LogFAQs > #963064929

59nd
Game: Dujanah
Title: Art Gallery
Composer: Jack King-Spooner
Nominator: @Simoun
https://jackking-spooner.bandcamp.com/track/art-gallery

most of the time, for this topic, i listened to the songs without a visual to accompany, just put the songs on my phone/etc and would only be seeing the file names. somehow, i don't remember this album art looking at all like this, but this is EXACTLY what the track makes me picture. these stretched pixels; deliberate artful re-positioning of errors into something that feels cool...and abandoned machinery?

this is very minimal, and the harsh sounds panning hard between the speakers are jarring and unpleasant and i am GLAD. oh man that high resonant frequency at 1:57 is legit painful, and these timestretched samples. it really REALLY feels like the musical version of this album art. portions stretched out to generate a sharp, colorful and noisy missingno edge out of something that might otherwise be a subdued atmosphere without those. nothing conveys this song better than exactly these bright spider-like missingno pixel garbage shapes piercing out over that black background

i have literally no idea what this experience was (there might be some psychological name for this very specific effect, but i never found a name for it); but for some reason when i was younger, i had a strange issue where when i'd hear certain sounds or look at certain images (high pitch sounds particularly), it would actually alter my vision (or the other way around, i'd have auditory hallucinations of certain sounds if i looked at images associated with them). I would see sharp edges as very highlighted particularly, sharp edges would SHARPEN and get SHARPEr when i'd hear a high pitch sound. this actually very occasionally still happened as an adult but i haven't experienced anything similar in a very long time. i suspect this is some strange antiquated primitive instinctual response to threats of danger in general, something about maybe these sounds being correlated with actual dangerous things (lightning, sharp objects, trees falling). it /does/ make sense that something unsettling would cause the brain to be shifted to a state that heightens an alert to danger, with things like knives or really any sort of sharp edge being an obvious thing to instinctively fear. i also do experience synesthesia, so it could be related to that as well. WHO KNOWS but anyway this was a thing, meaning high pitch sounds are pretty permanently entangled with "sharp edges" and an instinctual feeling of "danger" in my mind. seeing tree branches morph into sharp insect legs upon hearing something high-pitched was a thing that happened to me when younger.

nowadays the image on this album art might still look exactly the same in terms of actual pixel positions, but once i hear these sharp bursts of painful spears in audio form: the exact same shape "feels", different. now those angular branches on the left i interpret more like spider legs or dangerous brambles. even the Arabic text starts to feel more like the shapes of a foreign insect that's potentially poisonous, the sharp ends of the text instantly start to feel threatening in the same way a pincer feels threatening. even now in 2022 when i'm not hallucinating this weird shit anymore, i still /feel/ this sharp difference in how i percieve the exact same objects once those startling sounds hit. the song activates these primal responses to danger and that's GOOD i mean this song is very obviously supposed to be scary...i assume...it woudl be weird if it was not...

the sound design in this track is pretty fascinating in general, the whole track is clearly fixated on that element. the 'composition' is mostly just that repeating rhythm on that one note, one that feels like a tribal drum pattern but it's on a specific tuned note, and the timbre warps between wildly different things as it goes. reality is morphing around this sound, with that being the sole thing tethering me to something familiar or comprehensible. i love how bubbly the sound of this whole track is.

this track reminds me of the mood of especially the beginning of one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite artists: Oneohtrix Point Never - Mutant Standard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr5xAppRgpU

oh my GOD i can NOT look at that opn album cover when i am in this specific state of being hahaha, i even have a shirt with that album cover on it because i like it...but it instantly starts to represent all the same things i said above about this instinctual "it's a dangerous insect that is poisounous " response, the moment i look at it while simultaneously hearing that high pitch sound at the start (i don't know how i never experienced this exact same thing before with this song? I guess the heightened state the dujanah song put me in has something to do with it, but also i probably just don't usually listen to mutant standard while directly looking at the album cover)

anyway mutant standard reminds me a lot of art gallery, they both have long portions of a pulsing /tonal/ sound that still acts like a non-tuned drum in terms of how it functions. you can simply relate the sound to a drum, in both cases, even if it is playing an actual note. and generally they're just very sound design focused tunes that do lots of very cool and strange things and activate instinctual reflexes because they are so scary....mutant standard gets a lot less scary though that one is actually very pretty at times. i would highly reccomend that song (And oneohtrix point never as an artist in general probably) based on the sorts of things you nommed for me! ((actually a fun fact that'd interest you specifically given that i know you like Rhem: i recently sorta made a fake personal ost for Rhem 2, since obviously that doesn't have music. but it was largely sourced from altered versions or portions of songs from oneohtrix point never's Garden of Delete album, and i managed to make it surprisingly fit well in certain instances. i had a slowed down version of Mutant Standard play after a certain puzzle was solved and it felt really cool in that context. works well for Post-Industrial Abandoned Cave Labyrinth environment for sure))

oh and this probably doesn't need to be said but this is absolutely a _Houndoom yt playlist category song; in the whole "evokes a destroyed reality" category i mentioned that i crave in the world of nothing writeup