306: Grim Fandango Remastered: Original Soundtrack, by Peter McConnell & Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Peter McConnell & Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (USA/Australia)
Grim Fandango Remastered: Original Soundtrack (2015)
37 tracks, 60 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

With bony hands I hold my partner

On soulless feet we cross the floor

The music stops as if to answer

An empty knocking at the door

It seems his skin was sweet as mango

When last I held him to my breast

But now we dance this grim fandango

And will four years before we rest

Olivia Ofrenda

Well. Surely this is serendipity at its finest? Today is the 2nd November, otherwise known as Día de Muertos – the Mexican day of the dead – and here we have an album dedicated to just that day. Surely there have been some ancestral forces at play in determining that. Thank you, ancestors!

I say the album is dedicated to it, it’s actually the game of which the album is the soundtrack that is dedicated to it. Grim Fandango, originally released in 1998, is one of the best video games of all time. The gameplay itself is in the classic LucasArts puzzle-solving adventure style, but it is its aesthetic and narrative that make the game truly iconic. It is a stunningly beautiful world with a unique and genius set of influences. The setting is the Land of the Dead whose architecture is a mix of art deco, Aztec and Latin American styles. The story is a classic film noir conspiracy and its cast the souls of the departed, making their way to the next world. They are reapers, gangsters, beatniks, revolutionaries, grizzled seadogs, colossal elemental spirits driving tricked-out hot-rods, and many more innocent dead caught in the crossfire. And all of this is set across four days: the Day of the Dead, four years in a row. I’m getting excited about it just writing about this game: that’s how much it impacted me.

The music is such an important part of this world building too. It suits the locations and the atmospheres to a T, and it uses just as many (if not more) influences. Throughout the soundtrack, composed by Peter McConnell, are elements of Mexican son and mariachi, Andean music, Indian classical, surf rock and tango, which all fit in and alongside the main sounds – cool and smoky jazz, frenetic bebop and dramatic and occasionally avant-garde classical orchestral music. Not only is it the perfect soundtrack to Grim Fandango, but it’s also just an amazing album.

The particular album is actually not the soundtrack as heard in the original 1998 release of the game, but of the 2015 ‘remaster,’ in which the game underwent a full clean-up, transforming the incredibly polygonal models for shiny, round, high-definition ones without losing any of its unique visual style. The music underwent an overhaul, too. The original soundtrack had been created with a handful of musicians and a huge library of sampled sounds to recreate the immense textures of orchestras and big bands. The problem was that, although the music sounded real enough for a 90s video game (when gamers were still used to music made up of bleeps and bloops), the timbres sounded dated in the 2010s. So, they went back to the original scores and re-recorded the lot of it from the ground up, with all live musicians and a full symphony orchestra. It sounds absolutely luscious.

Nevertheless, I wasn’t really intending to buy the remastered album; after all, I already had the original soundtrack and those slightly clunky sounds had their own charm to them. I had the remastered version of the game to listen to the new recordings if I wanted to, so what’s the point. But then I heard the new version of the piece ‘Casino Calavera’. Here is the 1998 original:

And here is the 2015 remaster:

For the first chunk of it, it’s pretty much what I expected: the same piece of music in every way, a swanky big band toe-tapper with a slightly dark edge to it, sounding lovely and polished by its performance by human musicians rather than computers. But then…an extended, improvised Latin jazz trombone solo! I wasn’t expecting it at all, and to hear a piece of music you know so well and love changed up in that way is like finding that your favourite book had a handful of equally-enjoyable chapters at the end of it that you’d never noticed before. The solo finished and I was already getting my bank card out to buy that soundtrack when…a clarinet solo! Oh man. Is it silly to be that blown away by the soundtrack to a video game?

I love it, I love it, and I will recommend Grim Fandango to absolutely anyone. If you have any interest whatsoever in video games, film noir, jazz culture or just great storytelling, you owe it to yourself to experience this game. Delve into its world and you’ll find something truly wonderful and a spectacular piece of art. And if all you want is a great and varied hour of music to divert you, the soundtrack will do just that too. Happy Day of the Dead!

287: Passion, by Peter Gabriel

Peter Gabriel (United Kingdom, with a worldwide cast)
Passion (1989)
21 tracks, 67 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Passion is Peter Gabriel’s not-quite soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ. It’s not-quite because he actually continued to work on the music for months after submitting it for the film, adding extra tracks and developing the material to make sure that the experience of listening to it as an album was an artistic encounter all of its own.

Gabriel’s aim for the sonic setting of the music was to root it in the oldest sounds of the Middle East and North Africa, the folk and classical styles of that region. As such, there are musicians and samples from Turkey, Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco, Armenia, Iran and Kurdistan. From that basis, he adds many ambient textures and small flavours of his own brand of prog rock. He also uses influences, musicians and samples from a wide range of other cultures too, from Pakistan, India, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau, Ethiopia and Ghana, in beautiful and inventive ways. With this album containing many impressive guest stars – Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Youssou N’dour, Baaba Maal, L. Shankar, Billy Cobham and Kudsi Erguner to name just a handful – it’s possibly more accurate to credit Gabriel as composer; this is much more than a ‘Peter Gabriel album.’

That probably plays a big part in why I enjoy this album so much. As much as I deeply respect his work in the promotion and recognition of music from all across the world with WOMAD and Real World Records, I have never really been able to dig his own music. Here, though, the atmosphere is very different. The scope is epic – and cinematic – but the performances themselves are very intimate. For every intense, percussion-driven section, there is a solemn and introspective section, periods of quiet reflection led by flutes or bowed strings. In bringing in music from across the world, he is very respectful without being overly reverential, allowing the different styles to mingle and create new possibilities.

More than most, I think this album benefits from being heard in one go, from beginning to end. I had heard tracks from Passion before, which gave hints as to its beauty, but the first time listening to it all the way through was a revelation. It was helped by the fact that it was at the WOMAD Festival, remastered and on specially-cut vinyl, played on one of the world’s most intricate surround-sound systems on a warm morning as I ate my breakfast. To not only listen to the music and the amazing quality of sound, but to do it together with about 100 other people was a very special experience. The engaged and focussed listening of the album as a whole really brought out its magnificence and highlighted its status as a complete and self-contained work of art.

