You all know about Deltron 3030, right? If you don't you should. Del the Funky Homosapien, Dan the Automator and Kid Koala formed like Voltron back in 2000 and put out one of the greatest space opera hip-hop albums of all time, fusing the best of video games, anime and Sun Ra into their eponymous debut album.
13 years later, they're back, and they've brought some buddies - the new album, Event 2, features everyone from comedian David Cross to Zack De La Rocha; from the girl who played Ramona Flowers in the Scott Pilgrim movie to Joseph Gordon-Levitt, fer crissakes.
But, more to the point, they have a song which I am adopting as the official song of this blog, and this game. Enjoy.
If you didn't know, before Vangelis was VANGELIS, he was a part of a Greek band called Aphrodite's Child, which put out a double album called 666, which is a musical interpretation of the Book of Revelations. As you can imagine, it's got some serious apocalyptic imagery.
Enigma actually sampled quite a bit of the album for their seminal work, MCMXC a.D., and listening to 666 for the first time, having been quite a fan of Enigma was very revealing. I knew that they sampled heavily (oh, those halcyon days) from many different sources, but it's always fun to hear something you know in a different way.
The famous heavy breathing from Enigma's Principles of Lust, for instance, is a sample from "∞", a five minute song supposedly cut down from 39 minutes, recorded in a single take, where Greek actress Irene Papas chants, "I was, I am, I am to come" over and over, in increasingly hysterical tones.
Anyway, it's some pretty heavy progressive rock, with seriously apocalyptic overtones. So enjoy!
So I've been doing a lot of writing lately, and I don't know about you, but I needs me some music to go along with any creative efforts, so I figured I'd share some of the music that gets my creative juices flowing.
In general, I need music that is... open. The "busier" the music, the less room I have for my own thoughts.
That means a lot of classical music, and a lot of ambient music, so if these things are not your cup of tea, abandon hope, ye who enter here.
Adagios in general are nice to create to. Nice and slow, easy does it. This recording in particular is a favorite of mine, Karajan was an incredible conductor, and brought out the feeling in many recordings. Apropos of nothing, if he hadn't been dead, I totally would have lobbied for him to play Gandalf, btw.
Speaking of adagios, if you haven't heard this one, under what rock have you been living? Barber's Adagio is hands down one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever set to paper, and nobody captured the essence like Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. You may know the song, but if you haven't heard this recording, you haven't heard it like it should be done.
From what I understand, Thomas Tallis is undergoing a renaissance of sorts, thanks to, of all things, Fifty Shades of Gray.
Sigh.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, I suppose. Tallis was doing the wall of sound thing 500 years ago, and the music reminds me of the ocean, shifting and sliding, while still being one, cohesive "thing".
Everyone knows the fourth movement of Dvorak's New World Symphony - the opening sounds like Jaws, then goes all brassy and badass. The second movement, though, is mellow, and just a bit threatening, if you know what's coming. You can feel the momentum building as you go along, while still getting a sense of stillness and peace.
Now we go to some darker places:
For some reason, Spotify lists the song above as Powler, it's actually called Prowler. It's by one of the greatest bands to ever have a ridiculously stupid name, Bohren and Der Club of Gore. They started out as a fairly generic death metal band, and then got interesting, introducing the world to the concept of Doom Jazz. It's music for the streets of a dark city, where the bar just closed and boozy patrons are slinking into the shadows, as a lone sax player stands beneath the streetlight, his music mournfully accompanying them to the grasping darkness that awaits them...
Philip Glass, oh Philip Glass. Candyman was terrifying enough as it was, why did you have to go and make it worse? It's not often that the music of a film encapsulates the entirety of the film as neatly as this does - haunting and beautify, simple and repetitive, it stays with you long after the film itself. As long as I'm on the topic, though, next time you watch Candyman, watch it with the idea that Helen has gone ridiculously insane and is an unreliable narrator - It was always you, Helen, takes on a very different meaning. Anyways, Philip Glass - the Candyman soundtrack is a good point of entry for anyone interested in the idea of voice as a musical instrument.
