LogFAQs > #963646290

42th
Game: Gran Turismo 5 Prologue
Title: Moon Over the Castle
Composer: Vince DiCola, Doug Bossi, Masahiro Andoh
Nominator: @Raetsel_Lapin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6lF2uWvL7o

(0:00 - 0:29) 27 bars of 7/16, 1 bar of 9/16
(0:29 - 0:46) 15 bars of 7/16, 1 bar of 9/16
(0:46 - 2:54) 55 bars of 4/4
(2:54 - 3:03) 2 bars of 6/8, 2 bars of 4/4
(3:03 - 4:33) 39 bars of 4/4
(4:33 - 4:40) 3 bars of 6/8, 1 bar of 4/4
(4:40 - end) 48 bars of 7/16

yeah i've talked about this before; i like mathy numbers. I LOVE vince dicola (transformers 1986 for a very long time was pretty much my favorite movie soundtrack). I never thought much of any version of Moon Over The Castle other than this one back then, but i think being so into this version of this song has made me retroactively nostalgaic for all versions as a whole?

even though you don't have to write it as x/16 (could list the tempo as faster, and write as x/8, or combine bars to make it all work out to less jagged timesigs) I really appreciate that the speed of rhythms in this song at the very least IMPLIES this level of asymmetry. it makes no attempt to "smooth over" the erratic rhythms, and although they're not as insane as things /can/ get, they're in-your-face enough to make it undeniable that "mycroprocessor on board 8 in 2014 or whatever would nominate this for vgmc" which i think did happen. or something (yes, it did).

it's very JOLTEON in that sense. actual rock organ being a big factor in that too. it's undeniable that this is "progressive rock", compared to other versions of the track, it is the version of moon over the castle arranged by the guy who sent Keith Emerson (rip) his music to tell him what a big fan of his music he was and Keith Emerson Told Vince Dicola that Vince DiCola was good! HOW LUCKY. what a lucky man he was

during the period where progressive rock (as in the actual genre and not just me calling everything i like "prog") was my primary musical fixation, one thing i think i was struck by was lots of rapid arpeggiated floursihes. keyboard player playing lots of notes really fast but only for a split second! things like the start of this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeboHGRHlW4&t=2s

this moon over the castle remix has a lot of those, you don't really hear things like that (especially not on keyboard) in mainstream popular music. in 2011, being suddenly exposed to artists like fairly surface level prog bands like Rush and Yes (which---to me were actually pretty alien in 2011 or so, i hadn't heard much like them in my exposure at the time), was a big deal. part of why it was a big deal was because they were /popular/, known for things that aren't even prog at all. but they bridged the gap from the very conventional as a natural segue into way more chaotic and strange work like king crimson and whatever.

2011 really was there year where i was exploring progressive rock specifically, as opposed to "vgm in odd time", or wishing that edm would have odd time signatures in it. i'd known what prog was before but honestly had only minimal exposure (and maybe some of the least 'adventurous' prog exposure i could've possibly had, i didn't even realize the genre was THE place for odd time, despite loving odd time, until my friend had showed me some rush songs with little odd time tidbits...which seem like 'nothing' now relative to what i've become used to, but at the time hearing stuff like that rock music was kinda mindblowing).

anyway i think i discovered Vince DiCola only a year off from that, 2012, and i was pretty psyched! because it was hard to find that style as translated to 80s synths, most prog bands got a lot simpler in the 80s, even if i was more attracted to the heavily produced, shiny plastic sound of that decade than anything before it: this just didn't correlate with composition being what i wanted. Vince DiCola fixed that problem! He didn't exactly keep the same sound in the future, and this track honestly sounds more like it's out of the 70s despite it being so new. but i'm not really complaining there, it's exciting that it makes his influence clear!

i'm a big fan of how some of the later sections here keep the erratic rhythms from the beginning, but the energy level is somehow the calmest of any part of the whole song. the contrast between that and the aggressive intro, is a good show of how even something as forcefully asymmetric as these prime numbered machine gun spasm rhythms, can have just as much variety in intensity and emotion as any other type of music. I like seeing this stuff as simply another option that music can be, rather than even insisting ideas like 'odd time is unsettling, it's good for horror' or whatever, it's good for anything, it can sound like anything. Here it sounds like everything.

this song is so sad. it's pretty emotional, furiously dramatic, much of that is sourced from the original material, but this arrangement's flair highlights it all to me just because by design there's so much constant motion between all the notes and stuff.