In a nice touch, this album was released alongside Passion Sources (Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes), a compilation album of music that was used in Passion (whether as samples or recorded especially) or that provided inspiration during its creation. It’s a great companion piece, and a great way to begin to delve into the roots of this wonderful music.

277: Hamilton: An American Musical, Original Broadway Cast Recording

Original Broadway Cast Recording (USA/Puerto Rico)
Hamilton: An American Musical (2015)
46 tracks, 142 minutes (2CD)
Spotify ∙ iTunes

For those that have never heard of Hamilton, it’s a hard sell. A sung-through hip-hop musical based on the life of a US Founding Father – Alexander Hamilton. It sounds ridiculous, and even typing that sentence I can hear in my mind the sort of dross that it would make me expect. Lucky for me, then, that I actually heard a couple of tracks from the show before it was explained to me.

Because – if you didn’t know by now – Hamilton is a revelation in the world of music theatre. It has won buckets of Tony Awards and Olivier Awards (including Best Musical and Best Actor in both) and many other theatre awards, the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theatre Album (for today’s Good Album) and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda. It’s broken box office grossing records and tickets – on both Broadway and the West End – routinely go for silly money. Perhaps most impressive of all, it turned me, an avowed anti-musical-theatrist, not only into a huge fan of Hamilton itself, but has opened my ears to a world of art I had previously considered far removed from my own brainspace.

How did Miranda manage to turn such a corny premise into probably the hugest (small-m) musical phenomenon of the past decade? First off is the obvious quality of the music on offer. To hear the words ‘hip-hop musical’ is surely to cringe; a bunch of ‘theatre kids’ with their flamboyant overacting and cod New York Jewish accents, making semi-ironic and wholly-awful attempts at old school hip-hip-hippety-hop – argh, I get angry just thinking about it. But Lin-Manuel ain’t like that. He’s dyed in the wool, growing up immersed in the sounds of hip-hop of all styles, as well as musical theatre cast recordings, competing in ciphers as a kid and compulsively writing raps. Add that together with a genius brain for lyricism, drama and storytelling, and you get a musical based around hip-hop in an authentic and sympathetic way, with incredibly intelligent verses that convey huge amounts of narrative, emotion and personality in very limited space and absolutely dripping with witty wordplay and virtuosic rhetorical turn-arounds. The musical isn’t limited to hip-hop either, as listeners are taken on a journey through R’n’B, jazz, classical and standard showtune-type music as well.

Another thing that really helps the whole conceit is that the casting was made in a very conscious way – in the original Broadway cast that you hear on this album, all actors except one (the ridiculous figure of King George III, e.g. the oppressor) are played by people of colour. This allows the show to be approached in a different frame-of-mind than otherwise, bringing to the fore different themes and connections to the present day – and manages to disguise the fact that, at its core, it is a story about the entangled lives of a million mostly-rich white men, as history typically focuses on at the expense of basically anyone else. It also allows for the casting of actors with very different skill sets than might normally be found in a story such as this.

Even divorced from the play itself, this original cast recording stands up as a Good Album and a rewarding listen in and of itself. The cast is made up, as you can expect, of amazing performers, from Miranda himself as Alexander Hamilton, Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr, Renée Elise Goldsberry as Angelica Schuyler and, for me the stand-out voice of the whole thing, Daveed Diggs as the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson. Diggs is a well-known alternative hip-hop artist in his own right, and he brings that to his roles with amazing results – his rapid-fire verse in the song ‘Guns and Ships’ is the fastest in Broadway history, averaging at 6.3 words a second, and each of them clear as a bell. Add in the fact that the whole album was produced by ?uestlove and Black Thought from The Roots, and the musical pedigree is outstanding. The story is just as affecting as on stage, too. The first time I listened through to this album, I was completely hooked in a way that, paradoxically, made me stop listening to it. I was so engaged in the story and enthralled by the music that at the end of the first act, I had to put it down – I wanted to make sure I could listen to the second half of the performance in a way that I could devote to it my full attention…and also, I didn’t want it to be over so soon. After I had finished that first listen through, on a sunny bumble around Brighton, with my heart having been wrenched several times by the multiple tragedies of the piece, I had to just sit down and reflect in silence. It was incredibly moving. Just how Miranda could read an epic-length and very dry biography of Hamilton and pull from that this intensely emotional, funny and downright badass hip-hop musical is simply astounding.

I’ve extolled Hamilton a lot here (can you tell I’ve been waiting a long time for this one to come up on this blog?), and I think it would be remiss to not at least mentions its faults. Some are understandable, such as a few fairly major historical inaccuracies that are bound to occur in the context of making a neat and compelling two-act story. Some are less so: the criticisms of slave-owning Founding Fathers are a little too subtle – or perhaps, too gentle; the construction of an ‘immigrant’ narrative around Hamilton as an analogue to today’s immigrant experience when he was actually just a white guy who moved from one British colony to another when he was a teenager; and the co-opting of an art-form of the oppressed to sing the songs of the oppressors are a little less excusable. It is important that we don’t allow the impressiveness and wokeness of some aspects of the show to blind us to some of its more problematic elements.

Nevertheless, I remain in awe of Hamilton. Since discovering this album, I’ve not only gone on to see the show at the West End twice (simply amazing, of course, see it asap!), but I’ve also been to see several others that I don’t think I would have if I hadn’t had my eyes and ears opened by this one. Yes, ‘a sung-through hip-hop musical based on the life of a US Founding Father – Alexander Hamilton’ sounds rubbish. But if you’re at all a fan of good music and you’ve not given it a go yet, at least take a listen to the opening song and let it blow away your expectations and keep you listening for the rest of the show.

