Biogramophone

In the year that I've spent scoring an upcoming dungeon crawler -- entitled Tower of Geheimnis --, I've experienced some of the strongest moments of a rebirth of self-interest in video game music. Not "video game music" in the false-genre sense (which is often an umbrella it's unfairly put under; and, as is often the case, this "genre" is defined by its most culturally externalized idiosyncrasies, here being the "bleeps" and "bloops" of early consoles), but video game music as, literally, music that was written for a video game. This rebirth probably started in mid- to late-2009. Because of this development, I felt that a brief, but not too brief, review of myself and music would be interesting, and hopefully not too self-serving, to write up. This will by no means be complete, although a total story may be distantly viable.

If one were to guess about my musical history, judging by my current enthusiasm, one might be surprised to learn that I've had, for most of my life, a distant and hidden relationship with the medium. In middle school, I couldn't identify with the tastes of people who were receiving material from the radio and radio-sponsored albums, because -- even if I lacked the capacity to express this, or to consciously recognize it (I don't remember if I ever believed that there was something wrong with me for not enjoying Nirvana) -- I found all that music meaningless. To me, musical meaning was, and continues to be, a largely sensual concern (in the future, I'll attempt to articulate this idea). And it didn't help that most of it was lyrically driven, what with my usual disinterest in singing. Since what was on the radio and sold in music stores was, at least to my knowledge, Official Music, most of what I had to fall back, not for wealth of material but for time spent engaging it, was video game music. I should note that the music of the (very) few games I had was, by and large, not particularly special, and my exposure to new games in general was ultra-limited; so the soundtrack to a game like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was practically an aesthetically-redefining stimulant in my life.

Andreas Vollenweider's music -- Book of Roses, Down to the Moon, Caverna Magica, and Dancing with the Lion -- was some of the most significant stuff I heard in my concrete operational stage of cognitive development. My dad had the CDs in the stereo with such frequency that they are practically the focal soundtracks to the Super Nintendo video games I played (although the live Jethro Tull album, A Little Light Music, might outdo all of Vollenweider's stuff for my unofficial audio companion to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past). It's a special exception of childhood music that I can continue to enjoy with close to no reservations, and I wouldn't be surprised if it exerts an influence on my own compositional habits. Vollenweider's music is most popularly labeled as World and/or New Age, but what passes for said genres (I recognize the terms' extremely poor explanatory value) often lacks the invention of Vollenweider's capabilities, and instead suggests a safe "Peace and Love" flimsiness at the sound's center as a feel-good non-philosophy for the ears. Though Vollenweider himself identifies with pacifistic ideas, he is distinguished by his ability to map out melodies with a sharp, almost baroque flow, and produce atmospheres that are too full of earnest but controlled twists and turns to feel anesthetized or "lite" -- at least in the albums I have heard. The last new CD of his that was brought into my house was Cosmopoly. I have to say that I appreciate how Vollenweider's earlier music includes electronic sounds, whose relative youth allows both a greater likelihood of wobbly authenticity and unlikelier instrumental interactions.

To sidestep into reflective pain for a moment: Other glimpses outside of my usual musical exposure include Enigma's MCMXC a.D. album, 2 Unlimited's "Twilight Zone", and The Immortals' "Techno Syndrome". According to my parents, I heard portions of Enigma's album as it accompanied a magician's performance. Later, my parents either recorded the album on an audio cassette tape or bought the tape version of it (I'm unsure if it was ever released in that format). Today, the music sounds corny -- those Flutes of Forbidden Love kill me -- but, as a kid, it was exciting and new. 2 Unlimited's song was played during one of my gym classes, maybe in second grade. I'm certain that I requested a duplicate of the tape from my gym instructor; I'm less certain about ever receiving one. When I lived in Grosse Pointe Farms, I had an unfriendly friend named Alex Grabski who loved Mortal Kombat games and owned Mortal Kombat: The Album, in anticipation of the movie, I suppose. It's not so different from 2 Unlimited's single, so my past obsession with it is easily explainable. I don't remember if Alex let me borrow it or keep it, but . . . I assumed ownership of the album at some point. Who knows where it is now. Killer Cuts should be cited, too, as long as I'm piling on the e-blushes. It was given to me by a young relative on my dad's side of the family. I would play it on my discman when I took the bus to middle school (the second half of my eighth grade education).

