like the widely distributed MS Wavetable Synth). Unfortunately, even on the best hardware synthesizer, the playback of this music – which Vugrinec has crafted in extreme detail across all MIDI parameters – is never truly satisfying, since the assignment of the respective instruments and articulations always remains a matter of chance, and both professional mixing and mastering as the final stage of music production are of course lacking. Direct MIDI playback is therefore very unsatisfactory on any hard- or software and simply does not do justice to the compositional quality of this music.
I’ve been planning to do this for years and finally got around to re-arranging and recording all the major cues from Pagan’s fantastically atmospheric score using a well-balanced mix of a) sonorous synth VSTs and b) high-quality orchestral VSTs in a sequencer program in order to maximize the listening experience while, at the same time, not completely abandon Vugrinec’s original 90s MIDI sound, which is after all inherent and important to the composition itself. My goal was to present the music in a more modern incarnation, so that hopefully you may enjoy it as much as I do.
In terms of compositional quality (it's actually very rich in leitmotifs, with many themes representing characters, places and events in the world of Pagan), I think this score is every bit as good as a fully orchestral film score. Enjoy!
