TMKF you realize that Karlheinz Stockhausen is primarily associated with electronic music.
Are you seriously making the argument that because Eno coined a new word it means he invented what the word describes?
Nope!
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This is highly tangential, but Ives is a goddamn hero
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Maybe one of these would count.
“Huh, this sounds a lot like the Evergrace soundtrack.”
glances at logo, which reads “EVERGRACE II”
“Oh.”
Oh, I realized you pointed out Metroid II in the original post. If you go back and listen to the podcast we did on Metroid, I argue that the music in Metroid II really goes all the way on what Hip Tanaka’s mission statement was with the original Metroid (to express the alien qualities of the world through pure ambience and a lack of melody). But I think the execution is what is really interesting in Metroid II, if you take it all in context, and it’s probably a big part of the reason I love the game.
You have this sort of heroic, driving theme above the surface when you land, which would normally set the tone for the whole game. It’s so catchy that you’d probably be fine with it stimulating the pleasure center of your brain for most of the game, but I think it was a particularly bold move that pays off when the soundtrack starts to slip into strange territory around the Chozo Ruins.
Thinking about it now, there’s a real dark sense of humor in the way this song starts and stop in uncomfortable cycles, with the tempo sliding up and down in a sickening way.
Then deep below the surface any recognizable or memorable melodies disappear, and you basically have either ambient noise or these strange stems of melodies glued together with what’s presumably environmental noise (breathing, scratching? It’s hard to tell). But it’s really unfriendly.
Fights against more evolved Metroids are just a chaotic collections of 2-3 note melodies that stammer constantly, and add the claustrophobia of the fights. A lot of people who criticize the game say that Samus’ sprite was just too big for the hardware, and that might be true, but I actually think it creates situations that suit the themes of the game (desperation, feeling lost) perfectly.
And finally, you get something a little more standard when fighting the Metroid Queen. At first, it seems to build to a suitable fanfare, and you feel a moment of awe of for this monolithic creature that facing her own extinction…but then this like, almost pathetic sounding, minor key thread happens in the melody, and it serves to punctuate just how sad the whole mission was in the first place. And that’s perfect considering what happens at the end of the game.
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That Haunting Ground song is pretty cool & Streets of Rage 3 is one of the few V-game soundtracks I really love and respect.
@B_coma I have a weird relationship with Metroid II, which includes the music. It’s an intimate relationship, but not a totally healthy one.
Basically, I’m one of the few people who was really into the original Game Boy. I had an older brother who was really active with tee ball and scouts, so I was always dragged to lots of stuff I didn’t want to go to and would spend hours reading or playing Game Boy.
M2 was one of the games I kept trying to play and wanting to like, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. On the pea soup screen, all the areas seemed to blur together, and I didn’t quite get what I was supposed to be doing. I suppose the non-linearity was a bit bewildering, but even revisiting it after playing through some 2-D Zelda games the game just didn’t seem available to me. It was always some sort of fever dream.
Along with all that, I’ve always remembered the music, but not necessarily in a pleasant way. Like you said, it has that catchy central melody that repeats a lot, but the timber of the sounds used is itself alien and grating. Even when it’s optimistic, I think the melody is kind of hokey in a disassociated way that feels kind of uncanny. Even as a kid I felt like the melody strangely didn’t match the alien world, and when it got to the more pulsing, ambient music you posted it felt like a very effective sonic emulation of dread–not a great feeling!
I actually mentioned Metroid II in my OP, partially because I was hoping someone could talk about something grander at play there, because when I think back on that game’s music it definitely feels like someone doing something clever or avant garde; but I’m all too aware that I was probably not engaging it.
So thanks!
I had a shorter, but not dissimilar experience with M2 on the original Gameboy when I was a teenager. I recall trying to play a friend’s copy between rounds of Link’s Awakening, and M2 seemed impenetrable at the time. At some point, I found the spider ball and just scaled every cavern wall I could find with no sense of direction, until I turned the system off in confusion.
I thought about that experience for years and eventually played it again, after buying a cart of my own online when I was in college. I think I had to wait so I could meet the game on its own terms, but I loved that playthrough from the start and suddenly navigating wasn’t too difficult at all!
A few years later, I lent that cart to my future brother-in-law. He loved Metroid on the NES as a kid in the 80’s, and was high on the franchise after having played the Super Metroid and the GBA games to completion. He’s like, 10 years older than me, for context, so it had been at least 20 years since he played the original Metroid.
