LogFAQs > #963124169

58nd
Game: The Evil Within
Title: Towering Terror
Composer: Masafumi Takada
Nominator: @Snake5555555555
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEk1xmAlVe8

Masafumi Takada isn't known for this style at all, but a while back I listened to every available Masafumi Takada ost I could with a friend (we wanted to know if he had anything like his couple of trippy contributions to kid icarus uprising). Remember loving this one the day we got to it, which happened to line up with when I was visiting my parents' house. I think it was like 2am and everyone was away from the house but me at that time for some reason or something, so I just blared this on their giant flat TV screen hanging above the fireplace with most of the lights off. this was significant because at that time their house was very much in this middle-of-nowhere sorta forested area, and like i said, at night. the mood out the windows, of the few lights i'd kept on in the house, no one else being there. it made the power of this ost quite extreme for me!

That was pretty memorable an experience! was not at all what i expected from masafumi takada, but i was enthusiastic to learn he'd approached something in this style in his own unique way. that was the perfect setting to experience this music in too

I mentioned in an earlier writeup wishing snake went for this style more with his noms for me, since out of everyone who does these sorta ranking topic, I'm probably the most likely to actually rate this kind of atmospheric horror game music quite highly---almost everyone else who does these topics would not. but for me they're among my favorites typically! well, at least you hit exactly on the mark with this one!

One thing I like about this is just...well. in general I react to music very "mathematically" whether not it actually is. This does some very appealing things on that front. It starts out very rigidly in a conventional 4/4 container, but later on in the track it is muuuuch harder to follow the rhythm imo

Starting at 1:49, if you keep counting as if it's been the same tempo as before, nothing really lines up at all anymore. It's "approximately" 13/16 bars, if you're interpreting at the previous tempo, but really you need to interpret it as a tempo change. the couple of drum hits at like 1:52 / 2:01 are my favorite part here. They reaaaly trip me up. These hits and their pulsating reverb trail kinda create the illusion of various different rhythmic spaces (sometimes i hear closer to 7/8ish at one tempo, other times something totally different), but none of the things i hear will line up with those drums, which makes this 2nd half of the track put me in multiple temporal locations at once. It's the audio equivalent of the existential torture of the separation of instinct from thought, when you are in danger............! one interpretation is "reality", but you are not allowed to perceive that because you are going to be killed so you have to interpret "approximation of reality", instead. this doesn't change what reality is, but you're feeling both at once all the same with different parts of your mind...at least, i am

now...honestly, if you just stretch a 4/4 click to line up with the space each of those hits starting at 1:49 is (bumping it up to ~130bpm), it lines up nicely, including those weird drum bits each just being normal 16th notes, but i find it almost impossible to naturally hear it that way! the change in tempo is so sudden it's impossible to escape the ~108bpm feeling from earlier, so into this rhythmically ambiguous hellscape of uncertain anxiety we go. and honestly, that's the perfect zone for a piece of music like this

i don't just like that sorta mathy thing because i like numbers, even if i self-reductively act like i do, and speak from the vantage point as if timesig stuff or whatever is all i care about a lot. but in the context of horror game, those sorta effects are the exact things that generate even the exact instinctual forms of uncertainty that you absolutely need to convey the scenario. not knowing exactly what the tempo or bar length is, even if there is clearly some sort of pulse, and multiple things pulling me in different directions---that's harder to process, in the same way being chased down corridors of an unfamiliar abandoned building you dont know how to navigate is harder to process. i like that!

all that rhythmic stuff i actually doubt was even that intentional, but it works for me!

there's lots i could praise about the sound design here, these reversed sounds are so cool. i love the way the electronic drum loops have this instant-on vs intstant-off thing going. the abrupt abscence creates SHAR{P EDGES and i talked plenty in my previous writeup about how much a primally scary thing that is. it's perfect! Masafumi Takada is extremely good at sound design but i'm used to experiencing that in a context that's more electronic/dance/jazz fusion aligned or whatever. i would never guess in a million years this was him if i didn't know, but given that i do know, i will say i think it does make sense. it's just crazy to see these same electronic techniques represent survival horror instead of "goofy dialogue in digimon rpg" or whatever