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Hollywood composer Clint Mansell has signed on to score the music for BioWare's Mass Effect 3. Clint who? Mans-huh? If you're not film-snobby enough to know him by name, you've surely heard his work anyway, so we'll just put it this way: the guy who composed that wicked cool song in the second half of that one Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers trailer is now on board to provide the music for one of gaming's most highly-anticipated sequels.
Above: You may remember Mr. Mansell's "Lux Aeterna" from our riveting expose on the WWE E3 booth
Mansell is most commonly recognized for his musical work on Darren Aronofsky films such as The Fountain, The Wrestler, Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream; the latter ofwhich gave birth to the song "Lux Aeterna."
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News of Mansell's involvement with Mass Effect 3 surfaced during his interview with The Quietus, in which he spoke to the challenges of scoring videogames, explaining:
“With something like Mass Effect you're more like a DJ, with all these elements. You've got the holding pattern, then the big explosion where you need the score to kick in. Then you need to take it off on a tangent. You've got all these different elements that change depending on what the player does. You have to figure out an overall symphony, but be able to break it down into component parts. You can bring the pain when required.”
This, by the way, isn't his first involvement with games. Mansell was in a band called Pop Will Eat Itself until 1996, and the band has a few tracks in PS1 game Loaded. Guess what? We did a Game Music of the Day feature on that very game! Check out one of the band's tracks below:
It's tricky to talk about game music without coming off as a music snob, but screw it – this is exciting news. And if saying so means I'm not invited to your next house party, whatever, I have better things to do. Oh, and make sure to listen for Mansell's work in Mass Effect 3 when it is released this holiday season.
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Matt Bradford wrote news and features here at GamesRadar+ until 2016. Since then he's gone on to work with the Guinness World Records, acting as writer and researcher for the annual Gamer's Edition series of books, and has worked as an editor, technical writer, and voice actor. Matt is now a freelance journalist and editor, generating copy across a multitude of industries.
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