After about 2 weeks, he looked very upset and insisted I take the M2 cart back, talking about it as if it was haunted relic. I asked why, and he said “without an in-game map function, he just couldn’t deal with it”. But this was confusing to me, since he had finished Metroid on the NES, which didn’t have a map either, and I’d argue that the NES game is probably more impenetrable by nature of some design choices/limitations. So my theory is that M2 was working on him in ways beyond just the strangeness of its overlapping map, and it wasn’t a conversation he was having out loud.
That’s why I posted the Chozo Ruins piece–it’s one of the last areas in the game that’s maybe recognizable as a functional space built by an intelligent species, and it would have been really easy to compose something solemn, something that pays respect to that notion. Not unlike Metroid Prime’s soundtrack in its own Chozo Ruins area. Instead you get this queasy, sarcastic composition that builds to this tense climax and just stops. I still can’t believe how thoughtful it is compared to other games at the time.
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Yeah, I dunno if I’ll ever be able to fully get over my M2 baggage to just enjoy the game. Like your brother-in-law M1 makes sense to me, but M2 just feels like a hall of mirrors. Probably just the disorienting effect of the monochromatic screen and the giant sprite.
Actually it probably is time for another attempt…
There’s quite a few pieces with variable time signatures in Donald Duck: Quackshot, though there’s a real sense of trying to control the player’s speed through various pieces, with the above being a slower track.
This is a relatively more exciting track, and plays not just for most of the bosses, but also for a few rooms which need puzzles solving quickly before you get crushed to death by walls, as an example (the only example?). My brother likens the OST on the whole to tracks from Frank Zappa’s album Jazz From Hell, though I have no concept of how popular that album may have been.
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One of my favorite things is when a video game shifts between two versions of a song based on the player’s actions.
Specific examples:
R-Type Delta stage 2, in which the music alternates as you enter and leave the water. (I think I remember Axelay doing this, too.)
Many stages in Klonoa shift between indoors and outdoors versions of the music. Stage 5-2 also shifts as it alternates between day and night.
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holy shit
ditto on the Jazz from Hell comparison
If weird rhythmic stuff is applicable to this thread might as well namedrop Shining Wisdom
I love the Metroid 2 soundtrack almost as much as that game intimidates me. I played the game when I was maybe 5? There is a video of me at a family camping trip playing a game boy and you can hear the music from the first part of the game playing. I don’t really want to try and beat it as an adult because I think the weirdness would actually be lost a bit, and it would just be a game instead of a mythical object of infinite bizarre properties.
Ryoji Yoshitomi composed the soundtrack. He also composed the soundtrack for Wario Land 4 and Wario Ware, which both have some really strange music. Wario Land 4 has one of my favorite OSTs, but it isn’t as outlandish or utterly bizarre as Wario Ware or Metroid 2. That said, listen to this:
At about 8 seconds, the drummer is off by a quarter beat or so. In fact, the whole song sounds like it’s being played by an amateur band which is an aesthetic I have never actually heard in another video game.
There were also 16 CDs you could collect. Some people might think that these would be the songs from the game itself in a sound check sort of situation, but nope, they are just weird and sometimes creepy little songs.
That song fills me with dread.
Why does it say Karaoke above this? What would you sing?
This is a reversed version of a song in the game, except the samples are different. Plus it sounds like monsters. And if you actually reverse it it sounds like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k24_oQpkc0
Weird, eh?
Alright last one:
This one actually starts to resemble a song near the end. It borrows a rhythm from one of the other songs, like a lot of these CDs do. I think that lends to the uncanny feeling - they resemble the actual game songs but are really bizarre.
I would listen to these late at night and basically just feel weird. Great memories.
Anyway, this has just been me gushing over one of my favorite VGM composers. Thanks for listening.
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This is all really really cool!
God R&D1 is so great. The Wario franchise has become a great umbrella for them to play under. I love the idea that Wario is sort of Bizarro Mario, so he would obviously enjoy literally off-beat music and his CD collection would consist of crazy nightmare music. It’s just so awesome that they could put that aesthetic into what is, ostensibly, a kids’ game.
God, I love the idea that R&D1 has their own Mario who gets to be weird and experimental and feel “off.” Fans can never criticize a Wario game for breaking from tradition, because a sense of chaos and tricksterism is a part of the character as well as the games themselves. R&D1 really found a loophole in the twisted Nintendo fanboy psychoscape.
Oh man, I just checked Wikipedia, and it looks like Iwata restructured the teams when he took over and R&D1 hasn’t existed as its own entity since the GameCube. Kind of a bummer :/
At least I now know that Wario would be a Shaggs fan. They can’t take that away from me.
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y’all might be interested in alumna ella guro’s old blog, sounds from the abyss
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