“Writers are liars, my dear, surely you know that by now? And yet, things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.” - Neil Gaiman - Dream Country
Title: Traders Life (The Hub) from the Fallout video game soundtrack Why?: It's weird how things converge at times. I say this because as you know, I'm constantly blogging about my favourite music, and just recently posted about video game music. And unless you're new here, you know I'm a huge fan of Talk Talk and by extension, I've come to really love their other work, for example, .o.rang, Paul Webb and Lee Harris' amazing project after Talk Talk.
But, who knew .o.rang could be found, in, of all places, a post-apocalyptic video game? Not me!
As per my usual, I can't sleep, so let's start reading unusual Wikipedia entries or tonight it was 'let's create a spreadsheet of Talk Talk related links so I can better remember which ones I've watched versus which ones I have not watched' because that seemed like a brilliant idea at the time, I was working steadily on my .o.rang section of the links. Seems like there's only one video on You Tube for 'N'hoojek' and the rest are just sound only.
In my browsing I found a piece of video game music that kept getting 'recommended' in YouTube for me. So I clicked on it. Like much of the video game music I like, it was ambient and probably set up some appropriate scene in the post apocalyptic world. Seemed ambient and pleasant enough. Then at the 1:26 point my ears perked up.
Ultimately, it's one thing to license songs for your video games (i.e. Talk Talk songs in one of the 'Grand Theft Auto' games), or even getting someone to compose music for your games (i.e. Nine Inch Nails for 'Quake') but this feels like deliberately stealing a riff without credit. I know it happens all the time. But there's a ton of video game players who likely had no clue who .o.rang is. Why deny them this gem? So this post is for all you unaware video game fans. Did you like this piece of music? Want to know where it was 'inspired' from? Look up "Herd of Instinct" and then "Fields and Waves". They're two really great experimental albums with some amazing music. "Spoor" is pretty damn good too. Just saying.
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.
