![]() “When he heard Actraiser, he scrapped it, went back to the drawing board, and went for an orchestra sound.” “At the time, Nobuo Uematsu had just completed the Final Fantasy IV soundtrack,” Dwyer explains. I wanted to create orchestral music unlike anything heard in a game before.”Īctraiser represented an aesthetic turning point in the sound of Super Famicom games. “I think the soundtracks for Star Wars and Space Battleship Yamato were big influences. “I was listening to lots of movie music at the time,” Koshiro recalls. When he was composing the soundtrack for mythical platform game Actraiser in 1990, Koshiro pushed the eight-channel sound chip of the Super Famicom console (known in the west as the SNES) to its limit – then asked one of the main programmers to modify it for him so he could go even further. Although he’s best known for drawing a direct line between house, techno, boogie funk, and VGM with his legendary work on the Streets of Rage beat ‘em up video game series, his dance sensibilities came with an experimental bent. Yuzo Koshiro is one of the true dons of the 16-bit era. “The MSX2 was a painful machine for developers,” admits Nitta, “but I undertook the challenge and managed to succeed somehow.” “If you talk to Fatima Al Qadiri, she grew up with computers like the MSX,” Dwyer says. Thinking about it now, it’s pretty weird that my company let me get away with this.” Self-professedly not really into electronic music, Nitta drew a lot of inspiration from classical music, in particular the works of Wagner, who he discovered through the soundtrack to 70s American war epic Apocalypse Now.Ī fantasy role-playing game full of demons and sorcerers, Xak II was originally released in Japan for Microsoft’s MSX2, a Japanese home computer system that also became very popular in Russia and Kuwait. I made the soundtrack at home with an electric bass and calculator in one hand. “I suffered, writhed, and in the end refused to go to work. “Micro Cabin wanted such a dark sound on this game that it made my mind dark,” Nitta laughs. Created by Tadahiro Nitta, an in-house composer at Micro Cabin, the Xak II soundtrack brought a heavy feel to the Technicolor sound of VGM. “In the unlikely scenario I was suddenly going to become a boxer or a wrestler, this is the music I’d run out to in my satin shorts,” Kode9 offers up. In Kode9’s words, “There is something about these sad melodies filtered through those chips that always conjured the image of circuitry crying.” As Japanese VGM historian Haruhisa ‘Hally’ Tanaka puts it, “You could probably say that his talent was too ahead of its time.” Dwyer and Kode9 both agree that their favourite VGM tracks hinge around melancholy, and with Chatty, Saito took it to a place Dwyer articulates through the Portuguese concept of saudade: longing, melancholy, and nostalgia all rolled into one. Over his short career, Saito scored for Tokyo’s System Sacom, where he created the remarkable soundtrack to a PC-88 game called Chatty: a first-person adventure set in a mysterious future. He composed with a light, stylish touch with roots in jazz and classical, and a restrained sense of syncopation that recalls French pianist Erik Satie. ![]() A lover of classical music and anime themes, Saito loved the works of Beethoven and Glenn Gould. Saito studied piano as a child, before studying the fundamentals of composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. Manabu Saito was one of the most promising Japanese game composers of the era, but tragically died of liver failure in 1992 aged just 22. With the compilation out now and a Hyperdub x RBMA showcase event at London’s Fabric venue, we asked the Diggin’ in the Carts team, and some of the composers from the era, to walk us through ten of the most experimental and adventurous VGM soundtracks from the era. In the decades since, Japanese VGM has pivoted from the influenced to the influencer, becoming a wellspring of inspiration for several generations of hip hop, beats, synth-funk, grime, and dubstep producers. They were all dreaming up their own micro-masterpieces, works that stand up well beyond the boundaries of “music for video games.” In the process, it reveals that while Tanaka was using the hyper-nostalgic bleeps and technological restrictions of the era to riff on dub and reggae, composers like Yuzo Koshiro and Soshi Hosoi were drawing from Detroit techno and minimalist composition too. ![]() An outgrowth of the video interview series and radio show Dwyer created for Red Bull Music Academy, the compilation surveys the glory days of 8-bit and 16-bit Japanese VGM in the 80s and early 90s chip era, building on the curator’s efforts to share the untold history of Japanese VGM with the world. Over the last couple of years, Dwyer has been working closely with London’s Kode9 and his Hyperdub record label to compile Diggin’ in the Carts: a Collection of Pioneering Japanese Video Game Music.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |