LogFAQs > #962919927

64rd
Game: GUNBRICK
Title: Convention 3
Composer: Eirik Suhrke
Nominator: @Flamander
https://phlogiston.bandcamp.com/track/convention-3

I'm a big fan of Eirik suhrke! I can tell that in many ways what he looks for in vgm is very similar to what I look for and it certainly shows in his work. Often i find comfort in knowing that. Knowing that even when i may feel alienated at times for having such weird preferences, that a musician like him exists who continues chugging away with his strange style in every work he touches. Even his most conventional music is usually at least slightly off kilter ("convention" being in the track title here is a pretty amusing irony)

The most in-your-face break from convention is that detuning ascending repeating note at the start, but there's some subtler strange things later too. My favorite part is actually the section with actual chord changes, because it gives the illusion of being something a lot more commonly heard at first, but that chord change at :25/:39/1:07/1:20 is out of nowhere and instantly gets me excited, every time it shows up

I've probably touched on it before but whenever there's a chord movement that's like "the root is suddenly one note chromatically above the home note for the first time" it is always so emotionally powerful to me for some reason. It just creates a punch with this opening of possible melodic and harmonic options that the song closed itself off from until that point. The recurring shifting between one set of limits and another more open set of limits never really gets old. Sooooo many big favorites of mine do it. the first one to come to mind for me is Gauntlet IV - Transparent Obstacle:
https://youtu.be/67fZSJKQfkQ?t=130

the fourth chord in the loop starting at 2:10 (at 2:16/2:24) it just hits me SO Hard i dont know why....it's a perfect climax.

Convention 3 is almost the opposite level of "epic" from transparent obstacle, it's much more bouncy, blocky and quirky, but that chord at :25/etc still has just as much powerful serious punch and climactic feel, even with that "climax" being like literally only 25 seconds in, it feels like i instantly imagine the first 25 seconds of the song as having actually lasted for 2 minutes and this is like the BIG MOMENT

and that brings me to just...this tune says a lot in its very short runtime. Theres so much more information in the song than its short loop length would imply! it's not even moving between sections that fast, it just "feels" so much longer than it is, in a good way! it's not tedious at all, i think it's basically because "i like the song" that it feels that way but maybe also because of how contrasting the two main sections are from each other. one sounds like it is a broken dream and the other sounds like it is an action video game song

this tune reminds me a lot of zan-zan-zawa-veia, partly because of the weird chord changes, partly just because of the instrumentation, especially the "dissonant funky synth" mood (especially that cool thing where the drums are like, a harsh tone, that you could pin to a specific note, rather than just being not tuned to anything. that's a very ROUGH janky vgm sound that is rare to see done on purpose, but both zan and eirik do it just for the sake of it feeling cool)

this song is the musical equivalent of round organic goo blobs being transformed into rigid cubes at a frantic tense rapid pace inside of a grid. these warpy "bouba" sounds contrasting against the very hard bumpy "kiki" gridded backing, all in the bouncy funk that merges the two together. it's a pretty perfect balance of timbral and compositional distinction. every element of this stands out against the others with a sharp drop shadow