Baba Yetu

On a somewhat different stylistic note within the video game music genre, and as kindly recommended to me by local Twitterer Lauren Wright, here is the theme to Civilisation IV, with some interesting graphics (I was particularly taken with Abraham Lincoln and also by the space station scene), titled Baba Yetu, and is also on Christopher Tin's Calling All Dawns album.

Although it isn't quite to my own personal taste, it is genuinely good and very well composed and arranged. I gather it has won a Grammy award, the first composition for a video game to have done so...

Into The Fire – Part One

This might be considered as the overture to the whole suite; and especially on that basis it is very good at doing that job. Although there is a slightly weaker short section than the rest in the middle, even that is without any significant fault in and of itself: it's a good piece.

At least, that and my other observations are my quick assessment of pieces I had never encountered before this evening, so do forgive me if your own findings do not accord with mine.

Anyway, the image this time is of an Earth Force Omega-class destroyer, with a rotating habitable section to generate artificial gravity (that's why it's 'lumpy' to one side) with around a dozen Starfury fighters, exiting a hyperspace jump point that the destroyer would have generated itself (i.e. it doesn't need a jumpgate)...

Into The Fire – Part Four

This track has a slightly more upbeat tempo than those I have featured thus far, often urgent, occasionally even impatient, one might say. Play it and you'll understand what I mean(!)

The still image is of a Minbari 'Sunfish' top-end warship, along with a cluster of one-person fighters. The Grey Council travelled in one of the big craft, and the Black Star that John Sheridan so famously destroyed during the Earth-Minbari war was another...

Into The Fire – Part Three

Possibly the 'classiest' (in some ways) of the tracks so far, from the cancelled video game project. This is all Chris Francke, and obviously so from its underlying stylistic character, though not derivative in any other way from other work of his with which I am familiar.

Despite the half-dozen or so almost-jarring pitch shifts that are mentally unexpected during the first half, this is quite an extraordinary piece, and is one of those that anyone like me will appreciate having had the opportunity to listen to "once before I die", as the expression has it.

The still image is of a Narn heavy cruiser parked alongside the rear residential part of the Babylon 5 space station: there is only the power-generating reactor behind that...

Into The Fire – Part Five

This music for the cancelled Babylon 5 themed video game is turning out to be of real interest, so I plan to feature more tracks as I find them.

This is the fifth soundtrack, again with the Chris Francke sound and sheer class, along with what to me sounds like a Rondo Veneziano influence in the middle section (in two parts, separated by a non Rondo-ish segment) but a rather sudden end, which is uncharacteristic of Francke.

Here it is, accompanied by a still of Kosh's personal ship in its usual bay at the Babylon 5 station...