LogFAQs > #962503719

78st
Game: Mega Man X6
Title: Metal Shark
Composer: Akemi Kimura (Naoto Tanaka)
Nominator: @Haunter12O
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8Gz9-RKjiI

Metal shark!!! I love sharks!!!

Another haunter12o nom, and even tho it's in megaman x6 it legit sounds like Hitoshi Sakimoto!!! If I hadn't heard this before and had to guesswhat it's from i would probably name things I know to have basiscape osts before anything else

What sets that mood the most is those crunchy brass clusters again. They're 'dissonant' intervals but they do not sound wrong at all.Instead the sound like a NEWS STATION theme and anyone who knows me knows how much I love those

Actually the song to awaken me to the fact that a lot of my favorite stuff is non-news station music that sounds like news stations music...is by hitoshi sakimoto!

Hitoshi Sakimoto - chlorella production manager
https://youtu.be/f6kxidM7pb0

chlorella production manager was nominated for a community i was in that did similar vgm contests and rankings and things . And someone kept making fun of it saying they couldn't take it seriously because it sounded too much like NEWS STATION THEME. And i pretty quickly realized that sound is exactly why I liked it

I've always been a fan of news station 80s-90s stock music and stuff. As a kid when I first used a computer I had a ton of fun poking around at the stock midis in business presentation software our computer had on it, plenty of which were clearly intended for a news station bgm context. And in university I majored in broadcasting for a bit and had access to their stock music libraries and fell in love with all the BREAKING NEWS tracks and stuff.

But until that sakimoto ten plants song, I hadn't comprehended i like equivalents to the style outside of stuff meant for that too. Based on the title its clearly more meant to represent like "factory", machines assembling parts, music that could be in "How It's Made"

Anyway back to METAL SHARK PLAYER. It definitely fits the context of the level. A recycling facility, crusher machines. Some guy makes a ton of profit from this recycling business...there's probably a "how its made" episode about stuff made from crushed recycled parts and you could just replace the song with this and it'd fit perfect

Oh and I LOVE THE metric modulation of course. Sudden tempo change, but its clearly rhythmically related to the first bit. You can tap a constant pulse at the same tempo the whole way through the song and you'd never go out of sync with the music. But the space within that time would shift from groups of 3 to groups of 4.

Another thing I love about this, both in terms of context fit and just it fitting with my taste in sounds: the mix of clearly synth brass brass and more real sounding brass. The more realistic brass layer lets it still have an almost like militaristic medieval castle sorta feel in terms of emotion exuded--regal, imposing, even just like "grandness of the scale of a giant building". But the clearly synth layers line the whole thing with the feeling of machines...I mean thats like something you'd want in almost any megaman song because of the settings conveyed, but this is straight up a recycling plant where you're inside machines. The combo is perfect for it

i usually associate "dorian mode" with like folky old fantasy setting, and it's interesting to hear the same types of melodies and progressions in something that evokes machine business world instead, both this and chlorella production manager are using that scale as their basis

i keep wanting to point out individual moments, but then i'd just list like the whole song at random but i will DO IT ANYwAY. the brass or strings having certain arps, cool weird parallel harmony in the synths at :41 that sounds VERY basiscape is one of my fav bits. The transition back to the loop i realize is one of my favorite parts here too, because you hear the straightforward constant 16ths 4/4 tempo veeeery subtly layerd on top of the other more triplety or 12/8 or [whatever you wanna call it] pulse. it's a very subtle sound, but it's there, and it just is such a cool perspective testing feeling.

another thing this evokes to me is like...machines turning on and off. in a mechanical facility it's not like every machine is always working all the time. when this speeds up it's like one new machine got activated and is doing its thing, but because the pulse is still mathematically related to the one from earlier, it doesn't change the feeling of everything constantly working. the same machines have been working the same way the whole time but now a new faster one has activated at the same time. it's just a perfect musical evocation of INDUSTRIAL PROCESSING

this might not show in the current rankings (though it might moreso in the re-rank perhaps) but i really can not understate how crazy it is to me that haunter12O nommed 3 songs in this /exact/ style that i've been looking for. very contrasting coming after the initial low placements. it's a style that grew on me even more recent than when i did this topic's ranking, particularly ever since i took my dives into other work by a lot of composers i like (sakimoto, kobayashi, etc) more seriously, but just these pounding, heavy and dense and busy and floaty orchestral arrangements is absolutely one of my favorite worlds. even more than it was at the time. so thanks so much for all these examples, seriously, i've thouroughly enjoyed bof4's ost so far and stuff like that song or this one, it's really gotten me enthusiastic in the mood for one of my favorite types of music.