“Title / Menu Music” opens up this two-track game soundtrack, building a Halloween-ish vibe with chiptune theremin over breakbeats, a style kept up with some variance in the other track, “Gameplay Music”. Effective at setting the playful mood and evoking a sense of setting, the tracks are lively and bustling, though it does seem like the gameplay track would end up being rather tiresome for more than a quick play session.
Hülsbeck
In this third installment collecting spare works by Chris
Hülsbeck (preceded by 1991′s Shades and 1992′s To Be on Top), pieces composed during his time with the German video game development studio of Rainbow Arts are the focus, including cuts from Z-Out, Jinks, and The Great Giana Sisters. Despite being rerecorded for the CD’s release, hardware from the Atari and Commodore computers for which the games were released is still used, with Hülsbeck drawing some impressively lithe performances out of the machines, and vocals appearing on four of the nineteen songs.
A broad spectrum of moods and song-writing approaches keep things moving and varied, with the expected early techno joined by more freeform and laidback compositions. On the downside, most of the tracks are main themes and medleys, which prevents much momentum or continuity from developing beyond the repetition of beat-patterns and certain synth voices. It’s a nice tour, with plenty of well-made moments (sometimes to a startling degree, considering the limited instrumentation), but it works much better in separate servings (particularly with the sound packs of the last four tracks, “Samplemania” I through IV) than taken in one go.
Packed on the same CD as the game’s data, the twelve tracks of this album offer a quick run through the music of Descent II, which leans into industrial metal and experimental electronic for its flavors. Brian Luzietti provides the bulk of the tunes, including the main theme, with some other obscure composers (e.g., Johann Langlie, Ron Valdez, and most of the other contributors) lending assistance here and there, while Skinny Puppy’s Kevin Ogilvie and Mark Walk turn in a couple of tracks, and an instrumental remix of Type O Negative’s “Haunted” is dropped in towards the end. For such a jumble, the music manages a surprisingly consistent mood and tone, aided by its sub-30-minute run-time, providing a clear slice of mid-’90s technolust attitude with electric guitars still ingrained.
This score album collects twenty-one of the audio cues from the 2002 game of its name, with just one of those tracks breaking the one-minute mark, and most of the rest falling under half of that. The standard mood of the tunes is one of dark moodiness, in keeping with the isolated setting and horror themes, but the string of “Polly Music” cues jumps quite capably over to quirky techno territory for the two minutes or so that they last. Touches of classical and early-20th-century pop are folded in as well, and for the brevity of the collection, it touches on an impressive range in its run, all pulled off with high style.
The score to the PS2 video game
ボクと魔王 (released outside of Japan as Okage: Shadow King) brought together six composers under the umbrella of the ‘Peak A Soul+’ name, to write cues for the game both individually and in various collaborative configurations. The majority of the music takes on an almost carnivalesque mood, with emulated wind instruments and little blats of brass joining programmed percussion and tambourines, with inventive combinations of odd rhythms helping to foster a proggy sense of the musicians’ immersion in their work.
The pieces representing different villages of the game are given little touches of individuation, like the background whir of gears for “Theme of Madril”, and the assorted dungeons and battle themes are given similarly distinct energies to fit with their contexts. For a score with such a large team of composers behind it, the music generally flows together well, with revisited motifs and retained instrumentation helping to make the jumps from one of the song-writers to the next almost indistinguishable.
At two CDs in length, with alternate versions of a number of cues included directly after their original cuts, it does run rather long, but that also offers some insight into the ideas the composers had for how to approach the same material from different angles. While the presentation might have benefited from some ordering adjustments, the actual content is excellent, and much like the game itself, takes some unorthodox approaches to qualities which have become common-place for the genre.
In this soundtrack to one of the more popular space shooter video games, composer Hisayoshi Ogura pulls together a nice range of compositional techniques, bouncing from fluttery light synths to pounding bass ostinato, flowing smoothly through hooky anthems and solid stage themes. Casual touches of humor help elevate the late-’80s electronica’s coolness, with serious dives through straight-forward power riffing providing a substantial portion of the score’s run. The tracks veer closer towards early techno than to electro, though they mostly dodge falling into loop studies, and the few trips through subterranean gloom show the arcade cabinet’s sound hardware put to impressively nuanced use. Good stuff, if fairly niche.
Scrambled Brains 