A few years ago, Deus Ex got a modernised soundtrack titled: Conspiravision. It’s taken me
this long to know what to say about it, I guess. For those of you who don’t know, the musicians
behind the original Deus Ex soundtrack were geniuses! The tunes were great. The main theme was
bold and memorable, and it is literally impossible to dislike the Unatco song. Literally, impossible!
This is despite the entire game’s soundtrack being constrained to a weird file format called UMX. Why
was this? Oh, who knows. Smaller filesizes I guess and… why is that dog barking every time I talk?
Just think of it as being a sample-based version of MIDI,
and it’s why the music from games like Deus Ex and Unreal Tournament have a unique feel to them.
Kind of like they’re being played out of a cheese grater.
So what makes Conspiravision so exciting, is that it’s done by the SAME musicians
as the ones behind Deus Ex, but they’re now older, more experienced, and finally
free of UMX’s cheese-gratery constraints! Problem is… this is probably not the remake
you want. Because let’s be honest: you don’t know what you want from remade Deus Ex tunes,
do you. Should they be the same songs, but with newer instruments? Or totally re-envisioned
versions of those tracks? Because we get both in this album, and I’m still not entirely happy!
It’s a hard album to summarise, but in short: it’s certainly got more sophisticated instruments than
the original game’s music had, but is still best in my opinion when it remains most faithful to the
original renditions. Apart from ‘Synapse Awake’ which is genuinely very good and probably better
than the Hong Kong songs from the original game. Even though that pains me to admit it!
If you haven’t played Deus Ex then you might actually be in a better position to judge these
new compositions than I am, because I’m clearly very biased about this. Even when I played the
remade Deus Ex, with better graphics and stuff, I still had to use the original soundtrack option
because I like it that much. If this is the first time you’re hearing these tracks, then please let
me know in the comments section what you think of them, when compared with the original versions.
So we’ll start with the main tune. Well, I say the ‘main tune’, but Conspiravision’s rendition
of it is oddly lacking the main tune. I can hear all the bits in the background,
and it sounds like the bit that goes DUH DUH DUH DUH DUH DUH
is about to start… but it never does! It’s like he accidentally muted the main track
before hitting the render button. This bit HERE still sounds awesome…
…and gets me in the mood to drop a crate on somebody’s face, but what it really needs, is
more duh duh duh duh duh. How ironic that a song titled ‘So it Begins’ never really gets started.
What a shame! I think this opening track dampened the whole album for me. Had the main
theme remained more faithful, then I’d have been more lenient of deviations to the other tracks.
So like I said, I’ve had to sit on this album for a few years and to try
and learn to appreciate what’s here instead. The next song is the Training Room. And here,
we start to see what’s going on- some of the tracks from Conspiravision lack the tunes
that made the originals so great! It seems as though Alexander Brandon has gone out of his
way to build a new song from the backings of the originals instead. In the Training Room’s defence,
we hear a bit of the tune towards the end. But it shows the direction he’s decided to take
his remade songs in this collection, in a move that I think will upset fans of the originals.
And the third song in the collection is Liberty Island, and beyond the first few seconds, becomes
utterly unrecognisable. This is NOT Liberty Island. I don’t know what it is. And this is a bit
of the game that I’ve played through a hundred times. Alexander must have seen something in
the originals that I didn’t, and then decided to build entire tracks around those invisible things.
These first 3 songs are, in my opinion, the worst in the collection. And it’s just as well
it stops being bad by the 4th track because that happens to be the UNATCO song. With the possible
exception of the main tune, I think this is the song that most people will be most interested in.
But this is a song NOT done by Alexander Brandon, but is instead done by Michiel van den Bos.
Sorry if I mispronounced that. Michiel also worked on the original Deus Ex music, as well as some of
the most iconic tracks from Unreal Tournament like the Facing Worlds one. I personally preferred his
style in those games, I feel like he has stuck more closely to the original verisons than
Alexander has for this Conspiravision collection. Which is good news for fans of UNATCO, who will be
happy to know that this one still sounds like UNATCO, but with more modern instruments. And
get this: it’s 10 minutes long! The first 3 or so minutes are familiar, then it goes off on a
bit of a weird and new sounding tangent, which is okay I guess, but probably isn’t worth 7 minutes
in length. But that’s fine because it doesn’t take away from the first 3 minutes, does it.