It's personally obvious that the aforementioned material was a lead-up to an inevitable bonding with the electronic genre of music, specifically EDM. There were qualities to the music that were engaging me on an intuitive level. Now -- and this I find odd --, I never searched for more music after having these random, opportunistic encounters. I was given these gateways, but I was either incapable of, or oblivious to, taking further steps. It may have been a mixture of both. Of course, I'm not truly ashamed of revealing this information, at twenty-five years old; and yet, back then, there was a vein of embarrassment tied to my taste. I recall, without fail, turning down the CD player's volume if it had the Mortal Kombat disc playing, up in my Grosse Pointe Farms bedroom. On a certain level, I think I must've been aware of what I really liked, then, but it was a suppressed and compartmentalized relationship because it was unorthodox.

One of my sixth-grade assignments was to bring in a song and share my rationale for enjoyment. This assignment terrified me, since the music I sincerely liked was, again, unorthodox. For reasons unremembered, however, the assignment was nixed before I had to go, and thank goodness for that, since I had settled on a goddamn Michael Bolton song in order to normalize my preference and not appear insane. I'd probably be looked upon as just that if the assignment weren't canceled. My fear of offending people with my taste also manifested itself in the radio I did listen to, that being the Detroit station Smooth Jazz V98.7 (Mark Morrison, Doobie Brothers, Anita Baker, Luther Vandross, Sade (I do actually like the songs which I've embedded in the names of the former three)), which could be read as offensive in its great inoffensiveness.

Because Mattawan was where I lived for longer than anywhere else beforehand, it was also where I had the most consistent and developed relationships with friends. As a consequence, our tastes met and cross-pollinated. My friends would have to divulge their own stories, but I know that almost all of us had/have brought an appreciation for EDM to the table. In addition, most of my closest friends were able to treat music from video games as separately enjoyable content. On a Christmas eve (1999, I think) at my grandparents', I received The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time soundtrack. It was the second CD I ever owned (the first -- well...). My second owned game soundtrack was Dance Dance Revolution 3rdMix's, purchased at the height of Mike's (a friend) feverish devotion to improving at the arcade game. The music is a bundle of obnoxious, earworm pop-EDM made by persons or groups only ten people in the world have heard of. What else was I consuming? Select techno, tracks downloaded off of OC ReMix (this is the only remix remaining on my computer; it has a total of two plays), vg-music stations on Internet radio, and more physical game soundtracks. At least two of these things involved the Internet, the importance of which is tough to overstate. Until Mattawan, however, the possibilities for musical exchange and investigation on the Internet were unknown to me. In fact, I don't think I knew that MP3s existed before -- I want to say -- early 2002 (I can guess on this because my first MP3 was "Yell 'Dead Cell'", and Metal Gear Solid 2 was released in late 2001). Instead, prior to that, I used the Internet for visiting VGMA, researching Ocarina of Time rumors, anticipating Majora's Mask (then under the moniker of Zelda Gaiden), hunting down footage of the Heisei-era Godzilla movies, and getting myself into trouble with porn.

Three important things before I get to (mid-/late-) 2004: the soundtracks to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Final Fantasy Tactics, and the first In Search of Sunrise compilation. Castlevania And Me is a lengthy topic unto itself, and Symphony of the Night was what first directed my attention towards the series -- as I'm sure it was for many other appreciators -- and composer Michiru Yamane. True to much of my soundtrack purchases, I got Symphony's soundtrack before I owned the game, or had even finished it, and listened to it every other day on any given week thereafter. Later, I got to handwriting a gushing letter to Yamane (did I know that she was a woman, then?), but I don't think I ever figured out how, or where, I'd send it. What really appealed to me in Yamane's Symphony score was her ability to combine memorable melody with a lot of sharp-witted, classical Western harmonic flavor, and punctuate all of that with idiosyncrasies, making the songs get over just being a display of formal knowledge. I still have the opinion that Symphony's soundtrack is one of the medium's gems. As the respective game sparked a personal curiosity with Baroque painting, drawing, sculpture, and architecture, its score motivated me to revisit many of my parents' classical CDs (which they hardly listened to anymore), especially those devoted to J. S. Bach.

