LogFAQs > #964387550

14rd
Game: Caravan Stories
Title: Luwiera's Forest
Composer: Azusa Chiba
Nominator: @kaonashi1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzzP8MZQEF0

the song that made me realize i need to pay attention to basiscape way more than i had been..........like this technically turned my entire taste in music upside down. i'd been a long time fan of kimihiro abe (and since, realized i liked him even more than i thought), as well as namiki and sakimoto to a degree. but your introduction of this ost to me made me decide to re-pay attention to everything and now the most of the sound team takes up a third of my top 30 favorite composers or something.....well. anyways. azusa chiba is one of the ones i like a lot, but this vol 5 is definitely a standout for her. you can tell there was a very carefully defined mathematical steve reich-y sound they decided to give these "elf people" probably because "Those elfs are so smart", this one sounds a lot less like that than some of the others actually, mostly because it's so pretty and HAPPY explicitly, like a FOREST BREEZE as opposed to the more neutral urban gridded tone minimalist music in this vein can have (which i love still, but for different reasons).

rhythmically, this is probably actually a lot weirder than it sounds. It's "9/4", which doesn't really have any explicit way to break it down that's best, but tbh it wouldn't be wrong to just think of this as 3/4, with 3 bar phrasing either. but I'm not sure that it'd be the best way to write it. ON TOP OF THAT The drums are in a typical "4/4" (looping after "2/4" i guess) groove over this "9" so really...no matter how you frame it, it's polymetric, but the degree of which is subjective. this means it actually takes "18/4" before the "9/4" lines up with the "2/4" again. (because 9x2 is 18, in case you didn't know).

one song this reminds me of very heavily is "Freddi Fish and Luther's Water Worries Music: Levels 31-40", which I know I've spoken about with you before
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWIJRCePiXU

One of the most similar things I can really think of to this specific caravan stories track is the soule freddi fish osts. The barline ambiguity of 1:09 - 1:58 in the freddi fish track is very on target with luwiera's forest, it's like luwiera's coral reef (and also kinda like Lugia's Coral Reef?)
https://cryptovolans.bandcamp.com/track/lugias-coral-reef-lugia-and-ho-ohs-position

there's actually other humongous entertainment songs I thought of as similar in feel to luwiera's forest, for different reasons from each other. some for the syncopated piano, some for the repeating sequences and mathematical nature. i'll just link one more but i could do it endlessly so i'll limit it to just this one to avoid "spamming with links(since when have I cared about that bef"ore?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0Gq45kgdG4

anyways....back to luweria's forestHAHA THERE'S A HARP that means it is like "NeoToky"o, just like BJORK. uh, I mean. Sorry my thoughts are such a convoluted mess with this track. I honestly thought it was the sort I would have to make an entire video to explain (i may or may not do this for some future posts in this topic, but don't get your hopes up). or at least a detailed image breaking the rhythms down. but while that would help illustrate some of the numbers this song has inside of it, really it's not that complicated, it sounds more convoluted than it is, but really it's fairly...symmetrical?

[18]
[2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2]
[9][9]
[3][3][3] | [3][3][3]

actually those 3s get broken down into 1.5s in some of the cool offbeat harp layers at the rate i'm counting (3/8 rather than 3/4) but WAT EVER it's still all subsets of 3. which is in no way any less cool. It actually sorta perfectly represents the setting, 3-ish-ness has a few common meanings evoked to me. it can be a few things. they either remind me of "rotating" and "mechanical" (see the writeup for 15th place [EDIT: I don't know why i said this, since that naissance track is all 4/4 hahaha]; also the guardian theme in botw [this comparison actually makes sense to talk about "3" with]). Or they can be "organic", living things, life, flowers, trees, maybe partially associated with the liveliness and celebration of a "waltz" (dance), the freedom and human asymmetry and organic rounded shapes associated.

one thing I really get out of this kind of music, is it gives you options. you can hear these piano lines as a bunch of mathematical 16ths and the mosaics, grids, [insert some shallow THE MATHEMATICAL BEAUTY OF NATURE image with the golden spiral and fibbionaci sequence numbers here] or you can hear the singing birds and village where there is a peaceful tree that talks to you and gives you directions to the "elf knowledge library" where you can read books about music theory

on the "options" topic, it's not quite as much like this as some other things i've talked about it with, but there's multiple different positions you can hear beat 1 as too. Partly because of the polymeter, and partly because of the /syncopation/. it's easy for me to fixate on one layer and start to instinctively feel an entirely new pulse, that shifts the vantage point of the entire rest of the song, and not even because of it being polymetric, but because of it being like a funky groove where the accent is on an offbeat and now everything feels all funky and "cool"

this song is so FLUFFY . kao, you really should listn to the klonoa osts; it has a lot of fluffy music that is so fluffy just like klonoa's ears, the whimsical wistful floating clouds of magical numbers.....

i know you know this one...this song reminds me of this one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6KxNNH10FY

this song is so happy and makes me : ) smile