237: Pokémon: The Missingno Tracks, by Various Artists

Various Artists
Pokémon: The Missingno Tracks (2011)
28 tracks, 98 minutes
Download in full from OverClocked ReMix ∙ Soundcloud

When I started to set out writing about this album, my first thought was ‘this is probably the most embarrassing album on the whole list.’ But really, that's bullshit. You should never be embarrassed to like any music at all – unless it is music that oppresses others by its existence, in which case it belongs in the sea. But as a general rule, the whole concept of ‘guilty pleasures’ in music just shouldn’t be a thing. If you derive enjoyment, pleasure or meaning from it, in whatever form that may take, and it doesn’t hurt anyone, then it does its job as art, and is therefore good. And if I derive enjoyment, pleasure or meaning from it, then it is Good, and warrants its place on this blog. So bearing that in mind, I’m going to resolutely try to be entirely unashamed of this pick, while secretly hoping that no-one is laughing at how much of a nerd I am.

What is it then? It’s music from the Pokémon games for the various Nintendo handheld systems from the Gameboy to the DS. The tracks featured here are mostly from the first two generations of Pokémon games, whose music was based on sounds that we now think of as chiptune. You know the sort – bleepy and bloopy but with a surprising range of timbre, percussion that was just different types of white noise, and very short compositions that looped around and around depending on which in-game area you found yourself in at the time. The music of the Pokémon series was really good considering its limited resources, and could sound idyllic like a small rural village, ancient like a traditional Japanese temple, funky and action-packed for fight sequences or just one of the creepiest pieces of music ever composed.

BUT that isn’t what we’re listening to today. Not quite. Pokémon: The Missingno Tracks is an album made by the OverClocked ReMix community. OverClocked ReMix is a fun little corner of the internet where people work with video game music of all kinds and put their own spin on things. This includes remixing, remaking and reorchestrating video game music in every conceivable style, as well as making music inspired by certain games or pieces. Everything on OC ReMix is vetted before it gets posted – so the quality is usually very good – and everything is available for streaming and downloading entirely for free. Occasionally they release ‘albums’ of music based on a specific theme or game, and that’s where Pokémon: The Missingno Tracks comes from.

The way the OC ReMix project works means that the music on Pokémon: The Missingno Tracks is incredibly varied. Some tracks are obviously better than others, but the project’s vetting and compilation process means there’s very few duds in this whole set, and when the tracks are good, they’re really good. Super inventive too. There’s standard chiptune-y type remixes, but there’s also full metal rescores, piano covers, even R’n’B sort of things and original songs. But my absolute favourite has to be the remix of ‘Team Rocket Hideout’ from the original games, Pokémon Red, Blue & Yellow. This is what the original track sounds like. And this is what the remix, ‘TEEM.ROKIT’ by producer Tweex, sounds like:

How great is that?! That’s some proper industrial techno and psytrance vibes right there. I would not be embarrassed to drop it during a DJ set as long as the mood felt right. There’s dirty dub bits in there too. And I love that it still stays remarkably true to its source material – it has a lot of the same bleep-bloop atmosphere and obviously bases itself almost completely around the same melodies and countermelodies of the original, but it just ramps it up and up to the next level. It sounds (appropriately) like an evolved version of the 1996 original, and the vibe it creates is so perfect for the in-game context that I wouldn’t be surprised if something like this is exactly what composer Junichi Masuda would have had in mind if the system at the time would have allowed.

It just brings me back to a thing I seem to say way too often and that you’re probably bored of: video game music is a really untapped source of brilliant compositions, programming and ideas that are very rarely heard out of context, but that really do deserve a wider listener base than just the people that happen to play those specific games. So here’s me doing my own bit to get a wider audience, this time through the great work of the OC ReMix project. Maybe I’m still slightly embarrassed to be writing about Pokémon music on my (mostly) serious blog about the wonders of music from every bit of the world…but it’s good music, so who am I to argue?

219: Journey, by Austin Wintory

Austin Wintory (USA)
Journey (2012)
18 tracks, 58 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

It’s been a little while since I had a video game soundtrack to nerd out over, so it’s great to get to bang on about Journey today. Journey is an achingly beautiful game; it’s one of those that are brought up in conversations about ‘video games as art.’ As the title suggests, it is the story of a journey, that of a faceless, cloaked figure controlled by the player. There is no language used in the game at all – the objectives are discovered in the exploration, the internal lore and mythology are all told through vague and ancient-looking pictograms. You meet other players along the way and you guide each other and keep each other company – all wordlessly. Above all, it is entirely graceful. Every movement is like that of a silk scarf on a gentle breeze, and even when the action becomes agonising or scary, it is all with the utmost beauty and elegance.

While I don’t think it’s entirely necessary to play the video game before you approach this soundtrack as an album – I wouldn’t be recommending it as a Good Album otherwise – the two work so much in tandem that they show the best of themselves as one symbiotic piece of art. That’s because the music of Journey doesn’t play out like the OST of a film, or even like the soundtracks of earlier games. It’s not linear in the same sense that the cues are heard from beginning to end before the next one starts; instead, the soundtrack is dynamic. This means the music itself adapts and changes subtly depending on the actions or movements of the player – themes will come and go, textures swell and decay and even rhythmic aspects become more pronounced or become absent entirely, all based on how you are playing in any given moment. This not only means that the music always fits the actions and emotions of the gameplay perfectly in real-time, but also that for every player and every playthrough, the soundtrack is an entirely unique and distinct work. How to capture this in the still-linear format of an album? Well in this instance, the composer Austin Wintory also takes the role of curator, selecting the pieces and themes to highlight and balancing them in a way that reflects the emotional tones of the game without the interactive element that would otherwise ‘create’ the soundtrack.

And all of that said, what is it like? Well, as you’d expect, it’s just as elegant and graceful as the game it is part of. Its lush sound is provided by a full orchestra, with soloists featuring on cello, flute and bass flute, harp, viola and serpent (an early wind instrument made of wood and shaped like a snake, roughly analogous to a modern tuba). Wintory has stated that he tried to write the music in a way that made it sound beyond any specific culture, but instead I hear a set that has worldwide influences, amalgamated respectfully but in a way that creates something new. It’s impressive that sounds that bring to mind Indian tambura, Indonesian gamelan, Irish fiddle music, Chinese strings, Japanese taiko and West African kora can all sit so easily within swelling orchestral music and enhanced with abstract or avant-garde sounds without any of it sounding forced or out-of-place.