Were I asked to name my most valued video game soundtrack, I'd be hesitant to give an answer at all -- much of my rationale being that I think putting some work above all others objectifies it too much for me, and also puts an unnecessary strain on direct or indirect engagement with the work to keep recognizing its prioritized standing -- but Final Fantasy Tactics' pops up quickly, though quietly, as one of my most valued. It's a cooperation between Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata, and I see it as a formidable realization from practically any musical angle (video game soundtrack, orchestral canon, music as music, etc). One observation I've made is that all of the game scores I've enjoyed the most -- whose relevant games I'm acquainted with wholly, slightly, or not all -- have allowed me to craft, as it were, independent, shapeable narratives. I could not really write these down as a linear or decisive story; rather, they are abstract bodies that exist in a purely sensual realm and are subject to ongoing molding in their pattern. Within the first year of owning FFT's soundtrack, I actually produced an accompanying tracklist with made-up titles ("Random Waltz" became "The Forest I Knew", and so on), often utilizing literal diction. What I mean by "shapeable 'narrative'" is that the music's language presents an aesthetic content that evolves alongside my own developments in real-time. Or, said another way: the songs mean new and just as valid things to me at different points in my life, even though, of course, the songs themselves have not changed. I think this may be separate from "replay value" -- or, maybe, it is a maturation of "replay value." Surely, we can think of songs we've listened to repeatedly but which never become psychically tentacled (and it's probably good that we have such stuff; it'd get exhausting if we had to maintain profound relationships with all of our consumed media). After a while, I believe we tend to outgrow the immediate, transparent satisfaction these songs may allow, and what remains is that which we can consult through life's developments and find continually enriching subjective value. This is what FFT's soundtrack provides me with, and I plan to elaborate on why it does so in the future. Like Symphony's soundtrack, it was also in a CD Player or Discman to a compulsive extent for a long while.

DJ Tiesto's (the compiler and mixer) initial In Seach of Sunrise, then, is something of an opposite case of endurance. Only a few of the included tracks have his name attached, by alias or not. I remain capable of capable of liking several of the songs, in particular the opener that has just the right blend of naive eagerness and atmospheric pacing from a late 90s dance track. And the album is remarkably cohesive in ambient makeup. The greater body of ISoS, however, invokes what I've termed before as a kind of mawkish nostalgia, or outright repels, especially where any of the frankly, and predictably, terrible singing appears, none more embarrassingly than in the second-to-last track. I'm as in the dark about how I decided to buy this CD as I am about my reasons for loving it so much back then, but I don't feel the need to get self-critical, here. I'm glad I was as stimulated by it as I was, and it put me on the path to purchasing In Search of Sunrise 4, whose second CD is a personal favorite EDM mix.

Around 2004, with the aid of the Internet and my network of friends (whom I knew in person or through the Internet), electronic music and EDM became the majority of what I listened to. A lot of this was delivered via Armin van Buuren's radio show, whose deteriorating quality I've groaned about in several past posts. I've all but forgotten of its ongoing broadcasts. Adam might have introduced the show to me, but it'd be up to him to confirm this, since I've forgotten. ASoT took on the role of a unifying force for me and my friends: we burned CDs and listened to them on car trips; we exchanged our opinions of the track selections face to face or online as the shows went live; I drew and painted pieces that were representative of discrete episodes; I even made a computer document that detailed my highlights (citing play-time, since I was unaware of songs' names. I think this obliviousness added to the excitement) for each episode. As ASoT moved into the late-teens of its 200-numbered episodes, many of the selected songs settled on less enthusiastic melodies and a darker, heavier sound overall. I wasn't convinced by this change, and only became reinvested in the summer of 2006. I can see this with some irony, as the episode that drew me back in began with a remix of the Anna Nalick song, "Breathe", while the episodes that left me feeling jaded are now what I would like a lot of trance to draw on.

