LogFAQs > #963540241

46st
Game: Entomorph: Plague of the Darkfall
Title: Saltmoon Village
Composer: Danny Pelfrey, Rick Rhodes
Nominator: @Zyxyz0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_qOpCjBpy8

LITERALLY JUST DEEP FOREST (i love "Deep Forest")

so this is "worldbeat" maybe, the genre of music that is imitating music that sounds like the artist Deep Forest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovwGCpx8ecY

that is one of my favorite genres for sure; a very distinct subgenre of "new age". definitely the precursor to things like ar tonelico or whatever, but more specific. there's a very distinct sound worldbeat has that isn't approached often outside of it really, even if i could make some vapid comparisons.

a lot of people cynically dismiss 'world music' as like shallow, or even outright harmful cultural appropriation. i do not want to get into the political implications of the topic, but one thing i will say, is that I appreciate what my interpretation of the motive is (whether or not the artists or others will share this interpretation):

TO ME "world music", is sort of a celebration of the optimistic enthusiasm of the 90s that,,,, all around the world, we were human---regardless of where we were from, and we could start to connect to each other with less fortified borders cutting us off from each other. this started to be big because INTERNET (wow) and a connected globe

I think people misinterpret the definition a lot. The reason it's called "world" is not designed to reduce anything "exotic" to a vague meaningless qualifier to exploit. On the contrary, the optimistic motivation was this idea that the genre is "music of all eras and types, from all around the world, merged together", to celebrate combinations of traditional music elements that historically were not otherwise possible to have interact with each other. You call it "world" rather than ever indicating any specific country on purpose: because you're removing the borders that require such a delineation (and ideally, combining multiple unrelated cultural heritages together), and allowing every type of tradition (and modern non-tradition) to work together to create something new. Traditional bulgarian chanting is no longer alien to electronic music producers in the uk, and you can hire an actual Aboriginal Australian didgeridoo player to work with you too in the SAME song. Now that technology and WORLD PEACE have connected us all together, no culture has to be cut off from celebration

i wish 2022 felt this optimistic

honestly most times in history never had this level of GLOBAL UNDERSTANDING optimism the 90s sorta pretended to have, but this song takes me back to the fleeting moments when the world did feel that way to me.

anyway, whether or not an artist approaches this merging-of-traits-from-unrelated-cultures-and-eras in a way I agree with or not; almost always, the most IMPORTANT thing is "i think it sounds cool usually".

For me, i think it's as simple as the [traditions-of-the-old] and [technology-of-the-new] not being cut off from each other, they're not enemies, and if blended right can make something unheard of and beautiful. while i do have my preferred countries where i think their traditional folk music is most interesting (proud to be marginally bulgarian...(i am mostly mexican though)), it actually usually doesn't matter so much where it's from, because the cool part is the anachronistic blending of the old and new. This is why "world music (genre)" speaks to me: it's not that i objectify my perception of exotic, it's that traditional music represents the old, and when you blend various traditions from around the world with something modern...it's just...cool!!! It's a NEW WORLD where the african savannah morphs into a psychedelic color swirls and neon wrieframe grids transport you in an instant to amazon rain forest. That's just a cool "new" reality that isn't possible with strict borders between which styles are allowed to exist with each other or not. so i've always been a staunch defender of eliminating that barrier, the same way i'm enthusiastic about other genres with words like "fusion" in the name. if jazz can be played by modern synths; you can put amen breaks under bulgarian chanting

this entomorph song is bursting at the seams with so much cool detail. it reminds me quite a bit of Yoko Kanno actually in that department, there's a pretty good bit of anime music from her that's like...this. Just lotsa layers piled up on top of each other for cool. some songs that come to mind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn4vp9mAgjs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2efYOIPZIgs

Something that's easy to underappreciate with songs like this (things like gust and kanno, or even Deep Forest themselves) is the number of layers doing the same thing as each other on top of each other to create a sound more full. I'm more inclined to recognize when layers doing very different things from each other are intersecting, but here you have stuff where like that high bass almost feels like its a percussion instrument. And electronic drum loops don't actually feel separated from the live traditional drums. Its hard to tell where the barrier is between synthetic future elevator machine drums and real hand drums. They have MORPHED between each other. That is so cool!

One thing this entomorph song does that I actually never heard much in deep forest or anything like that is how at some parts here you've got the voices with like a flange/phase filter on them. Makes it feel like those drakengard 3 songs that do that...coool!

Honestly 90s electronic music had so much stuff "figured out" that its absurd to me that it is associated with the feeling of being dated. In some contexts there's a feeling of limitation, but this feels more sonically immersive than anything modern.

There's not any static sound here, every synth pad morphs between timbres, every lead has so many pitch bends, cool background pitch bends that create this sense of depth and height as well

If you haven't yet, and like this song. In addition to checking out Deep Forest I would highly recommend checking out the Lost Eden OST as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLjKjNp5N_Q

As i said, worldbeat is one of my very favorite electronic/new age subgenres and although it was "all the rage in the 90s" I really can't think of any examples of it being in VGM directly other than this track and the Lost Eden ost (if anyone has any good examples let me know!). I'm thankful for those examples though because they are so cool!