Like the game itself, the soundtrack to Journey is a masterclass of subtlety. It sounds like discovery and learning, and it is exciting because the next thing is always to some degree unexpected. The perfect way to approach this soundtrack is to experience it, rather than just listen to it, to create your very own version of the soundtrack and to let it touch your emotions so much more deeply for it. Listen to this album by all means, but play Journey if you can.

168: The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (OST), by Joe Hisaishi

Joe Hisaishi (Japan)
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (OST) (2013)
37 tracks, 52 minutes
Stream and download from khinsider (shhh) ∙ iTunes

Although I love Studio Ghibli’s films, I only saw Isao Takahata’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya for the first time a couple of years ago, but it’s probably my favourite film ever. It is absolutely stunning, a complete masterclass of animation, storytelling and simplicity. It is unrelentingly beautiful, the whole thing looks like an almost-finished watercolour come to life, except for when things get a little frantic and it seamlessly transitions to a chaotic charcoal sketch style. The story is rather simple, but passionately and sensitively told, based on traditional Japanese folklore, and all of that is reflected in the art style. It is a quiet, contemplative and slow film that really takes its time to ponder on the humble beauties and tragedies of nature and life. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is a nigh-on perfect film, and I encourage you all to go and watch it as soon as you can, and get blown away just like I was.

But we’re here, ostensibly, to talk about music, and specifically an album – today, the Original Soundtrack of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. It was composed by Joe Hisaishi, who is well-known for his Studio Ghibli soundtracks, but this was his first for a Takahata film. Although his other scores have tended to focus more on standard Western classical and contemporary techniques (often including some interesting synthesisers), this one is a little different. A great score reflects the film, and that is the case here: the art style looks as if it could have been made by one artist and one brush, and so the music is entirely acoustic and usually focuses on quite intimate tones. The music is pleasantly understated and has a habit of sounding incredibly simple while being anything but. Almost the entire score is pentatonic, and there are many nods to classical Japanese musical forms such as gagaku and traditional instruments such as the koto zither and ritual bells; it even at points takes influence from Indian and Burmese music – which may sound a bit odd, but its use is completely natural in situ.

The film actually incorporates music into its plot in a couple of interesting ways. When she is young, the Princess sings folk songs with her friends in the countryside, but once she is moved to the city, she is obliged to learn the classical music of the koto. There is a real binary constructed between the two, which is especially evident in the way that the Princess performs the same piece of music in both ways: the earthy, simple but friendly tone of the folk style, and the intricate and elegant, yet resented, manner of the classical style. That can even be heard in the tonalities of each variation, with the folk version being in the major-sounding yo scale and the classical in the more complex, semitonal miyako-bushi scale. This album has the nice touch of putting them side-by-side as the closing track, entitled ‘Song of the Heavenly Maiden’.

One element of Joe Hisaishi’s genius that you will not be able to appreciate through this OST album is his masterful use of silence. He knows that not every scene needs incessant musical accompaniment, and these moments of quiet are always spot-on. When the first strains of strings come in after a long, reflective silence, it makes their impact so much more emotional and intense. I know this is a piece of writing about the album, but, you know, you wouldn’t have to listen to the album if you watched the film. Then you get to appreciate it in its full glory, sounded or otherwise. Plus, you also get to experience one of the most breathtakingly beautiful pieces of art out there. Just sayin.

115: Bagpuss: The Songs and Music, by Sandra Kerr & John Faulkner

Sandra Kerr & John Faulkner (United Kingdom)
Bagpuss: The Songs and Music (1999)
21 tracks, 44 minutes
Spotify • iTunes

There has actually just been a recent release called The Music from Bagpuss on Earth Recordings, which should not be confused with this album, Bagpuss: The Songs and Music, which is from 1999. The newer release has different recorded versions of the same tracks, as well as a bunch more. But the earlier one is the one that I know, so it’s that one I’m writing about here.

And it is the album that I know. I’m not old enough to have watched Bagpuss as a kid, and I’ve since only ever caught glimpses of it on clip shows and the like. I actually rather stumbled upon this album, after hearing a very small snippet of a piece from it on a telly programme by Charlie Brooker and wanting to hear more of it. I wasn’t expecting it to be such a full-on folk fest. This happened during my slow blossoming into a folk music fan (which I’ve discussed a little before) and this album certainly helped me along the way.

The music really does reflect the nature of animator Oliver Postgate’s work: it is utterly charming and delightfully whimsical. There are silly little songs like the ‘mouse rounds’ (rounds, sung by mice, of course), to songs that would sound traditional if their subject matter was ever-so-slightly less surreal, such as ‘Uncle Feedle’ and ‘The Bony King of Nowhere’. There’s also occasional little spoken word bits and pieces from the wonderfully rounded voice of Postgate himself. It’s all so comforting and relaxing, and although the music’s themes are obviously child-friendly, the music itself is not dumbed down for the younger audience at all. This respect for its audience also means that Bagpuss: The Songs and Music is a fulfilling listen for music fans of any age.

106: The Bressingham Voigt

The Bressingham Voigt (1976)
13 tracks, 53 minutes
Stream or download on Archive.org

I think this is only one of two albums on the list that don’t actually have an ‘artist’ as such: all the music on this one is played by steam. To be more precise, it’s steam as pumped through a Voigt Ruth Model 35a 69-Keyless Band Organ, built in 1930. The organ was built in Germany, lived in Bressingham Gardens and Steam Museum for most of its time (hence the name), and was bought in 2002 by a collector in the Netherlands, where it still performs regularly.