I had also discovered the (non-MIDI) music of the Dragon Quest video games series during this period, and was digesting this alongside the Last Exile (an anime that could be really great if it were redone) soundtracks. I think both fed into a cleaner aesthetic bent I had at the time, as was evident in my visual art and outlook on life. In my opinion, it is not insignificant that Koichi Sugiyama, Dragon Quest's composer, denies the atrocities Japan committed in the twentieth century, such as the Rape of Nanking; while revolting, this willful ignorance is suggestive of the pastoral near-naivety Sugiyama puts into a lot of his music. The descriptive power of his compositions -- paralleling (among others) Gershwin's industrious melodies, Debussy's dreamy reflectiveness, and the heroic spectacle of earlier film composers such as Erich Korngold -- is based in a type of sweet idealism that is also present in the games' bright, old-fashioned worlds. There is even a series of frankly bizarre videos that show Sugiyama conducting an orchestra as complementary medieval scenes play out. Similarly, Last Exile is a show whose world, though set in violent conflict, is romanticized through a fusion of futuristic ideas that are beautified by anachronisms. It's all in the glow of a nostalgia for a time that has never actually happened, but whose parts have real, historical counterparts. I now have trouble listening to a lot of Last Exile's music, not only because it sometimes gets so sweet, but because it's also attached to the strange, melancholic year before I first attended college, and the proceeding first semester.

Tsuneo Imahori's score for the Gungrave anime needs mention, too. It spans two albums: righthead and lefthead. I ordered righthead after watching one episode with a friend and hearing the credits theme, "When the Sunset Turns Red", performed by the band Scoobie Do (which has no affiliation with Imahori). Gungrave's soundtrack is a funny thing. I'd call it the most successful music done for an anime series that I've heard, even though it outdoes the show. This could go into how one defines a soundtrack's success. I heard most of Gungrave's music before I'd watched the show, and found it to be powerful in its emotional and narrative character; so I dub it as the most successful in the sense that I can hear it beyond explicit descriptive intent and be moved as I am. In time, I also ordered lefthead -- a difficult listen, full of discomforting, mechanical rides and highly textured reworks of motifs. Arguably more sonically experimental than righthead, it does lose the yearning, conflicted harmonic power of righthead that I loved, and do love, so much. So it's probably a good fit for the series' second half! -- which becomes pretty ridiculous and more of what its source material -- a video game -- was about. Beyond anything else, righthead is what comes to mind when I think of solo car trips to meet friends (and girlfriend) that pushed into night drives down highways, fuzzed up by the dirty yellow of street lamps.

By 2007, the evolution of my relationship with music sped up at such a pace that documenting it with any authority is about as difficult as giving a coherent account of what was happening to me from ages 6 to 10. Here is one thing I can't forget: Thanks to a user on one of the forums I frequent, I downloaded a batch of miscellaneous electronica, and a track called "Cape", by someone named Rei Harakami, happened to be in it. Hearing this song was an experience that wonderfully crashed into everything I thought I knew about music, and it was the catalyst for a new obsession. I think I can use a quote from Maynard Solomon's biography of Mozart, Mozart: A Life, and relate it to Harakami: "Such beauties convey a sense of discovery, revealing that which we have not previously seen, and the element of surprise is accompanied by a leap in understanding, an expansion of sensibility: The 'oh' in our reaction to this kind of beauty is the 'oh' of wonder, the discovery of something beyond what we thought existed. The intake of breath says that we have taken into ourselves something extraordinary, which we are loath to let go until silence has restored us to the ordinary world." To date, I've heard nearly everything by Harakami, and have acquired more of his CDs in the time table between 2007 and now than of any other musician or band.

A few months before discovering Harakami, I'd realized that my laptop contained a default musical program; so I started to mess around, mostly by combining preexisting samples. It may go without saying that there's little to comment on for this first year in making music. My results were aimless and emulative, and progress was marked less by compositional improvements and more by an increase in instruments used and tracks' length. However, there were habits I formed which largely remain to this day. For instance, my non-percussive base was always purely chordal (melodies were added on top, and were initially rare). I also showed a harmonic preference for parallel motion in said chords, and a preference for tetrads. About mid-2008, my imitative efforts followed cues from Harakami, transitioning from the externalized thumps of EDM to a comparative confidentiality. But before I go on -- I'm not capable of condensing my compositional history here in a workable way. So I will leave its advent in this essay as a stepping stone, and include bits of its advancement where appropriate.

