Tuesday, October 19, 2021

mix 13

Tracks are all hyperlinked

Sorry for not posting for a long time, I hope all of my fans around the world forgive me. 
Curtis Mayfield - Think (Instrumental)




                                   Runescape OST - Serenade (Ian Taylor) (remastered version)
                                 Runescape OST - Background (Ian Taylor) (remastered version)







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Thursday, May 13, 2021

ambient/sampled playlist


Earthbound OST - Moonside Swing (Keiichi Suzuki)

This song is basically just a straight up sample from this one Ric Ocasek (The Cars) track, but slightly manipulated, with some sounds added in. When you get to this part in the game you'll see how effective it is at establishing the desired mood of the respective location. Earthbound was the first video game that heavily incorporated sampling, which even in 1994, when the game came out in Japan, was not a very popular thing to do in musical pieces. Just another reason why the EB OST is a masterpiece, and far far ahead of it's time.




Earthbound OST - Dr. Andonuts' Lab (Keiichi Suzuki)
As you probably already know, this is my favorite ambient song of all time. It's really simple and short, and the weight it has in my mind is probably also tied to where it first appears in the game, but I am also so deeply impressed with how Keiichi came up with these beautiful tunes with such shitty sounding presets. Fun fact, I think the high pitched little beeps that are present intermittently throughout the track are actually a bird tweeting sound just slowed down, but with the pitch kept relatively the same. People think this is a diegetic sound, meant to emulate the beeping of whatever gadgets and machines Dr. Andonuts has in his lab. Really neat stuff in my opinion. 




Earthbound OST - Deeper Into Ness' Subconscious 
I almost feel guilty showing you these songs, because I feel like they really need to be experienced first within the game, but I am hoping that they will take on different meanings for you once you actually encounter them when playing. I remember reading a Youtube comment once that said that this song feels like crying and I don't really think it could be summed up more succinctly. This song has always sounded very heartbreaking, but a lot of other people think it's creepy. I don't think so at all, I just find it very beautiful. Also, this song features a heavy amount of "string-bending" aka vibrato. Earthbound is probably the first game whose soundtrack features a lot of heavy vibrato, and whenever heavy string bending is heard in either video games or adjacent content, people seem to always reference EB. Although, the Roland Jupiter-80 synth, which came out in the 1980's, has a lot of patches prebuilt into it with this kind of heavy string bended, and delayed, wide sounds, but is not usually referenced when people talk about that kind of sound. I wonder if Keiichi had one and used it throughout his musical career, as a member of multiple influential japanese new wave bands.




The Orb - Plateau
I don't like a lot of The Orb's work but I think this song is super impressive. Not to sound silly, but there are so many different sounds and layers throughout this song that seem to blend pretty seamlessly, and evolve in a way that I think makes a lot of sense. It's really not easy to find a bunch of sounds, especially vague and semi-abstract ones that serve either as embellishments, or to push the track further, that work so well together. Overall, I just think there is a lot to unpack here and I always find myself hearing new things whenever I come back to it. 




Echospace - Theme From Silent World 
This guy Rod Modell makes up one half of this duo, and he is a very very odd guy. There's this interview with him where he talks about how in order to determine whether or not he likes a song, he has it blasting in his house all day, sometimes for multiple days without stopping. He also talks about the air pressure affecting his ears when he steps outside for too long and how it changes how he makes music or some shit. Really weird stuff haha. 




DJ Shadow - Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt
I recommend listening to this whole album, because it is widely considered a masterpiece. I think this song is a good place to start. The record this song is off of, Entroducing, came out in 1996 and was the first album created that was entirely created using only sampled material. DJ Shadow was close friends with one of the people who ran a popular NYC record shop, and he eventually let him have access to the basement of the shop, which had mountains upon mountains of obscure and forgotten records. It's rumored that DJ Shadow would listen to thousands upon thousands of these records, which he ended up sampling a decent amount from. There are also recognizable samples present, ranging from Bjork to Tangerine Dream. A lot of people have attempted to identify all of the samples, but the list is still not complete. This song and record I feel like does a really good job of capturing what it was like to live in NYC in the 90s as someone who was really into Hip-Hop and urban culture. idk that sounds kind of stupid but yeah 




Final Fantasy X OST - Wandering Flame (Nobuo Uematsu)