The sound of the thing is really charming. There are loads of organ pipes of different timbres, including flutes, trompettes, oboes and strings, all with different types of tremolo available to them; there’s also a xylophone in there and a snare drum and some cymbals. And all of those are programmed into hole-punched reels – I can only imagine the amount of meticulous effort that goes into programming all that; unfortunately the name of the programmer has been lost to time. They’re not simple pieces either. The repertoire on this album is a mixture of mostly light classical pieces, Viennese waltzes, chamber dance styles and marches, mostly, although there are some outliers, such as a ‘Medley of 1954’ of some pop tunes of the day, including Hank William’s ‘Jambalaya On The Bayou’. It’s all so cheerful!

But let’s be honest, I didn’t stumble across this album out of the blue, or from a pre-existing love of mechanical music as such. No, it’s another video game soundtrack! The game Rollercoaster Tycoon from 1999* is a theme park building and management sim, and it’s one of the most perfect games of all time – it’s perfectly weighted, it’s challenging while still being incredibly relaxing and it has a wonderful aesthetic. It doesn’t have music of a soundtrack though, aside from a theme tune when you boot up the game and ambient noises of the theme park you’ve created. And that’s where this album comes in. The only music featured in the game itself is played whenever you have a merry-go-round going in your park. When it came to choosing what sounds the ride made, developer Chris Sawyer remembered an album in his dad’s record collection that would fit the bill; that was The Bressingham Voigt and so all the music in the game is just taken directly from this album.

Like the humongous dweeb that I am, when I learnt that the music from Rollercoaster Tycoon wasn’t just available as an album, but on an old vinyl from 1976, I had to get my hands on it. And I did! Pleasingly cheap too, from discogs, although now you can download it directly from Archive.org.

People have told me that they think it’s creepy – it reminds them of abandoned fairgrounds and killer clowns, they say – and I understand that a little bit, but for me it’s just too jolly! I guess it helps that it’s connected to hours and hours of Rollercoaster Tycoon in my head, but very little of the music that I listen to is so unabashedly light-hearted, so considering I’ve found some, I want to hold on to that. It’s just steam, a load of pipes and some really wholesome noises coming out of them. And if it doesn’t make you want to ride on a creaking wooden merry-go-round to feel the wind rushing through your Victorian pin-curls with one of those comically-sized lollipops in hand…well, maybe you had a bad experience with a clown when you were little, I dunno.

*It was actually released 20 years ago to the day that I’m writing this – cool!

095: Magic & Mayhem, by Afro Celt Sound System

Afro Celt Sound System (United Kingdom)
Magic & Mayhem (1999)
12 tracks, 41 minutes
YouTube playlist

You’ve heard hidden tracks before, pieces of music that are ‘hidden’ in an album in some way, usually just by being left unlisted on the packaging, sometimes after a long silence at the end, and sometimes with some tech wizardry, like being placed before the music starts. Well, this one is the next level: a whole hidden album.

Magic & Mayhem is a real-time strategy video game from 1999, with a sort of high-fantasy theme. Video games were only just being able to include full soundtracks of pre-recorded music (as opposed to programmed music that is ‘played’ by the game itself with MIDI or similar sound chips), and the makers of Magic & Mayhem leapt at the chance to utilise this ability to its fullest, and they hired pioneering world dubtronica outfit the Afro Celt Sound System to create their score. As you played through the game, it was to the grooves of the Afro Celts. So far, so relatively normal. But it turned out that if you stuck the CD-ROM of the game into your CD player instead of your computer, it played the soundtrack there as well, all twelve tracks just as it would a normal album. I’ve never heard of that technique before, but it’s a great idea.

And, because it’s the Afro Celt Sound System, the music is great too. Fitting the game, the tracks are divided up into three realms with four tracks each: there’s music for Celtic, Greek and medieval worlds. Each has its own feeling, of course. The Celtic tracks are classic ACSS with uilleann pipes and whistles; the Greek ones feature harps and guitars; and the medieval tracks, perhaps a bit oddly, are a bit more new-agey, focussing on electronic instruments but using ancient-sounding scales. From those bases, everything is given rich layers of luscious synthscapes, appropriately Afro-Celtic drum loops and an overall dubtronic production treatment. This soundtrack is maybe not as adventurous in terms of the amount of international influences and guest musicians as on their standard albums, but the quality is great nevertheless and it shows a different and little-known side to the group that went on to be so successful.

Magic & Mayhem wasn’t the only time ACSS combined their music and video games with hidden content. Their second album proper, Volume 2: Release, also from 1999, did the opposite of Magic & Mayhem: it was a standard audio album, but when you opened it on a computer, you could install a small game called Noodle, in which you could remix the track ‘Whirl-y-Reel’ from the group’s first album. The way it worked was really interesting, each instrument was represented by a little moving graphic, and each played a set of loops that you could mix and match, bring to the fore and let fade away, and even save your favourite configurations. The amount of hours I sunk into Noodle as a kid is probably too embarrassing (and too long ago) to tally. And again, this was hidden: you wouldn’t know about it until you tried it in your computer and opened that unknown and suspicious .exe.

So hurrah for hidden content and hurrah for the pioneering mix of world music and video games – it still doesn’t happen enough. More please, but until then, let’s enjoy this little-known gem of an album, hidden perhaps too well.

094: Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance OST, by Philip Glass

Philip Glass (USA)
Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance OST (1983)
13 tracks, 76 minutes
Spotify • iTunes

Koyaanisqatsi is a 1982 film by director Godfrey Reggio and cinematographer Ron Fricke that uses visuals, as opposed to language, to convey its message. Various images of human behaviour, technology, scenery and nature are juxtaposed in ways that are awesome in the literal sense of the word. With Reggio’s technique, footage that would be otherwise mundane becomes unnerving simply by the images it is contrasted with. It all highlights the concept of koyaanisqatsi: a Hopi word meaning ‘life out of balance;’ the idea, stunningly and convincingly portrayed, is that humans are living outside of their means, inviting disaster upon ourselves. The film was made 37 years ago and things have only changed for the worse since. The film is a really interesting watch, and remains as uncomfortable and unsettling as it is enjoyable.