Maybe he didn’t have time to finish the tune for Deus Ex and this is what it would have
sounded like had he been given more time! So yeah, what we get is… okay, but is unlikely to
be your favourite remix of UNATCO. Because there have been many made over the years.
The tunes in Deus Ex had several stages to them: the first was the tune everybody knows it for,
then there was a second more action-packed version for when you accidentally tripmined
the lady’s toilets. Michiel has decided to split the UNATCO song into 2 tracks,
and this second, more action-focused one again, remains a decent remake of a classic tune. But
it doesn’t add anything too exciting to it. Michiel plays it safe. But I’m happy about that,
because the few times he does deviate, I don’t like what happens to the tracks.
Lebedev’s Airfield, for example: it’s not got the same ‘feel’ as the original song any more, and
that makes it a really hard one for me to judge. I definitely feel its strongest bits are where it
returns to recognisable bits from the original version- in particular during the last minute.
There was one odd-song-out in Deus Ex: and that was the Hong Kong Streets music. It stood out
as being totally different from the rest of the game. Like, I know it’s not that great,
even though I love that segment of the game and have grown to love the song for what
it is. But it was almost meme-worthy. And I think the way that Alexander has
tackled the Hong Kong tunes in this album has resulted in the best track of the collection!
The Synapse is sort of like a mixture of several tunes from the Hong Kong segment of the game,
all rolled into one excited ball of activity. It simultaneously sounds familiar,
yet new. And it’s a great tribute to that part of the game. I guess this is what I wanted from
a remade album, and this is the one track that I think it was worth releasing Conspiravision for.
Another other large open hub in the game was the New York segment,
and Alex’s remix of this song isn’t quite so brave.
It’s sort of like a modernised version of the track, but with a quieter main instrument.
But of most value to it is the fact that this track now has an ending!
The last minute is full of weird new bits, but it’s definitely an improvement over the abrupt
‘loop’ that the original tune suffered from. Maybe because I’ve played the earlier levels
in the game the most, I have the strongest opinions about the earlier songs in the
album and the later ones just sound like decent remixes and with more sophisticated instruments.
Duclare’s Chateau is just as beautiful as the original song was.
Conspiracy Theory makes a decent track out of a few songs that
I already liked already while somehow managing to miss all my favourite bits.
Oceanlab Combat has been upgraded from ‘combat backing track’ into a proper ‘song’,
while the Oceanlab track has been downgraded from ‘song’ into ‘atmospheric backing track’.
Area 51 takes the weakest bit from the original song and makes into something new that’s worth
listening to, which I commend. And the ‘Credits Tune’ I see as being a bit of a
side-grade cos the original’s instruments managed to sound decent enough already.
The one surprising omission from the collection is ‘The Nothing’, which
was a tune from the original game that I felt had the most remix/remake potential. Meanwhile,
I was surprised to see the Paris Dance track here. I always felt the tunes that were played
in clubs in the game were throw-away tracks, but Michiel clearly saw something in this one
and decided to make it into something bigger. Good for him. Though it’s not that memorable.
Conspiravision attempts most of the iconic tunes from the game, fails at some,
and is decent enough at others, but I wouldn’t say it’s essential listening for anybody-
it probably won’t mean much to new listeners, and could simply disappoint fans of the originals.
But that’s remixes in a nutshell, I guess. But Conspiravision is certainly a CURIOSITY.
It answers the question that nobody asked, that being: what would Deus Ex’s music sound like,
if it was made today? I started off deeply disappointed with the result,
but since its release, I have warmed to most of the tracks. I guess I wanted the impossible from
it, and obviously, I didn’t get that. I don’t know what I wanted… but I never asked for this.