LogFAQs > #963365008

52th
Game: Murasaki Tsurugi
Title: Darkness and Rumbling
Composer: watson
Nominator: @UF8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wxDTgzf9o

I wonder if Watson (gym leader) would ever do a cover in his style of relevant gen 3 pokemon music.. . .or if he would think it is very annoying that I have created a forced inside joke with myself of always calling him watson(gym leader)

This song checks a lot of boxes for me
1. Chord changes based on transposing one single chord around
- this is especially cool at the beginning, as what is initially a plain chord loop gets other layers adding even stranger harmonies in top of those same chords. And as more elements come in, it starts to contextualize it all as something more 'musical' than the initial simple cluster transposition (and of course, enforce the thing i love where melody lines and whatever have to essentially change key every 2 seconds to work and how that makes me float in the sky)
The filter sweep effects on those pads and all that really bring this element alive!

2. Very fake slap bass
- and fake versions of real instruments in general I suppose. One thing I think is very cool about this track is the fact that the "fakeness" all resides on the timbres themselves, but the composition is by contrast super alive and organic, liveplayed feeling. Like theoretically this could be a live band all playing midi controllers, where someone with an EWI could be playing back a guitar sound, live electric drums, epiano being played back by a "marimba lumina", all hooked up to laptops and set to cool synthetic vsts. something like this:
https://youtu.be/IHmwfT_HBWA

3.(I had a 3...but i forgot what it was)

i saw that "eBand" concert that i linked above live..i think. anyway i was always inspired by things like that back when the idea of it was 'new' in the early 2000s, now the idea is a bit more normal though usually not actually live. watson's probably just playing all his layers on his midi keyboard live and recording the data into the daw and messing with it. there's an irony of jazz-adjacent genres being entirely electronically produced: a category typically priding itself on freedom and the organic nature of human expression. but i think part of why it works is because jazz and all it's derivatives have always been pretty centered around the idea of it being "new" and evoking the urban. So naturally, evolution of it transforms into watson/yack electronic fusion zone by the 2000s. (ironically NOW "jazZ" is like, old, traditional, and most people in the vgm world probably think of "cuphead" before anything else, despite the profound influence modern fusion has on even very mainstream vgm. and there's also some really stubborn people who refuse to acknowledge it can evolve wildly and still have the same roots. )

Uf8 loves to sit in a lounge chair that has a post-memphis-milano colour scheme while looking at the skyscraper window into the darkness and brightness of the fast moving urban night

I JUST REALIZED how much this song feels like Wataru Ishibashi. I was getting all ready to make Yack comparisons but this is definitely more comparable to the mood of something like The Ruined City Kishgal. In fact if I had to guess composer without knowing the track already id probably guess ishibashi, even though Watson would be incredibly obvious in hindsight