Largely considered the king of video game music, and especially orchestrated and triumphant battle themes, Nobuo is clearly also capable of producing very beautiful sounding ambient music. In my opinion this song rivals the ambient music of all the greats ranging from Eno to Aphex Twin. The main drone which establishes the chord progression is a mixture of manipulated clarinet and flute and something else maybe. It sounds very ethereal, and I when I first discovered this track, which was outside of playing FFX, I became quickly enamored and I remember constantly getting shivers listening to it. real great stuff






Urfaust - Outro
So this band is kind of funny. They are predominantly a black metal band, whose music I think sounds like if a band tried to only use instruments that they found out their local dump. Also there's like vague nazi imagery, which is almost surprisingly a pretty popular part of the aesthetic of black metal music. But this song, which appears last on the album, is really something else. This song is really repetitive but this synth patch is just so dam beautiful.. and the chord progressions here works quite well with it. This is some really immersive stuff and I recommend listening with decent headphones (not earbuds) on. 





Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Panaiotis - Nike
So despite this being the kind of music that you put on when you're trying to appear very cultured and smart around your dumbass hipster friends who think that half of liking music is about how cool it is to like it, this song is really cool, specifically because of the process of how it came into fruition. Pauline Oliveros was a very influential early electronic musician, who pioneered tape music, which was the first kind of music that focused heavily on sampled material and on manipulating pre-existing sounds in an attempt to create a sound that feels very foreign or new. This is basically the essence of electronic music, and we owe a lot to Pauline for it. Anyway, the cool thing about this track/record is that it was literally recorded 14 feet underground in a cistern. What Pauline found novel about this kind of recording space, was it's ability to produce an incredible amount of resonance, with sounds sometimes lasting up to 45 seconds at a time. It's a neat little experiment, and I can easily imagine how exciting and interesting it must have been for someone who was so deeply interested in manipulating sound in these very fundamental ways.



 

AFX - watery big ez
So as you might already know AFX is one of Aphex Twin's many monikers. This song was released on his soundcloud a number of years ago just as a one off kind of thing. The recording feels very raw, so it kind of sounds like this track might have been made sometime in the 90s. You liked that Tod Dockstader track, and although this isn't really a abstract song, it features samples of like waters and bubbles which I think is neat. It's very catchy stuff and has Aphex's signature written all over it. 

also here is the full playlist on youtube which will make listening to this all in a row easier...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHTwCRqjds_S_82F8OZvKBCNC9GTOcgQJ 





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Monday, November 2, 2020

mix 12

Current Value - Into The Light





Pokemong TCG OST - Hall of Honor (Ichiro Shimakura)
Pajama Sam No Need To Hide When It's Dark Outside OST - Potion LabPajama Sam No Need To Hide When It's Dark Outside OST - Dance Time
Pajama Sam No Need To Hide When It's Dark Outside OST - Palace of Doors
The Singers Unlimited - Michelle (Paul McCartney)

Boards Of Canada - The Smallest Weird Number


Charlie Parker - Just Friends
Chrono Cross OST - Ephemeral Memory
Glen Campbell - Guess I'm Dumb (Brian Wilson)
Echospace - Theme For Silent World












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Sunday, August 9, 2020

mix 11

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Sunday, June 21, 2020

mix 10

this post will only be comprised of music from the mother series, specifically from mother 2/earthbound (although a few of these tracks were created for the first game of the mother series, which solely utilized basic square and triangle waves alongside the obligatory use of delay/vibrato.)  I've been feeling incredibly inspired and in awe of all the different kinds of sounds and feelings Suzuki and Tanaka managed to bring out of themselves, especially given the limitations of the 16 bit software they were stuck with. I will put a * next to songs that I have at some point been especially enamoured with or deeply impressed by.













                                                                                                                     
Snowman**
Hospital*
A Flash of Memory*
The Tendas Cave
Pink Cloud Shrine*
Dangerous Caves
Boy Meets Girl (Twoson)*
Paula's Theme*
Peaceful Rest Valley
Happy-Happy is Blue**
Runaway Five Left the Building!
Magicant
Dr. Andonuts' Lab***
Threed, Zombie Central
Winters White
Battle Against Belch
Battle Against a Mobile Opponent*
You've Come Far Ness
Inside the Dungeon
Buzz Buzz's Prophecy*
Deeper Into Ness' Subconscious*
The Cliff That Time Forgot
Home Sweet Home*
Pokey's House
Moonside Swing*
The Place (Cave of the Past)
The Heroes Return (part 1)
Bed and Breakfast*
Because I Love You
Hi Hi Hi (Saturn Valley)
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Sunday, June 7, 2020

mix 9

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Thursday, May 21, 2020

Mix 8

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