Still II

War has always been a competition between defense and offense. At times these two have been relatively balanced, but at other times, one becomes far more powerful. It is during those times that the greatest military innovations occur.

The Empire in retreat, Luke Skywalker has begun a quest to rebuild the Jedi. Although dead, the Emperor's presence still haunts him, and Luke still feels the taint of the dark side from his time as the Emperor's thrall. Will he give in to the dark side?

MrRay73 Mark II is a digital simulation of the famous american electro-mechanical piano of the seventies, invented during World War II by a music teacher, Harold B. Rhodes (1910 - 2000), and widely used in almost all musical genres ranging from soul/black music to jazz, blues, modern and pop. This instrument has rapidly become a legend, and is still used today, altough samples have replaced the real thing so that very often music producers use huge sample libraries or hardware keyboards / workstations to achieve this kind of sonority, and often the result is a cold and 'dead' sound, with no vitality, no warmth, nothing that even compares to the unpredictability and genuineness of the real thing.

Based in part on a six-volume novel by Junpei Gomikawa and, in part, on Kobayashi's own wartime experiences as a pacifist trying to survive in the Japanese army, The Human Condition is as grand in scale and scope as that other anti-war classic, Gone With the Wind. Like the South, Japan lost a war and can't stop talking about it. Every great Japanese director has a movie about the traumas of WWII under his belt, but none is as ambitious as The Human Condition.