LogFAQs > #962593561

75rd
Game: Spyro the Dragon
Title: Artisan's Home
Composer: Stewart Copeland
Nominator: @Mr_Lasastryke
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqzRrSaYBzs

i'm spyro the dragon

Spyro....the soundtrack is something that seems like I wouldn't like it and would find it boring, reuses the same very standard and simple progressions: ones I will regularly complain about in other contexts. And the emotional tone is usually a neutral-happy blues scale zone i tend to feel nothing from. While these things are actively detrimental to my interest in other contexts, in spyro music im just neutral to these factors

But there's a few things that make me instead VERY consistently VERy SPECIFICALLY like spyro music:

1. The instrumentation! Wow! Did you know I love synthesizers from the 80s and 90s? Well this game is pretty in your face about using those! Nice crystalline electric pianos and injections of just generally neat sounds I like (both lots of kurzweil k2000-2500 and spectrasonics distorted reality sounds. Both among my favorite sound sources from the period)

2. The rhythms. The soundtrack is by a drummer so maybe rhythmic focus isn't too surprising. Almost every track has something at least mildly interesting to me going on in that department, sometimes pretty subtle but other times very clear

Spyro is a game series i would say that half the reason I rank it as high as I do is because I like the "feel" and "atmosphere" of playing it. And the majority of what sets that tone in any game for me is the music.

Collectathon is a genre I love but I need to be invested in the mood the game presents to me to genuinely get into it. A much bigger factor than actual technical things about the game design.

In the past I said collectathons are the genre I'm into with the lowest correlation with my taste in vgm. While this is true--almost every other genre of game that I like has a higher % of soundtracks i love--collectathon is also the genre where the music that Is there seems to have the greatest impact on my enthusiasm for the game.

Part of this is probably because I tend to approach this type of game in almost like a casual relaxed like...cookie clicker type way. The feeling of getting higher % completion gradually by just wandering around and finding things is more about "feeling" i realize. I'm not as interested in the technical gameplay structure with this sorta thing as I am with other genres I like like metroidvanias or myst clones. The important factor is how it "feels" to wander around this particular world and stumble on ways to increase the count of whatever items are being collected.

I infamously can not stand banjo kazooie because of the music--a game that on paper lines up more with the sort of structure of gameplay I'm interested in (convoluted, basically). Spyro is so much simpler yet all it takes is me actually being immersed in the damp foggy ps1 mood of this ost, to make it jump 100 slots higher, somewhere into my list of favorite games to play or watch at any given time.

Another part of it is probably the odd mismatch between setting and music style. Its like...medival castle dragon land, and various "exotic world cultures being explored" but then you're hearing electric pianos and electronic loops over sorta funky drums or whatever. Yet this isn't unfitting at all. The music perfectly compliments the way the game looks and feels to me, even though it has very little to do with the themes the game portrays. . .the odd atmosphere created by this unexpected combo just keeps getting me coming back to this game and wanting more

It represents the world in a more abstract way. The timbres paint the colors and geometry that makes everything up, or how open or closed a space is. Its kinda like how super monkey ball music instantly evokes "floating platform in the sky" but if you didn't know what the music was you'd probably never guess the ost would have anything like the atmosphere it does

Its weird, I don't rank the spyro ost that high on its own, but as far as establishing the feeling of a game I love to play, the music is nearly the entire reason I love this entire game 100 slots more than many contemporaries in the style

Anyways, I would definitely not care about this game very much if the soundtrack was different from what it is. And i would be sad that I don't, because I like dragons and clearly seem to have almost as much of a thing for reptiles that are purple as I do weasels that are teal.....if It didn't have this soundtrack I would be sad that I want to like this game but couldn't get into it because the soundtrack did not sound like rotating polygonal gems. luckily it does sound like rotating polygonal gems so i am able to be a big fan of a game where i can play as a purple dragon that i love!

Artisan's home is difficult to talk about as an individual track since so much of why I'm into it is the abstract feeling it gives me that i mentioned above. But there's a few very specific bits that define this track to me.

Pretty much the whole track fixates on rhythms that aren't beat one. The melodic synth harp / synth bell layers are like entirely on the "and" beats and you almost have to work to not get turned around and think they're hitting on beats 1/2/3/4 instead. Gives me a feeling of lopsided but forward motion that perpetually pushes me forward thru the track.

The bits where you hear the full chords hits on 2 and 4 only further makes this lopsided and easy to lose beat 1, pretty much every beat has more emphasis than the first, yet it doesn't feel like it's this crazy at all with how smooth this relentless syncopation is presented

My favorite bit though is the groups of 3/16ths in the triangle at 1:00, it just floats over everything else unrelated to the motion of everything around it and if my vantage point shifts it can grasp my entire focus instead and like...become a new totally different tempo.

This song is honestly strangely virgil donati-ish rhythmically. They're both drummers-as-composers but the personalities of the two are pretty much complete opposites (iirc Stewart Copeland may have even specifically made fun of virgil at some point? Or at least he said he's skeptical of drummers that he sees as showing off technical complexity and sees the place of drumming as purely not that (which obviously i disagree with philosophically if forced to apply to other people, though I think it has interesting results as he applies it to his own style))

But 3ven with that in mind, Copeland is not simple. His complexity is just very subtle. He makes incredibly unusual grooves, but they still function as "grooves" rather than math puzzles. But you can still make them math puzzles if you want! I mean I already noted some of that above!

The donati version of this song would have every rhythmically odd thing in your face with perfectly synced-to-drums keyboard parts deliberately enforcing a spastic jaggedness that makes it clear whenever there's anything even slightly weird about these rhythms

But Copeland wants to create a groove while still doing the same sorts of multilayered mathematically tricky stuff donati would do, and the difference in terms of how it sounds between the approaches from these pretty opposite drummers is pretty striking to me!

I've realized how much I appreciate subtlety these past many years, so I have a respect for this approach I might not have had in the past too. Its...honestly my whole "what do I think makes a good dungeon theme" conversation again. Very non-distracting song to the point a lot of people find this ost totally unmemorable and dull; but at least to me, if I tune my focus into the music deliberately there's always enough going on for me to pick out something different each time and never get bored

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