LogFAQs > #962700024

71th
Game: Super Paper Mario
Title: World of Nothing
Composer: Naoko Mitome, Chika Sekigawa, Yasuhisa Baba
Nominator: @Shonen_Bat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e50wQj4aeuQ

Here you are again. Up much more toward the top finally. This is the way to sell a bleak world to me!

I started to get obsessed with music that evoked "a destroyed reality" ever since sometime in 2009 when I had a really crazy dream about exploring a decaying universal collapse, with "g-darius - invivo" as the background music. Metallic chain linked platforms struggled to connect broken floating chunks of ground together above an infinite void of stars, navigation was non-euclidian. Things were fading in and out of existence. Reality was /broken/, reality was _dead_

The world of that dream (nightmare) was legitimately dark and unpleasant, but it was also COOL. it was such a cool feeling to be inside of this warped destroyed universe, i somehow felt like i belonged there. once i woke up i felt like i /needed to be there/, and i still feel that way. it was such a vivid and fascinating experience that ever since it i was always desperate to go back there. An insatiable CRAVING to return to that bizarre place. The closest I could ever get was immersing myself in music that painted that picture to me, thus a whole new category of my taste in music was born.

I think unlike other categories in my music taste, this one is very "emotion" based. The ideal is music that makes me feel a specific way (or maybe better worded: takes me to a specific place), and as a result there's a diverse amount of routes one could take to reach that point.

This song is obviously just from the name meant to represent a reality wiped out to near nothingness. Its a pretty unsettling moment to exist within what's largely a bright and colorful game otherwise. (Actually that's not true lol there's stuff this dark all over the place in this game)

I like this soundtrack a ton as a whole, has a profoundly unique instrumentation and well defined signature aesthetic to the sound. The composition is in basically every song pretty interesting. This game and ttyd are both games with their osts in my top 20 still too this day. I never actually fixated on this song particularly, but its obvious why I would enjoy it, and it still ranks pretty high clearly.

The vibraphone(i love that instrument!) chords strike fear further in every time they descend. And these bouncy analog synths----elsewhere in the ost those bouncy synths define a funny cartoon jumping man. In this song, instead those same rubbery synths now define the alien incomprehensibility of an infinite abyss of white emptiness instead, it's just so perfect...

I remember when younger being weirdly disturbed by this part in "chalk zone" where everything gets erased and then one of the characters says "its an infinite abyss!" And it implies that everyone in their world will be falling into an infinite white nothingness void forever. This white emptiness being the way spm defines a similar idea definitely gives me chills related to that memory. An existentially scary moment in a cartoon! that's EXACTLY what this song is!

Back on the topic of emotion (and i alluded to this earlier): there's an unreleased song I recently heard from a private album screening (so i unfortunately can't share it yet) that represents the destruction of something beautiful. It is the only time I can remember a piece of music actually moving me to tears for real and its got me thinking about why. I think "loss" as a topic hurts me a lot more deeply as a form of cutting than most dark topics. Something being gone "forever" is a really scary concept to me: maybe especially as someone so nostalgia-centric and obsessed with media archival and seeing so many of my favorite memories gone forever. So when music can somehow find a way to convey that to me even just by the way the music sounds: the loss of an entire reality, potentially forever. It hits hard if it succeeds in that. That's what this one makes me feel and as a result its probably on the list of noms this topic to most powerfully impact me in purely an emotional sense

I like when media can successfully make me cry or feel genuine fear. This doesnt quite to that but it gets pretty close, and its literally fucking mario. Actually, the world of mario being so colorful and cute typically makes the feeling far more intense than if the world were something less friendly from the start. it's like the feeling of seeing a cute plushie that normally says a cute phrase when you pull its string, but when you pull it now, it makes horrific garbled glitching sounds. way more stinging of a feeling than just looking at a burnt down lifeless office building: this was a colorful playful world with vibrant characters with all sorts of personality. now it is just a white void.