LogFAQs > #962543949

77nd
Game: Murasaki
Title: Fishing for Lapis Lazuli in a Pond on the Moon
Composer: watson
Nominator: @UF8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnZUoxClRoM

PMD strings at the beginning haha. this is like the Office Lounge Dungeon in pmd5.

so i've made it no secret that i really liked uf8's noms for this topic and that i like watson. i feel like it shouldn't be surprising that i like watson if you know my taste well, which uf8 does, but man, it's one of the better jazz_fusion<->edm blends i've heard in something. it feels completely natural and organically segued together as styles in a way where one side of the mix can't live without the other. dnb-style drums, 808 perc, warpy synth pads, but also an amazing brass solo!!?! yeah, i mean that style merging is basically why i like yasuhisa watanabe, but this is a very very different manifestation of that. and this also has pokemon mystery dungeon trope at the beginning of the song for some reason which makes it even more a seamless blend of styles i look out for but can't often find merged together in a way that feels natural and not forced. this song doesn't register as "mix of unrelated styles" until i'm analyzing it for a writeup like this. It feels like every element belongs here and would only belong here. jazz and dnb and 'downtempo' and "pmd dungeon music" don't exist: only this song exists, it happens to be all 4 o those things at once but the genre of this song is best described as WATSON(gym leader)

one thing i've noticed in a number of watson songs is how spectacular his use of detuning is. the chord that comes in is like on top of itself detuned from itself and it feels otherworldly. something like that could wind up feeling "wrong" but here it instead just creates a new icy timbre essentially. nekomata master does very similar things a lot and i've always liked that. another thing i really like about that starting chord sweep that opens the song is that it sounds like a brass instrument at first, but reveals that it's actually just like a really strange synth (and even returns as a more percussive sound with sharper attack later one, with the slow attack from the fade in being a TRICK)

oh and of course the other thing that makes this partially 'jazz' is the extended harmonies in the electronic piano. epiano is an instrument where i'm unsure whether the reason i like it is because i actually like the way it sounds, or simply because i associate it with types of music i like a lot ."electric piano = modern jazz", "rock organ = prog" is in a similar boat, well. i like it, so i'm not complaining that it's here! (ok honestly one of my first "favorite songs" (from when i was like 3) was a mannheim steamroller christmas arrangement that opened up with constant dx7 electric piano sound so i take that back; i've always specifically liked this /sound/:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RMGesC8Q18
)

watson's stuff is almost always very 'conventionally well produced' in a way that i sometimes don't see to the same level in artists as independent as him. but one thing i just realized is a bit odd about his stuff, is how it has that norio hanzawa subtle-desync thing going on that i mentioned on war of the human tanks and a bunch of other stuff. i think it's probably simply because so many elements are played live, but some things that have this factor to them are the more mechanical elements like dance electronic drum loops, and that's where it starts to feel unusual. i suppose that's probably a side-effect of his brand of blended genre merging, and a lot of people would see that as a flaw, but for me it is exactly what i want!

speaking of the liveplayed elements, the improvised soloistic stuff throughout his work is really great. i think one of the quickest things to get me to complain about jazz is when i feel like the solos feel really stilted or cheesy, which can make me possibly unfairly judge that the artist is unskilled and not even aware of the number of possible options that'd sound good in a solo over a given thing. but watson makes it clear he knows what he's doing, he knows the vast number of possibilities that are out there that could sound cool, and picks adventurous ones, ones that never sound wrong, but certainly sound above what i'd hear elsewhere for this kinda stuff. very thankful for that