A huge part of the artistic success of the film is down to its soundtrack, composed by Philip Glass and performed by his ensemble. In terms of its effectiveness as a film score, Glass’s work on Koyaanisqatsi is basically unparalleled, which makes it even more impressive that it works equally as well as a stand-alone suite as with the film.

This was Glass’s very first film score, but he got it exactly right. He utilises all of the minimalist styles he is most well-known for, the ever-repeating arpeggios, the deep drones and the ever-changing time signatures, all without getting boring. It has periods of calm and periods of frenetic activity, sometimes it sounds triumphant and sometimes bleak but all the way through there is a powerful sense of foreboding. The use of synthesisers, too, as an integral part of the sound alongside the standard orchestral instruments is a great addition, as it brings otherworldly timbres into play alongside the earthier acoustics, again juxtaposing the natural and the synthetic.

Some of the pieces that make up this soundtrack have gone on to have lives of their own, too. ‘Pruitt Igoe,’ for one, has become iconic, for both its music and the film sequence. It’s on YouTube:

And then there’s the opening piece, ‘Koyaanisqatsi,’ which sets the tone for the rest of the film and its score with its slow but insistent organ figure and basso profondo repeating that key word. Sinister.

Glass’s score to Koyaanisqatsi is a complete triumph. Without it (or, more practically, with a different style of score), it is difficult to imagine that the film would have worked anywhere near as well, in terms of emotional evocation or even just interest; it takes something special to sit through 85 minutes of contrasting images. As it is, the film is a key cultural touchstone and its score is a wonder of minimalist composition.

063: Homestuck, Vol. 1-4, by Various Artists

Various Artists (multiple countries)
Homestuck, Vol. 1-4 (2011)
12 tracks, 65 minutes
Bandcamp

The album by Shnabubula from the other day wasn’t a video game soundtrack, and neither is this one, although you might mistake it for one. Instead, it’s the soundtrack to a webcomic, one of the most famous there has been, actually. I can’t think of any other webcomic that has a soundtrack, but then again, this isn’t any other webcomic.

Homestuck was written and drawn by Andrew Hussie, and the plot starts with a bunch of friends acquiring a new video game and spirals out of control from there. It’s an epic adventure in terms of both the story and the length. Not only does the plot grow increasingly more outlandish and complex, but so does the comic itself: it starts as single panels with a short subtitle, and expands to includes gifs, Flash animations, side projects, games, textlogs, interesting bits of URL-fu and more – so of course it would have a soundtrack. The style of the comic is in the manner of an old-school illustrated text adventure video game, and the music it includes is in keeping with that style. It makes sense that the music is just as in-keeping. This album is a collection of the music featured in the first four acts of the comic.

Because there are a bunch of different composer-performers on the album – the material was written separately by a community of twelve fans – there is a variety of approaches to musicifying Hussie’s adventure. The music stretches from straight-up 8- and 16-bit programming that could be direct from the NES or SNES, to touching solo pieces on piano or violin and grand classical-style pieces. There’s also some plain mad shit, like a dirging lament sang (?) entirely by cats. All of it has a creepy and foreboding atmosphere, which echoes that of the comic, but there’s also more than enough to make you laugh in there too. Like many soundtracks, motifs are used throughout that pertain to certain situations or characters; it means that, when you listen to this album from start to finish, it evolves and grows, making it a rewarding listen on its own without any knowledge of the source work.

The highlight of the album comes right at the end, in the form of a piece called ‘Black,’ written by Toby 'Radiation' Fox*. I used the word ‘epic’ before, and that is extremely appropriate for this one. Here, I'll attach the video:

It’s a perfect culmination of the whole album. It’s dark, it’s funky and it uses General MIDI in a way that I’ve rarely heard paralleled. The sounds of General MIDI are quite crap reproductions of real instruments, but here they are used in their own right, turning their uncanny-valleyness into a strength: my favourite is a saxophone sound that is warped to play so fast, exceed the normal range above and below, make pitch-bends and even chords as to be wildly inhuman. Together with 8-bit sounds, synthesisers, pianos and even a sample from by 1910s vaudeville star Eddie Morton, this is a right headbanger that brings in so many references from the history of video game music to create a masterpiece.

I have to admit, with regret, that I’ve never been able to finish reading Homestuck. I’ve tried starting it from the beginning twice, but both time I’ve gotten, well, ‘stuck’ at the same sort of point and just haven’t been able to push past it. It’s a shame because I really enjoy it. Maybe I should try again…at least I know that there will be much more great music in store for me.


*Really interesting thing I found out just on proofreading: this is the same Toby Fox that went on to create (and compose) the game Undertale, which has been a massive hit over the last few years, and another game with an excellent soundtrack. Cool!

048: Yellow Submarine, by The Beatles and George Martin

The Beatles and George Martin (United Kingdom)
Yellow Submarine (1969)
13 tracks, 38 minutes
Spotify · iTunes

Like the Rage Against the Machine album last month, Yellow Submarine was a contractual obligation dun good. The Beatles had signed a three-film contract, but after A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, they figured that an animated film would be the easiest way to fulfil their contract with minimal input on their part. They licensed some of their well-known songs from recent years and chucked in a handful of originals that were deemed not good enough to put on any albums. The film company hired a bunch of actors to play the fabulous foursome, and that was that. In the end, though, with its distinctive surreal and psychedelic art style and its charming and silly plot, the film turned out to be a classic, and hugely influential in its way.

And with the film came the obligatory soundtrack album, featuring all of the film’s original songs as well as the title track. But that’s not all it included. It’s officially credited to The Beatles, of course, but I feel like that diminishes too much the contributions of producer George Martin: the whole of Side B is made up of the orchestral score of the film, which was written by Martin himself. These pieces present a much different flavour than you’d normally get on a Beatles album: they are heavily rooted in classical sounds, from Stravinsky to the scores of golden age Hollywood. Martin keeps the Beatles very present in the music, though. He worked so closely with them as to understand their artistry perfectly, and so their sound is evoked often in the orchestra, even without any direct musical quotes (well, not many). The piece ‘The Sea of Time’ even shows Martin getting into the spirit of the other George’s Indian adventures.

