LogFAQs > #963208390

56st
Game: Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon
Title: The Fairy of Love and Dreams D'ETOILE
Composer: Shigeru Araki, Kato Yusuke, Saiko Miki, Yasumasa Kitagawa
Nominator: @Janus5k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncmOly5_iPY

i don't know how but this intro of total dissonance and incomprehensible "orchestra warming up and all doing different things at the same time" has always been somehow so "catchy" to me. the reversed cymbals feel so cool too...i know i said a few writeups ago that i often don't like when things get in my head but i don't mind this case of that! also there's something admirable about the fact that this managed to be such a memorable cacophony somehow. it's the same as remembering the exact random seed of crazy bus that we all know...except less about having had something that became a meme battered in my face, and more just i dunno something about this insanity is like stimulating in a very specific way that sticks in my head somehow. it's structured in a way that gives it a touch of familiarity that a similar explosion of dissonant noise wouldn't, something about the just barely slightly off overlapping timings of the multiple layers of rapid winds i think is exactly what does it.

it's like knowing the exact cue of rube goldberg bouncing chaos sound effects in a movie you watched 400 times as a kid, or something like that. and then getting the audio of that scene 'in your head' as if it's a song. or like knowing the exact rhythms and cadence of some guy's voice. not melodic or even musical, but a difficult pattern that i can still latch onto. this is probably very subjective and not a shared reaction i'd expect others to have tho

i don't think i've ever listened to this ost in full but i know it's full of plenty of quirky proggy stuff, and this is certainly an example. at a glance it might sound like stereotypical stravinsky rite of string pastiche (a style i love to begin with. that brass part especially nails the stravinsky feel) but this adds a light cartoony flair with stuff like the sporadic vibraslap hits. making it feel more like Pokemon Anime music that sounds sorta like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1__IpPla9c

still feels like a formidable foe, but you can tell it's taking place in a universe with a more 'fun' animated aura about its world. i've sporadically mentioned how i love when i can feel that. it's hard to get the exact balance right of serious and cartoony, where one of the two doesn't overwrite the other into oblivion, but this has it balanced perfect for me

so it took quite a while to get it, but this song is...completely normal 4/4 i think?! in every way, but the track is clearly extremely averse to repetition. or even when it does repeat, not making it clear where the loop point of a given layer is. it's actually very fascinating composition to finally pick apart, but not in the sorta way i was expecting going in. i don't really have a use for typing in a bunch of numbers (i was expecting to have to make some actual visual chart of layered rhythms based on how it sounds), but i can just be like "whoa....it's normal, but it does everything possible to make me think that it is not". there's not really any layers asserting the 4/4 at all, it just...is.

I think what makes it feel so weird is that the /drums/ have no involvement in asserting 4-bar-phrased-4/4 or anything, the only thing really truly consistently tethered to where barlines would be is the constant atonal string notes...and even those, often ascend in ways that aren't quite what they did the first time. and it's harder to keep track multiple bar long passages of sequences of even-spaced notes unless you're doing it deliberately. Drums are the most typical timekeeper in music, so what's really cool here is the drums exist for more 'punctuation' purposes, they don't keep a groove or beat, they accent or intensify the texture at any given time.

oh and of course this is a "sample-based chiptune" so here is a visual, it got a little messed up synchronization-wise; also i misunderstood how extracting the sequences worked so a couple of the instruments are missing in the visual--if there's something you hear that you can't see displayed, that's why (most obvious with the wacky fluttery winds at the beginning). sorry about that! if anyone actually cares about these i can make a better one for this later but it'd actually be a lot of work in this case because of how this extraction seems to work
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbhHYp9nZy8