The always busy Peter Savelkoul and his personal musical vessel, A Challenge of Honour, have released a follow up to their immensely stirring ‘Monuments’ album from last year. ‘Seven Samurai’ is a tribute to legendary Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa who died back in 1998 at the age of 88. Naturally anyone that’s familiar with Kurosawa knows his most famous film was called Seven Samurai, and essentially this recording is an alternative soundtrack to his 1954 masterpiece. The music isn’t necessarily supposed to go with the movie, but to tell the story in a different direction was the idea behind this recording.
By today ACOH has become one of the most well known bands in the martial industrial/symphonic scene, and this recording carries on in that tradition but also adds some new elements. You can of course expect grand symphonic compositions augmented by intense tribal like percussion and dark ambient undercurrents, but also this time around Peter added a little traditional Asian music to the mix. At times the music can be fast paced and bombastic, other times slow and ritualistic like, and even in a few places very catastrophic and saddening sounding. The percussion is really one of the most important aspects in this release often times giving the listener the feeling that something menacing is on the horizon, and the symphonic portions of the album are both beautiful but they also have a very threatening resonance to them too. Additionally this album comes in a gorgeous thin digifile with great artwork and is limited to 1000 copies. Get yours while they last, because it is certainly worth it!
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