Steve Reich came into the picture through this video of Joby Burgess performing Reich's "Electric Counterpoint" on a Xylosynth, but I don't know why I watched the video in the first place. To date, my favorite of Reich's work remains that piece: specifically, the rendition by Pat Metheny on the Different Trains, Electric Counterpoint album. Although I cite Reich as personally noteworthy, too much of his work is lacking in imagination to go beyond performances of academic novelty, beyond realizations of clever, but dry, musings on the proverbial paper. His effect on me has only been through a handful of pieces, Music for 18 Musicians included, and in making me continue to struggle with his statements about how music should be contemporary. His quote from this documentary, where he says, "This is not Europe. This is America. This is, you know, John Coltrane playing at a jazz workshop. There are hamburgers being sold, there's motown on the radio. How can you pretend, in a world like that, that you're living in the dark, brown angst of Vienna at the turn of the century [...] ? It's just not true," seems strangely literal and shortsighted, a sentiment that puts the reality of Reich living in a city over the social and cultural realities of others, and ignores that germane music can fight against a given reality by consulting supposed anachronisms. Essentially, the question is, Why does music have to sound like X just because X is/are happening?

By the end of 2008, I had pretty much given up on new trance. The fetishistically distorted basses of electro and the monotony of minimal found their way into EDM more and more, and the trance that remained as an alleged noble bastion of True Trance was a top-heavy tumble of super-compressed waves of side-chained basses and sterilized, faceless chords. I think something inside of me snapped with the Justice documentary-album, A Cross the Universe (mostly a live retread of Cross), whose music I'm fond of calling the aural equivalent of hardcore porn: arresting by its sheer forcefulness and sensual transgressions, but -- ultimately -- stomach-turning and hollow once one has gotten over the arousal of shock. I even had a dream where I went through my iTunes folder and deleted every Justice track (an action that I followed up on in real life). The literalness was funny and cogent. The dance music that I did listen to steered towards house. Its warm basslines, rich analog pads, and funk/disco influences were welcome sounds for bored ears. I also picked up on ambient material, like that of Tim Hecker, Stars of the Lid, and Biosphere, and admiringly reflected it in my own songs by way of static, bit-crushed synths, treble-reduced chords, and slower, more melancholic demeanors. I was in the process of building a tightly knit album tentatively called Tunnels, but it was my computer's fate to crash and render my songs' data (finished tracks and works-in-progress) as irretrievable. As a compulsive worrier about the data's safety, I had uploaded most of it prior to the crash, so all of the exported stuff survived. But the mixing is poor in most cases, and does not support creative closure. A future project might be redoing the songs with current know-how.

Ever since I had gotten comfortable letting people hear my music, I'd been sharing it on select forums. In summer of 2009, one of these forums' users contacted me, curious if I wanted to do the soundtrack for an iPhone game he and a team were developing. I sent a sample track in, and it was decided that I'd be the main composer (a secondary composer would lend combat-oriented themes, and I'd rearrange them with better samples). Concurrently, I began a playthrough of a friend's copy of Final Fantasy XII, scored (overwhelmingly) by Hitoshi Sakimoto. I suspect that these two factors were the leading stimuli for my return to vg-music. Working on a game soundtrack prompted me to immerse myself in other scores get into a proper mindset, coax out ideas, and to better understand the mechanics of those ideas. Even though the project was canceled after a dispute over creative property happened -- it could be revived --, I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to musically develop in an accelerated and overseen way. And with FFXII, it was a combination of the sheer time I spent with it and the potency of its music that made an impression. Though it is not as inspiring to me as Final Fantasy Tactics', I count its soundtrack as a considerable achievement of video games' past decade. Somehow, past 2006, I believe I'd been silently telling myself that I had outgrown the music of games -- that I had graduated from aesthetic infancy and was now ready to move onto Real Music. I realized, however, that this was nonsense I'd contrived for a sagacious appearance. There was so much worth returning to, and so much worth waiting to be heard for the first time.

