I like the mix of electronic and orchestral instruments here. There’s a nice sense of atmosphere and suspense in the texture, although the chord progression is pretty generic, and the piece is pretty slow to develop. The production quality is solid, and the sound design is really cool. I was really itching for some melodic content after the first 2 minutes, and the minimal horn riff doesn’t feel quite dynamic enough after 2.5 minutes of suspense. The re-intro at 3:06 does a lot to further the suspense, and the bubbly riser at 3:20 was a pleasant surprise sound design-wise. The harmonic content of the piece doesn’t feel very dynamic or interesting after a time, and I wanted to see you vary the refrain at 4:14 to do more to hit this piece home. There’s a lot of tension in this piece that never really gets resolved in any way, and I think you missed an opportunity to maximize the emotional appeal of this piece in that regard. Still, I enjoyed the strong mixing and mastering, atmosphere, instrumentation, and phrasing. Keep at it, JordanKyser! :)

Mixing, mastering, and balance
2/2
Structure, transitions, phrasing, and variety
.75/1.5
Melody, tonality, harmony, and texture
1.75/2
Instrumentation and sound design
1/1
Emotion, atmosphere, and catchiness
1.25/1.5
Originality and uniqueness
.75/1
Overall (how do the elements above interact?)
.75/1
Composite score
8.25/10

I like the rich atmosphere and the large reverb that makes the song sound dreamy. There's a lot of cool percussive elements, and the combination of instruments is quite interesting. I find the song to be extremely repetitive; the theme is too simple to be repeated this much without significantly more variation. You used a lot of big percussion and fx to create good transitions, but the momentum would quickly die out because the rest of the song didn't change much. When you use a big hit or fx to signify an important transition, there should generally be more variation in the following section in a way that carries that momentum. You clearly improved your orchestration skills significantly over the past year, but one thing I think you should focus on is building tension over a long period of time and releasing it in a way that feels climactic. The main reason for my low score is that I happen to be more sensitive to repetitiveness than the average person, but I still think there are a lot of things to like about this track, which is why you got some high scores already and praise from one of the judges. Keep up the progress!

All in all, a great job on the piece - the atmosphere of it was great. You would have probably benefitted from having a secondary theme here - having the same 8 notes for melody repeated for a whopping near 6-minute piece simply tires the ear, no matter what magic you pull (and admittedly, you *did* pull quite a bit of it!). Have the melody go somewhere - or switch keys; that's really the main complaint here; otherwise, the dynamics are great, the atmosphere works for the art piece that inspired this and I can definitely tell the amount of work that went into this. I have made pieces I put well north of 40 hours into, so I'd know the difference ;) And it sounds like you confounded one of the AIM judges - that's always a plus, right? ;) Cheers mate, keep on creating :D

-- Official AIM review --

.....................Excuse me?
It's been about 2 years since I gave one of your tracks a 0.5/5 rating, what in the world happend between then and now? I was actually blown away.

The way you build up the atmosphere in this is incredible. The melodies are engaging, Every sound blends perfectly together and the mixing is very well done.
The strongest aspect of this though is the arrangement. I wasn't bored for a single moment throughout the entire thing and you have a really nice recurring main theme. It gets a little bit repetitive at times though.

Great job, Jordan. You can be proud of this one.

I enjoyed this. I think it fits the artwork really well. Good job and good luck to you in the AIM contest! 🙂