Video game music
Originally published in Plan B magazine, February 2009 – www.planbmag.com/shop – and many thanks to Louis for the edit.
Formative influences being what they are, it’s little wonder that a generation raised in darkened rooms, eyes transfixed by bouncing sprites traversing blocky mazes, should now be found recreating video games culture in their art. Marnie Stern’s looping runs and baroque lack of variation in tone should be instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever wielded a joypad, while Wizardzz – a side project of Lightning Bolt’s Brian Gibson – made an entire gaming concept album with 2006’s Hidden City Of Taurmond. Look deeper, though, and you’ll find a thriving subculture of games-influenced musicians that’s broad in ambition and scope, encompassing everything from emulation, remixing, cover bands, and original composition – projects borrowing not just from the games themselves, but from the culture, music and community that has grown around them.
In the US, this culture is traceable back to the late Nineties, when
bands such as Generic (later the Advantage) and Jenova Project
(later the Minibosses) began to arrange and cover popular game
music themes, touring often, making recordings freely available, and
encouraging others to join the remix culture – a growing scene of
musicians dedicated to re-recording game music.
It’s a culture that grew directly from the ranks of gaming fanboys. “I
met some kids that were learning 8-bit songs in my high school,”
explains Spencer Seim, drummer for The Advantage (who also
count amongst their number touring Marnie Stern guitarist Robby
Moncrieff). ”They were playing along to some previously
programmed drums, but I’d just bought a drum-set, so I asked if I
could play along. It was something I’d thought about doing a bunch
but had no idea in going about it, but they’d already taken all the
nerdy steps to go about learning all the stuff.” Many of these bands
typically gravitate towards Nintendo games, attractive for their instant
recognition, insistent and repetitive lead melodies, distinctive tones,
over-layered arpeggiation, and frequent modulation – many of the
staples, of course, of prog-metal and math rock. Game music is, in
short, noodle heaven.
Yet outside of its stories, there is little of the fustiness of prog or the
arcana of math-rock in game music. As a form, it’s progressed from
a classically Japanese foregrounding of melody towards the greater
textures brought by FM synthesis and multi-channel sampling, each
innovation giving rise to its own heroes, foremost among them Koji
Kondo, author of generational earworm the Super Mario Brothers
theme, Koichi Sugiyama, whose Dragon Quest 3 was the first game
music arranged symphonically, and Nobuo Uemura, whose Final
Fantasy soundtracks have synthesised Japanese and Western
traditions to such popular effect.
It’s perhaps no surprise that game sound technology, driven as it
was by composers pushing the envelope of both hardware and
programming, for some time became a staple of home electronic
composition. The Amiga and Atari ST were widely used by
contemporary Western musicians – the Amiga for its sequencer, the
ST for its MIDI – as affordable, state-of-the-art kit unavailable
elsewhere. Use of game consoles and chips – particularly, but not
exclusively, the SNES (or, for the faithful, the original Famicom) and Game Boy –
has since given rise to the thriving chiptune and 8-bit scenes, inhabited by the
likes of Nullsleep, Bit Shifter, and Unicorn Kid. “I was pretty fascinated by the
texture and mood of video game music as a kid, and the economy and
efficiency of these programs has really spoiled me,” said Bit Shifter
to digizine Chaos Control of his decision to reach for 8-bit
technology over traditional musical tools. ”It’s a pretty abstract
system, which to me is really a plus. It forces you into an unfamiliar
mode of conceptualising music and sound, which can lend well to
happy accidents and unexpected results.”
The chiptune scene is beginning to be popularly influential, as we
saw with last year’s global crush on Crystal Castles’ punk 8-bit. But
as evocative as the tones are, the majority of the chiptune scene is
remarkably futuristic; less a feint at kitsch than a passionate
advocacy of the power of polyharmonic bleeps, assembled like
edifices, yet retaining the plasticity and innovation of the best
interactive in-game music. Chiptune has instituted its own annual
bonanza, New York’s Blip Festival, while Two Player Productions
has documented the scene in the excellent Reformat The Planet,
which toured international film festivals in 2008.
Far from the filesharing and DIY shows of chiptune and remix is the
orchestral performance tradition, which has arisen primarily from the
lush scores dominating game music since Dragon Quest 3. Koichi
Sugiyama instituted his ’Family Classic Concert’ in 1987, bringing
the most popular game music compositions to the stage. The Final
Fantasy soundtracks are perhaps the apoetheosis of orchestral
game music composition, and the first to break the international
market. Since 2002, these compositions have been performed
orchestrally to concert halls all over the world, while 2007, the 20th
anniversary of Final Fantasy, saw the start of a world tour which
continues into 2009. Game franchises are wise to the remix scene
too: in 2003, Uemura recruited the Black Mages, a prog metal band,
to perform new arrangements of the Final Fantasy themes. The
Black Mages are as much a part of the Final Fantasy franchise as
Uemura himself, appearing at official concerts and events.
The symbiotic relationship between game music and Western music
cultures has come full circle with the institution of music-making
games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band saturating Western gaming
markets. When players pick up the controls to wail along to Blue
Oyster Cult, they are, wittingly or unwittingly, parodying two decades
of video game music culture by learning new, game-oriented
arrangements of rock staples. Game music is an evolutionarily lively
form, replicating and variating, inviting participation and innovation
by its very nature.
Tintinabulum 