Back to the Beatles themselves. Remember that the original songs on the film were already written, but weren’t considered good enough for an ‘official’ album release? It’s madness, really, when you look at some of the songs discarded into Yellow Submarine. ‘Hey Bulldog’ is, in my opinion, one of the best Beatles songs ever, it rocks so hard! It starts with the meanest piano riff, which is then joined by acidic guitar and machine-gun snare; already four bars in, you’ve lost me. It’s too late, I’m already fist pumping and howling at the moon. And then you remember that the other original songs include ‘Only a Northern Song’ and the perfect kid’s song ‘All Together Now’…the quality of the ‘second tier’ songs that are included on this album just go to show the utmost quality of the rest of the Beatles’ work.

044: Awāra/Shree 420, by Shankar Jaikishan

Shankar Jaikishan (India)
Awāra/Shree 420 (1951/1955)
18 tracks, 72 minutes
I’m including this here as one album, because that’s the form I have it in. You can download the same songs-only compilation from iTunes or listen to the two complete soundtracks separately on Spotify: Awāra · Shree 420

This is a really good album to serve as a comparison to yesterday’s. They're both film soundtracks mixing Western and Indian classical themes with all the associated instruments and orchestras thereof, but here it comes from the other direction – direct from Bollywood! This album compiles all the songs from two classics from the golden age of Bollywood film: Awāra, from 1951, and Shree 420, from 1955. Both films were directed by and starred the legendary Raj Kapoor, and the music and songs on both were composed by the duo Shankar Jaikishan.

Now, Bollywood music isn’t really my thing, usually – the songs are usually completely melodramatic, incredibly cheesy and I usually find it hard to listen to the shrill timbres of the strings and female vocals. These two soundtracks are exceptions though. What originally drew me to these in particular were two songs that remain my favourites of the set. They’re both sung by Mukesh, and both are super catchy – and they’re actually two of the most famous songs from this era of Bollywood. I guess I’m quite basic. ‘Awāra Hoon’ is about the nobility of the vagabond; ‘Mera Joota Hai Japani’ is a more upbeat piece, patriotic and has a chorus that will stick in your head forever: “Mera joota hai Japani / Ye patloon Inglistani / Sar pe laal ṭopi Rusi / Phir bhi dil hai Hindustani” (and if you don’t understand Hindi-Urdu, that is: “My shoes are Japanese / These trousers are English / The red cap on my head is Russian / But still my heart is Indian”).

But, working in exactly the way these things should, these two pieces led me on to listen to the rest of the soundtracks, which are lovely all the way through. Even the voice of Lata Mangeshkar – the Bollywood playback icon and possibly the most recorded singer in history – doesn’t rub me up the wrong way as it usually does, perhaps because her particular vocal style had not yet become the basis of a million pastiches, nor become a parody of itself. In fact, it is her voice that leads my other favourites from the album, the pair of ‘Tere Bina Aag Yeh Chandni’ and ‘Ghar Aya Mere Pardesi.’ The two songs mix Indian classical music with disconcerting horror film music, wailing clarinets and slide guitars as well as something that sounds a little Russian, a bit of French and a good dose of sultriness. All sorts!

This album, and the soundtracks it contains, really make it stand out to me how easy it is to write off huge swathes of music that might contain bits and pieces that you’ll absolutely love. As I said, I’m not usually into Bollywood music, but then I heard a track or two that I really dug, and they dragged me further in and presented new and interesting listens. Never be afraid to listen a little bit wider, then!

043: The Man Who Would Be King OST, by Maurice Jarre

Maurice Jarre (France)
The Man Who Would Be King OST (1975)
10 tracks, 30 minutes
Listen on YouTube

The Man Who Would Be King is a 1975 film based on a short story by Rudyard Kipling. Starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine and set in the 19th century, it follows two British officers adventuring around India and Afghanistan, until one of them becomes revered as a god-king in the city of Sikandergul. It’s a classic tale of hubris punished, with more than a dash of colonialism and orientalism.

The soundtrack, composed by Maurice Jarre, is quite a mix between Western classical music, British folk and military music and Hindustani music, and features a brass-heavy orchestra and heavy use of Indian instruments such as the sarangi, sarod, surbahar and shehnai and even some slightly misplaced Tibetan horns. As is common for film music, a lot of the material is based on a few short motifs that are developed and varied throughout the film. A neat touch for The Man Who Would Be King, though, is that the most prominent motif is lifted in its entirety from the melody of the old Irish song ‘Minstrel Boy’ – a song which becomes important to the plot near the end of the film. By that point, the theme has come around so many times in so many different ways, we already know every note of it.

What I enjoy the most in this soundtrack is its very particular combination of Western and Indian classical musics that really evokes, for me, the 18th and 19th century interest that Western composers had in South Asian music. It’s heard most clearly when the Indian instruments are not playing, but where the North Indian melodic and rhythmic elements are transposed into the setting of the Western orchestra. I’m not sure whether this was Jarre’s intention or not, but I think it really captures that spirit of orientalist composition of the time: it’s rather clumsy and made without the depth of knowledge required for sensitive fusion (or at least composed specifically to sound that way). It’s that lack of sensitivity that makes this style rare today, but from a purely musical standpoint, it creates a sound that is very much rooted in time and place, and all the more evocative for it.

033: Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Original Sound Version, by Alexander Brandon

Alexander Brandon (USA)
Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Original Sound Version (1998)
17 tracks, 67 minutes
Listen and download at KHInsider

What is the complete opposite of yesterday’s all-acoustic album of solemn, religious chants and prayers? A late-90s video game starring a green, gun-toting, anthropomorphic hare who's too legit to quit, I suppose. Yup, that’s Jazz Jackrabbit 2. It was a fairly typical run-and-gun platformer that could never quite complete with its rival series of Sonic the Hedgehog and was eventually forgotten by most. It was quite good and I had fun with it when I was little, but that soundtrack still slaps well after Jazz hung up his bandana.