Brian Williams, aka Lustmord is the king of Dark Ambient. Pretty much any of his works do the trick, but The Place Where the Black Stars Hang one is a particular favorite of mine. If you get a chance to see him perform, you owe it to yourself to do so. His performances are wonderful and amazing and terrifying and beyond real description, just like the music itself. The album is over an hour long, and the video above has it all one small part of it. Put on some good earphones, turn down the lights, and start writing.
Peter Andersson is a prolific dark ambient musician, with numerous projects. I could make an entire post just about his various projects - each approaches the idea of dark ambiance from different perspectives. Raison d'etre is his most well known, and approaches from an industrial angle, while Necrophorus focuses more on naturalistic ambiance Panzar is.... terrifying. The album this track is from, Human Degeneration, is, so far as I can tell, some sort of concept album about the Holocaust, or WWII in general (lots of talking in German, which I don't understand - for all I know it could be a recipe for cookies), and it is every bit as haunting, ominous and threatening as you would imagine such an album would be. To feel the full effect, you should listen to the entire album which can be heard here. This track, though, captures most of it.
Enough of the dark stuff, here are some lighter works.
Steve Reich is a pioneering minimalist, and this shows the power of his work. In this work, he takes a simple phrase, and turns it into an audio feast that will blast anything that is stuck in your head into oblivion. A good audio enema.
I recently had an opportunity to see Robert Rich perform live. He did a house tour of the world, putting on concerts literally in peoples' homes. I was one of about 25 people at the concert, my better half and I lounging on a couch. At some point my eyes closed, I was drifting, aware, but at peace. The music ended and my eyes opened and I was refreshed. It's that kind of music.
I'll preface this by saying, I'm no musical scholar. I don't know anything about chord progressions, or key changes, or anything like that. So if I'm dead wrong, just go with the feeling of what I'm writing.
Which is pretty much what I'm writing about, come to think about it. There are some songs/albums/bands that I listen to because I love every note, every bit of the music. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, for instance, I know it inside and out. I can sing along with the guitar lines, I know every beat from the drum, a part of me thinks that I own that music, I know it so well. Every once in awhile, I'll go into what my better half calls a "Floyd Void", where I listen to nothing but Pink Floyd albums, and I'll devour their studio albums, I'll chase down ROIOs online, and I will live on Floyd alone. I can do that because it's something I know.
There is other music I can never own, though. John Coltrane's Blue Train is a great example of this. I was listening to it on my way into work today, and it struck me that I listen to it differently than I do Pink Floyd. I love it just as much, but I can never own it the way I do DSOTM. With DSOTM, I wait for the next familiar beat so I can belt out the refrain in time with the album. I don't sing along with Blue Trane. I inhale Pink Floyd, I let Blue Trane wash over me.
Play the opening to Blue Train for just about anyone, and they'll swear they've heard it before. It's just one of those instantly recognizeable tunes that everyone's heard, either intentionally or in the background. But that's not the song. The real song kicks in once Coltrane is set loose, and while every take of the song is different, it still hangs on that opening tune.
That's how I want to game. I don't want to game like Dark Side of the Moon. Yes, every song is a masterpiece, and there are times where that's all I want to listen to, I want to game like Trane - I want the game to wash over me, with familiar bits that spin off into majestic lunacy that keeps me on the edge of my seat, wondering what is coming next. I don't want the Hero's Journey, I want cliffs and valleys, I want hairpin turns and vast chasms to be leapt.
I want my games to be fresh and new every time I play them, with just enough familiarity to keep things going.
D&D might be my DSOTM. I love it, but I'm not sure if I can stop singing other peoples' refrains. I've been in a D&D void for awhile, my thoughts consumed by dwarves and elves, but I feel the need to stretch my legs a bit. Maybe something new.
I stumbled upon a series of old posts by Jim Raggi at his LOTFP blog, citing musical influences for him. It got me thinking - there are, in alot of cases, songs that I hear that I immediately associate with various rpgs. Some of them are a bit on the nose, while others have more personal meanings, but I figured, what the hell, that'll make a nice blog post.
You all know about Deltron 3030, right? If you don't you should. Del the Funky Homosapien, Dan the Automator and Kid Koala formed like Voltron back in 2000 and put out one of the greatest space opera hip-hop albums of all time, fusing the best of video games, anime and Sun Ra into their eponymous debut album.
