American Mcgee's Alice (Score) [SOUNDTRACK]

Chris Vrenna (Composer)

Product Details

• Composer: Chris Vrenna
• Audio CD (October 16, 2001)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Soundtrack
• Label: Six Degrees
• ASIN: B00005OB0J
• Also Available in: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #56,108 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Chris Vrenna's soundtrack to the American McGee's Alice video game is fittingly twisted. Sounds created with toy instruments and percussion, music boxes, clocks, doors, and sampled female voices (including Jack Off Jill singer Jessicka) are manipulated into nightmarish soundscapes. A harpsichord and a clock ticking over a bed of rhythmic effects invoke a sense of Victorian horror, while also playing off of modern motifs. Fans of the game and connoisseurs of dark and spooky music will be delighted by Vrenna's surreal score. --Bryan Reesman

Product Description

With the soundtrack to American McGee's Alice, Electronic Arts' new video game, Chris Vrenna (formerly of Nine Inch Nails) provides musical menace to accompany the heroine's adventures in a Wonderland gone to hell. The sounds of dilapidated toys and ghostly machinery converge with the haunting ambient electro-soundscape produced and composed by Vrenna.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A score that sells a game., September 16, 2002

By	J. Cavacini "cuddler of underdogs" (Coplay, PA Corporate States of America) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Much like the smile without a cat, this is the score without a movie.

This score by Chris Vrenna is a masterpiece of atmospheric mood. It contains sounds you know and sounds you hope never to meet in the real world, all used musically or dramatically to enhance 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 actually excellent 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 people who bought 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 should 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 also like the other.

My appreciation of this CD lead me to purchase Chris Vrenna's solo project "Tweaker: the attraction to all things uncertain." If you like Alice, you may well like Tweaker, though they are surely of different upbringings.

This disc is surely one of the most important in my collection. Make it part of yours.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the power of what is left unsaid, December 26, 2001

By	Jack Kirven (Charlotte, NC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

ok, so this is a soundtrack for a game... how much can it really have in it?? you might be surprised -- 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: familiar 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 familiar had dissolved into the demented. chris vrenna does amazing work, so i'm not shocked to see that he has accomplished these things with his music -- what surprised me (pleasantly) is that he would go to the trouble of evoking so many colors in a soundtrack for a game. he really should be commended for this project.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As atmospheric as it gets - and MORE than the game had!, November 19, 2001

By	Mr Vess (Cracow) - See all my reviews

I absolutely loved the thrilling, atmospheric score in the chillingly ambient game, and one of the first 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 able to appreciate it anywhere where there was a CD player. :) Some time later I heard about a planned release of the soundtrack and I was hesitant - I was sure it would simply be a clipped version of what I already made for my use on my own, i.e. just some 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 actually sounds considerably better. It certainly is worth buying. A truly magnificent collection of excellent, ambient music. I think even the greatest film music composers of our time, people 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... :)