There’s a superb groove through everything on the soundtrack, but despite its name, this ain’t jazz. It’s all electronic; trance, techno and other electronica play a big role in the sound, and there’s a few little pastiches in there, but for the most part this is funk. This isn’t some crude replica, either – this funk is hard. Yes, the instrument sounds aren’t the best – it’s only a couple of steps above General MIDI – which lends it a particularly ‘gamey’ feel, but the synth sounds are quite good and the music itself is of a quality that can utterly transcend those timbres. You’ll forget that the instruments are shitty reproductions or whatever, because they work so well in context.

Soundtracks can be weird sometimes, because their quality isn’t necessarily tied to the quality or popularity of the thing they’re soundtracking in the first place. That’s how you can get some proper righteous instrumental funk locked up within a mildly unsuccessful PC game. It’s a shame, really – the music fits the game well, but it really does stand well on its own, and hasn’t dated nearly as badly as the game. This stuff deserves to be heard on its own merits.

027: Inherent Vice (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), by Jonny Greenwood and Linda Cohen

Jonny Greenwood and Linda Cohen (United Kingdom/USA)
Inherent Vice (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2014)
17 tracks, 55 minutes
Spotify · iTunes

Inherent Vice is a really cool film. It’s a darkly humorous detective film set in the hippie’s Los Angeles of 1970. It’s quite like a noir in a way, but this film’s private investigator is well-baked instead of hard-boiled. It’s got a wonderful aesthetic, thanks to director Paul Thomas Anderson and director of photography Robert Elswit: it’s romantic and wistful and bittersweet; the colour is slightly washed-out and the film is grainy; it’s like a pot-hazed memory of twenty-odd years ago.

It also sounds just like it looks – the sign of a great soundtrack. The soundtrack as it exists in album form (we are 365 Good Albums after all) is about half-and-half for original soundtrack composed by Jonny Greenwood (best known as guitarist for Radiohead) and licensed music as selected by music supervisor Linda Cohen.

Greenwood’s compositions for this soundtrack serve mostly to evoke feelings and play with tensions – making you feel a bit nervous or suspicious here, relief or sadness there. It’s mostly performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, with Greenwood and others guesting on the less orchestral instruments now and then. You can hear the noir influence in these pieces, I think – quite late-Romantic (in the Western art music sense) with the slightest of influence of jazz, in some cases a big dollop of Philip Glass, and hints at Greenwood's experimental rock pedigree all the while. In a different film, this would be perfect music for slinking around dark New York streets, but for Inherent Vice, it fits equally well with wandering around Los Angeles in a heat- and dope-induced daze.

It’s the licensed tracks that stick with me. Whereas Greenwood’s orchestral OST helps build the emotions of the film, these tracks give a real sense of place – even when that place is a bit disturbing and jarring. The highlight is Can’s psychedelic ‘Vitamin C,’ which gets stuck in my head every single time without fail and is exactly as cool as the film itself. There’s also the laid-back country of Neil Young and soul from Minnie Riperton and Chuck Jackson...but then you’re hit out of left-field with the creepily cheerful crooning-and-whistling of Kyu Sakamoto or sort-of surf from the Marketts. It’s all pretty strange and it works.

There’s also a couple of tracks that are somewhere in the middle – technically-OST and Jonny Greenwood-composed, but tracks instead of orchestral pieces that do an excellent job of knitting the two together. It’s seamless in some cases, especially with Joanna Newsom as narrator, reading beat-like monologues from the film over the music every so often.

This album is a great distillation of the film’s soundtrack, and enjoyable enough to listen to on its own. But don’t let that suffice: its real magic is its place in one of my favourite films. Come over and we’ll have a smoke and a giggle and watch and listen and then we’ll have, y’know, world peace.

014: Neverhood Songs, by Terry S. Taylor

Terry S. Taylor (USA)
Neverhood Songs (1996)
39 tracks, 57 minutes (original CD version)
Bandcamp · iTunes

(Okay, this one has been released several different times throughout the years with various bonus tracks and extra discs and all that, but I want to write about specifically the original release of Neverhood Songs...or, as it exists in my own collection, Disc 1 of Imaginarium, which was released in 2000. But that’s boring discogs.com talk. About the record itself, and a bit more besides…)

This album is the first video game soundtrack to be featured on this blog, and there’s going to be quite a few, actually. I’m terrible at video games, but I really appreciate them as an art-form, and I’m particularly interested in how they use music not only to bolster the atmosphere they wish to create, but also to match the style of gameplay that is involved. Of course, the best soundtracks are not only perfect in situ, but can also hold their own as their own art. The music from The Neverhood, a point-and-click adventure game from 1996, fits that bill. In fact, it is still one of my all-time favourite albums.

The Neverhood itself is one of the most underrated video games and its visual style has never really been matched: it’s somewhere between Hundertwasser and German expressionism, and it was created entirely in claymation. And considering the silent protagonist and only a sparse cast of supporting characters, the game is outstandingly funny.

But we’re here about the music, and the soundtrack to The Neverhood is absolutely perfect for the game. It sounds like it was made out of the same clay as the rest of it – it’s just as gloopy and thumb-moulded as the world looks. The composer Terry Scott Taylor (betterwise known as part of Christian rock band Daniel Amos) mixed trad jazz, blues and rock’n’roll to create a wonderfully evocative nonsense, almost all sung in a made-up language (bah diddly cuddly op...). There’s a little or a lot of influence from Leon Redbone, I think – more about him at some point in the future.

I think the music for The Neverhood was the first time I experienced music being funny in and of itself, without the need for comedy lyrics or whatever. The music is irreverent and madcap, but its musicians are obviously top-notch as evidenced by some off-the-wall jazz ramblings. Sometimes it isn’t even really music. The last 17 of the 39 tracks are more like skits: funny musical snippets, bizarre comedy skits and other assorted recording studio high jinks that made it into the game in one way or another. Neverhood Songs is a brilliant album, and it’s still unique after so long. Give it a listen, tap your feet and laugh yourself silly.