mcc
What I'm listening to today: "I Don't Give A Fuck", DJ Rashad
DJ Rashad was a wildly inventive instrumental hip-hop producer working in a Chicago-local microgenre ("Footwork") he himself co-created; his stuff sounds kind of like trap music from another universe (the universe is Chicago). This song, from an album released one year before Rashad died, is an unpredictable, unsettling, avant-garde descent into darkness. It goes real hard.
This recording contains Cuss Words
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Whisper and Mantra" (Secret of Mana), Hiroki Kikuta
I've mentioned before the SNES sound chip was a beast. Secret of Mana uses that chip to the fullest, leveraging its strengths *and* weaknesses. Consider this song that plays in mana temples, how the vocal sample starts & stops so abruptly. Technically that's a limitation of sample synthesizers but it feels right— "diegetic", like inhuman, supernatural voices are leaking from another world.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Mystic Invasion" (Secret of Mana), Hiroki Kikuta
So in the first mana temple the peaceful-if-spooky "Whisper and Mantra" plays. Then you reach the second mana temple, which has been overrun by surreal monsters, and this dark, fusion-jazz variation on the temple theme plays instead.
Secret of Mana has kind of a nothing plot but it's really emotionally memorable!— In part because the soundtrack does so much of the heavy narrative lifting.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Ceremony" (Secret of Mana), Hiroki Kikuta
One of the places Kikuta brings traditional Asian music forms into his game work and one of my favorite pieces of video game music ever, this chaotic gamelan fugue plays as our heroes descend into the nightmarish inner sanctum of a sinister cult. The low-res samples really sell the feeling here; it makes me imagine music playing from an old, crackly loudspeaker bolted to the side of a public shrine.
mcc
What I'm listening to today: "Prophecy" (Secret of Mana), Hiroki Kikuta
SoM has multiple "airship" themes and this is the final one, when you enter the endgame, the sky is darkened and the Earth itself has changed. It is *super* dramatic. Again amazing use of the sample synth, in its context it really doesn't sound like something a Super Nintendo should be capable of.
(Missing from this recording: The crackles of thunder indicating the movements of the Mana Fortress.)
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