Stuff I'm Listening To #80 - Super Mario 64 - Dire Dire Docks

Composer: Koji Kondo

Title: Dire, Dire Docks

Why?:
After yesterday morning (an alert about an incident at the local nuclear power plant that turned out to have been sent in error), some calming down was in order. 

Guaranteed, most people are familiar with the music from Mario Brothers. It's instantly recognizable and Koji Kondo is the man behind it. 

But this piece, which occurs on the water level in Mario 64 stands out for me. It was the first time I actively wanted to have video game music included in my playlist. True story. I'd actually put the game on and leave Mario in a safe spot while the music played on loop in the background. Aside from the sound of Mario sleeping (which happened if you left the controller alone for too long) I found it was a kind of calming, dreamy piece of music. In fact, I had it as a ring tone for a while, upon which my non-video gaming husband, after getting startled by said ring tone, asked why did I have weird glory-to-heaven church bell kind of music on my phone? 

I never thought of it as heavenly or churchly. Just glorious and beautiful. Because this music plays in a water level, I obviously associate the tune with water. I like water. I can sit by water and just relax. It's calming. Above the surface, the motion of the water, the waves, even the sound of the surf... well... it's nice. But underwater, it's a different thing altogether. Take any underwater nature documentary you've ever seen. For me, the sounds like the way sunlight looks when it's being filtered through the water. The motion of the water is going to break that sunlight up into a twinkling mess, but a pretty one. And the sound of water, while under it, has this weird, bubbly, buoyant and bloopyness to it. Somehow, Koji Kondo figured out how to compose a soundtrack for being underwater, collecting stars, and coins.

Video game music is a weird thing. The music back with the 8-bit systems were tinny and weird at best, but super catchy. BBC6 radio had this wonderful program on about video game music just last year. I learned some interesting things about how video game music gets programmed in (FYI, back in the day, they could only program one note at a time, so any chords you're hearing? A trick in programming where the notes are played sequentially, and within milliseconds of each other. We're fooled into thinking it's a chord, when it's a super fast computerized trill... oh look... digressing). 

The fact that this piece came from a video game level, of all things, astounds me.