Noise Pollution #28: They’re Already Selling Easter Candy

It’s just a few days from Christmas, and those of us who work in retail have suffered through covers of covers of Christmas songs since September. I had no idea there were more than a dozen versions of Paul McCartney’s musical abortion, “Wonderful Christmastime” but I can tell you I wish someone told Mark David Chapman Jodie Foster would’ve been more impressed with a different Beatle. Between that and the seven covers of “Last Christmas” I have to hear every day I’m ready to grab a garland and find a supportive pipe or beam.

And I like Christmas music. But I guess licensing fees or whatever legal bullshit I’m too lazy to look up has kept it so that the classics are kept in a vault while these new, Great Value versions are dribbled out to moisten our days. The outlier is The Beach Boys “Little Saint Nick,” which has fourteen covers plus the goddamned original piped through our sound service. This song fucking sucks, and what makes me irrationally angry every time I hear it is the line “Christmas comes this time each year,” which is the laziest fucking redundant line in any Christmas song. Ever. What a cognitive fucking failure.

That isn’t to say I haven’t found at least one song to enjoy. Here’s some remix of an old Vic Damone cover of “Winter Wonderland” that sounds like Ian Curtis. It’s actually pretty killer.

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This will probably surprise you but growing up I was awkward and socially withdrawn. Since I was a child in the ’80s it would stand to reason that I gravitated towards less socially interactive pursuits, which meant a lot of reading and, inevitably, video games, and while we could go into a case study as to why I was like that or how it impacted me in my adult life I feel like I need to leave a few nuggets for my therapist. So, why bring it up at all? Because as I’m rounding the corner into thirty years of making music (and even longer listening to it) I’ve come to realize that games had a lot to do with building up how I view music, both as a listener and as a creator. My family didn’t have a lot of money so I would generally rent games. Until Christmas, where I’d be lucky and get one or two. So I equate gaming with this time of year.

I’ve wanted to write about old video games for a few years now but never knew how to approach it. I still don’t, if I’m being honest. That said, here’s some of the music from some games I loved.

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My memories of the NES never really centered around the music, though there’s multiple subgenres of synth and electronic music based entirely around the 8-bit era. There were a lot of games with great and memorable music–”The Legend of Zelda,” “Mega Man 2,” etc. But over thirty years later I’m left with the overworld theme from the first “Dragon Warrior” game as the one that stands out. The simplicity of it is a bit of a sonic misdirection as it really represents how alone you are in the game.

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I eventually got a job as a paperboy, just around the same time the Sega Genesis was launched. The pack in, “Altered Beast,” was fucking cheesy, slow and a bit garish. I loved it. But I didn’t know what game I wanted to buy, so I went in blind and picked up “Phantasy Star 2,” and this is where I can hear the formation of my musical attachment with what I was hearing on games. “Phantasy Star 2” has such spacey and warm tones, especially the intro screen, and I can draw a line from it to my love of Fenriz’s Neptune Towers. This was the first game that made me think about how important music is to visual storytelling, though I don’t think this was my line of thought 35 years ago.

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I’ve included the third game in the series here as well because the music and the choice of the synth sounds are dark and menacing and is the start of my weakness for synth bells in music (Archgoat, Danzig’s “Black Aria,” etc) but also because this game catches a lot of shit for being atmospherically different than the previous two, with more of a fantasy setting than sci-fi. This is a super unfair assessment as this game contains innovative storytelling and a great atmosphere.

This is all fascinating for those of you under the age of 40 and/or never had social anxiety and withdrew into fantasy as teenagers. Next column will be about black metal again, I promise.

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Another game that catches hell in the gaming community (when they’re not telling women to either show them their tits and/or kill themselves) unfairly is “Sword Of Vermillion.” This felt like Sega’s answer to “Dragon Warrior,” and certain segments even play the same but the story is unusually dark for the time it was released and the music is morose and fits the mood. Plus, I’m sure if the song I linked was done by some electronic project or a guy in a mask there would be people fucking to it. This game was terrific and doesn’t deserve the hate it receives.

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https://youtu.be/R58d2xr8jKU

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I used to rent “Wonderboy in Monster World” from Blockbuster constantly one summer. It surprised me because the box art looks childish, the name doesn’t really sound very interesting and the screenshots weren’t very captivating. I don’t know why I even rented it, but I’m glad I did as it’s since become my favorite game on the system. I’ve included this track because you could very easily play it for someone and they would think it was a dungeon synth project.

My paperboy job also led to me taking care of people’s animals when they went on vacation. One family had both a swimming pool and a Super Nintendo. As the years went on the SNES became my console of choice, leaving the Genesis to collect dust (until the eventual release of “Phantasy Star 4”) and opening up new ideas in how I enjoyed and processed sound design.

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“Secret of Mana” was a special game because it was the first time I could remember a company releasing a soundtrack with it. For years I used to use songs from it to tie together mix tapes and would eventually use it on my radio show. It’s since become an iconic soundtrack and really proved that the music to a game could take on a life of its own while also being a crucial component to the storytelling and gameplay.

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https://youtu.be/rXZD9ZEnQBI
https://youtu.be/AL2PaecaVeQ

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Another game that released a soundtrack (a double cd no less) was “Final Fantasy VI,” which was released as “Final Fantasy III” in the West. There’s been so much written about this game and how innovative it was and I don’t need to add to any of that noise but the impact of the music really cannot be overstated. This was around the time I started working on writing my own music, both on guitar and synth, and it definitely had an influence on how I approached things. As an aside, when I was going through financial issues years ago I sold both this and my copy of the “Secret of Mana” soundtrack. I’ve never regretted selling anything, especially when I’ve been in a bind, except these two. Trying to find copies now is a fucking chore.

If nothing else, this column has rendered me unfuckable.

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I don’t have “Secret of Evermore” here because it was a particularly great soundtrack (it does) but rather that this is the most important gaming experience that relates to how I write and record music, especially ambient. The effects of the voices in the market, or the waves and birds on the shore, and how the volume is used in comparison to the effects of the character or spells really made the world come alive. Sure, this is standard now, but back then I’d never experienced anything like it. Another game that gets shit on unfairly. It’s also probably my favorite game of the 16-bit era.

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https://youtu.be/DY5vmx0YvgE

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I’ve only included this track from “Chrono Trigger” because it popped up on a video I was watching months ago and it caused me to have the most visceral emotional reaction I’ve ever had to a video game. When “Chrono Trigger” came out I was playing with a death metal band called Abominus and had just begun recording the first Krieg demo that would see a public release. Hearing this just took me right back to being in the living room playing while we were taking a break from rehearsal.

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I’m going to finish this with a game that actually was a Christmas present from my late mother. I remember playing it until late into the night by the light of the Christmas tree after an evening out with the miscreants and punks I associated with, right on the heels of recording Rise of the Imperial Hordes and this memory, until the birth of my daughter, was the happiest memory I had in my life. I think it was just because it was peaceful and the last few moments of being a child. I don’t know, I guess I can talk to my therapist about it.

Thank you for indulging me this holiday season and for reading this column for the last year. I hope that you have a good and calm Yule season and we’ll be back early in the new year to talk about how King ov Hell ruined Gorgoroth and how they became great again after he left.