Heya Einel, thank you so much for your feedback! I appreciate the compliments but your feedback and critique was excellant and I'm so glad you spent the time to write it out!
To give you more of my thought process before I answer your critiques, I found myself pulling from composers that, to me, gave me a bombastic yet chilly quality to their compositions. I gravitated towards Jewish composers from the 1900s, such as Mahler (who likes to realllly pull his punches and let resolutions take a measure or two more), and Japanese composers like Taku Iwasaki for his arrangement of quick string stacattos and percussion. I wished to use this project to practice string orchestration, which is something I have not really done before and would consider myself a total beginner at.
However, after listening to a few tracks from the composers you supplied, I can see that I missed the mark when it came to creating an album that actually captures the nature of the trek for yourself - there's a mysticism and longing that isn't captured by the tracks I chose as reference, as "chilly" as their writing can be. Some of my references came a little closer to tracks like "Happiness Does Not Wait" but the way in which I wrote prevented me from writing more long-form, ambient tracks. I admit that I struggle to write music that sounds like that - I often revert to more energetic (postive energetic?) tracks as I'm more familiar with the qualities they need when writing.
In the future, should we have another jam that skirts nearer to this culture, I will try and do better with regard to the reference material by finding music made by those within the culture itself. Thanks again for leaving your comment!