A new compositional opportunity came to me, late-2009. On the same forum where the iPhone game's developer had addressed me, another person was planning to produce a dungeon crawler (as Wikipedia describes them, "fantasy role-playing games in which heroes navigate a labyrinthine environment, battling various monsters, and looting any treasure they may find") and needed a composer. I volunteered, and was on board upon submitting a battle and environmental theme. Rather than going for verisimilitude in the instruments, as I had for the iPhone title, I aimed for datedness, mimicking with increased success how games sounded on platforms like the Sega Genesis, PC-88, and Sharp X68000. As I did so, I began to realize how much I enjoyed FM synthesis when it was utilized successfully, how wonderfully foreign it could make even a note sound (In fact, even as the dungeon crawler's development cycle is still going, I made, and continue to make, independent songs that feature FM synths. This has allowed me to better grasp the instruments' sonic capabilities and to satisfy my formal interest (I also realized that the sound of the original Nintendo Entertainment System, and similar sound chips, didn't really cut it for me anymore)). While the idea of a dungeon crawler probably suggests accompanying music that is dry, minimal, and stiff -- and while these kinds of adjectives do relate to my initial tracks --, my exterior attention was caught by progressive jazz/jazz fusion and bossa nova/samba in 2010. Consequently, the soundtrack has come to be a container of what I would call my most harmonically and rhythmically inventive stuff to date. I also experienced something of an epiphany when a person with whom I was sharing my work commented on the stuff's rhythmic conservatism; almost all of it was in straight 4/4 time, and (though not an inherent fault of such a time signature) the melodies were stuck in rigid orientation that lacked a directional logic aside from getting to the next chord. I'm not sure why, but that one critique stuck in my brain, and stuck hard, pushing me not only to write new songs in complex time signatures, mixed meters, and additive meters, but to also pay attention to the timing of music I heard in general. In fact, said observance threatened to overshadow my emotional focus, and it is a conflict I grapple with still. I am teaching myself to leave it behind, however, similar to how I am unlearning bringing to every visual artwork the immediate question of What Does It Mean.

Progressive jazz/jazz fusion and bossa nova/samba appealed to me for basically equivalent reasons: lush harmonic character that flirts with dissonance, inventive and surprising chord progressions, and strong rhythmic cores. Among the bands and people I listened to were Pat Metheny Group, Mats/Morgan Band, Tom Jobim, and Joao Gilberto. From video games I also became enamored of Yasuhisa Watanabe (through his Border Down soundtrack) and Yousuke Yasui (through the Mamoru Has Been Cursed! soundtrack). Both would likely be typified as "shoot 'em up", or shmup, composers; unfortunately, this also means that a lot of striking music has been put into games with dismal aesthetic value, as shmups have latterly traded the theme of guiding ships through space and (post-) apocalyptic landscapes for pandering to a subcultural fetish for adolescent girls who shoot lasers and bullets from their bodies. Watanabe rarely uses non-percussive instruments that would be associated with jazz fusion, but that is an ingredient of what made his music worthwhile to me, in addition to his skill with guiding a melody along with all sorts of curious leaps and fractions in its path. Yasui's stuff is not as bound to jazz variants as Watanabe's (it's perhaps more comparable to a rococo breed of early electronic acts like Yellow Magic Orchestra), but it carries a similar emphasis on making the listener play catch-up with the composer's deviousness. Yasui has, for example, a fondness for packing the ends of phrases with a cadential flip, so that the melodic notation may adhere to the original line of thought, but the leading tonic transforms. If there is one problem I have found with Yasui's music, it is that it is a bit too intuitive, and this leads to a unity in his output that feels unfairly close, given how capable Yasui seems.

This brings me close enough to The Now that I can cut myself off. It seems inevitable that an abridged history would fashion a reductive frame, particularly in my case, where embarrassment, limited access, and narrow perspective got in the way. But filling out the spaces, big and small, is just one foreseeable function of this site. I look forward to what the coming times bring.

hello, invisible readers~

I am using this blog to concentrate my efforts on writing about music, as I felt that having a blog for practically anything was distracting. please look forward to it :bows: