It’s almost impossible to keep up with the production of A Challenge of Honour and related projects. This Dutch act around Peter Savelkoul keeps on releasing material. Often limited vinyls or cd-r’s on obscure labels. This is a regular cd though, on Divine Comedy Records. The first description that comes to mind when hearing Seven Samurai is ‘cinematic’, and that’s no wonder being a re-interpretation of the score to Akira Kurosawa’s classic film of the same title.
I have not consumed much of ACOH’s recent output, but I consider Seven Samurai to be one of the more convincing works I heard of the project. A piece like ‘Bambei’ brings elegant synthetic neo-classical music, with an heroic feeling which fits the feel of the movie well. ‘The village’ continues in this vein, but more bombastic with heavier percussion, making me think a bit of In the Nursery’s soundtrack work. ‘A quest for knights’ starts interesting with fierce ritual drumming, but goes on a bit too long. In the title track not much happens, while ‘Preparing the village’ nicely builds up tension.
There are a few tracks that tend to get a bit boring after a while, perhaps they miss the visual counterpart to make them more interesting. In generalSeven Samurai fulfills its goal as an epic soundtrack reasonably well. A vinyl version of this album is released by ACOH’s own Vrihaspati Recordings .
So far I’ve only seen fragments of the Kurosawa movie, but after hearing this album I plan to watch it soon.
