"His Brain is Squirming Like a Toad"

The Glitch Mob - Starve the Ego, Feed the Soul

 

What's better than driving out to the forest in honor of the first snowfall of the season? Seeing that snowfall turn heavy and blustery just as Riders on the Storm queues up in your car's stereo.

 

That sync synced up for me with an increasing lack in a slightly older game I've been playing (try to guess which by Wednesday!) and gives me a good opportunity to illustrate my usual complaints about game music via three composers who've worked repeatedly for the same series/studios: Mark Morgan, Inon Zur and Jeremy Soule

 

While wandering around my newest latest, I was intrigued enough by the ambient music to make a note to look it up. Yet the more I ambled about, that note turned into a desire to know who this composer was who kept sapping his own work of its expected, more attention-grabbing complements and sweep. And of course it was Inon Zur. I think I have one to three of his tracks saved up, compared to over a score by Soule and half that by Morgan.

I actually can't actively dislike Zur's stuff, but he's mostly seemed to operate on the assumption that "ambient" is "Ambien" in accordance with its status as background. Smooth transitions, smooth gradations, universally recognizable tonality, nothing to jar you out of your adventures even at its heaviest metal. Slick stuff... but you do lose some ground when you can no longer tell whose back it's grounding, when it no longer evokes the world of the game, when playing his tracks fails to set off any memory cascades. It's not just my '90s industrial fan taste for bombast speaking (though I do love my imperial marches) but the frustrated active expectancy of something more, a dip, a soar, a counterpoint, a... payoff of some kind, whose immanence never breaks into full consciousness. It's your eardrum tensing in anticipation of the other shoe that never drops. You so rarely feel like you're riding the storm.

 

Morgan's work might be the least melodious of the three, but it will never fail to call up the very moment when you first walked up to the gate of Shady Sands or saw the robot army marching along, and even as I criticized Wasteland 3 in most respects I couldn't help praising its apt and striking sound work. As for Soule, you don't even have to reach for that thunderous viking chanting or Nerevar Rising with its hint of Khachaturian's Spartacus. Try Peaceful Waters, a deliberately sedate backdrop for low-key beach-combing, yet which by offsetting minimalism with hints of orchestral grandeur actively invites you to just... breathe... for a moment... while still looking forward to your upcoming trials.

Damnit Zur, get off your respectable composer high horse and cut loose more often!

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P.S.: I do also prefer Beethoven to Mozart, The Rolling Stones to The Beatles and The Dead South to Mumford & Sons, if you're wondering.