EA is a company that puts out a lot of games each year (to put it lightly), so it’s little surprise that potential music occasionally gets left on the cutting room floor. The track featured today, Under Fire, is one such piece of music. The song was written by Jesse James Allen, a multi-media artist who has been involved with music for over 30 EA games, dating back to as early as 2003. It isn’t mentioned what project the song was intended for, but Jesse lets us in on the rest of the background on the song:
Under Fire was written for an EA Project that never saw the light of day [and] thus vanished into the archives of EA Trax. Being that Trance is not a commercially sought after musical genre in the United States (or as much as say Alternative Rock) I’m not sure if it will ever make it into a title though who knows.
Under Fire technically took me over a month to write as it was compiled from a sea of original electronic rhythms that I hand crafted for a musical style library. It is one of the most complex musical scores I have written from a pure sound design standpoint; there are so many layers of both organic and synthesized elements that it became a technical milestone for me. I really held nothing back when arranging the track, I wanted it to be melodic, immersive and yet somewhat menacing to support the theme of the project I was on at the time.
Since it was written within EA I am unable to publicly sell this or provide a download link but it killed me not to have it heard after so much work; Under Fire is here as part of my online artist works portfolio that I am allowed to display so please enjoy.
Maybe it will see the light of day again in another EA game. There certainly were a lot of requests for the song to appear in Mass Effect 3 in the comments on YouTube. He did create the music present in the Afterlife Club in Mass Effect 2, so it is possible. As Jesse said, enjoy the song.
