This is a (still unfinished) collection of tracks I’ve written (or, in one case, cowritten) for game soundtracks since 2023. They’re currently all intended either for hellpak Vol. 2 or Tempus Irae Redux, which are both forthcoming third-party scenarios for Bungie’s Marathon series, though I don’t know for sure where they’ll end up.
You may ⟨aaronfreed.github.io/music/compositions2023-2024.html⟩ in three forms:
Any media player worth its salt can read the individual songs within the images; I also provide cuesheets to split all three versions into their component movements, and to split both disc images into songs.
I’ve made this free for personal listening, but ⟨aaronfreed.github.io/aboutme.html#contact⟩ if you wish to use any of it in your own projects. The first two tracks are the sole exception: like all hellpak tracks, they’re licensed as ⟨creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en⟩, allowing non-commercial uses that are:
I’ll probably grant most noncommercial uses for other tracks if asked; I’d just like to know who’s using it and why. (I may even allow commercial use if offered fair compensation, though permission for track 11 is not mine to grant.) You may also (see above) with questions, praise, constructive criticism, job offers, etc.
I link to many of the songs I mention on the web-based version of this document. Because those URLs would be wildly inconvenient to type, I don’t include them on the printable version of this document. Visit this page on the web ⟨aaronfreed.github.io/compositions2023-2024notes.html⟩ for the links. The web-based version also includes additional information that’s currently only included in hover text (I plan to make it more accessible eventually).
The “DR” scores measure songs’ overall dynamic range via foobar2000’s ⟨foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_dr_meter⟩ plugin. Higher scores correlate to higher dynamic range. (This doesn’t universally correlate to better sound quality, but low dynamic range can cause listener fatigue, especially on headphones.) Modern popular music often scores in the DR5–DR7 range; thus, this album is both more dynamic and quieter. Use your volume knob if necessary.
Lastly, the predominance of Italian and Latin song titles is a direct result of Tempus Irae Redux’s Italian setting. I left a few direct references to other works in English (the isolated phrase “you wanted to” is literally, not figuratively, untranslatable to Italian or Latin, neither of which has split infinitives, while any translations I could formulate of “co-starring” to either language were infuriatingly wordy), and I titled one movement in Spanish, one in Japanese, one track in French, and two tracks in (very likely ungrammatical) Greek for reasons explained below, but titling most of them in Italian or Latin felt appropriate.
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Translations of Foreign-Language Titles, or, “What Language Even Is That?” (French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Spanish) |
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| #/Lang | Title | Romanization (if applicable) | Meaning | ||
| 3 | I | Ludo mortale | Deadly Game | ||
| 3.a | I | Danza frattale | Fractal Dance | ||
| 3.b | J | フラクタル・ジャズ | Furakutaru jazu | Fractal Jazz | |
| 4 | L | Ambiēns aquātica | Aquatic Ambiance | ||
| 6 | L | Singulāris persōnificātiō mālōrum | The Singular Personification of Evils | ||
| 6.i | L | Dōnā eī requiem | Grant Him Rest | ||
| 6.ii | L | Pfhor Pfhōrī lupus | Pfhor [Is] a Wolf to Pfhor | ||
| 7 | G | Λοκρῶν θρῆνος | Lokrōn thrēnos | Locrian Lament | |
| 7.α | G | Λοκρῶν θρῆνος (τᾰρᾰχώδης) | Lokrōn thrēnos (tarakhṓdēs) | Locrian Lament (chaotic) | |
| 7.β | G | Λοκρῶν θρῆνος (γαληνός) | Lokrōn thrēnos (galēnós) | Locrian Lament (peaceful) | |
| 8 | I | Ritratto in grigio | Portrait in Gray | ||
| 8.a | I | Ritratto in grigio (elettrico) | Portrait in Gray (electric) | ||
| 8.b | I | Ritratto in grigio (acustico) | Portrait in Gray (acoustic) | ||
| 9 | L | Tempus tempestātum | Time of Storms | ||
| 9.a | I | Tempo tempestoso (elettrico) | Stormy Weather (electric) | ||
| 9.b | S | Tiempo tempestuoso (acústico) | Stormy Weather (acoustic) | ||
| 11 | G | Καταιβᾰτή ἕλῐξ | Kataibaté hélix | Downward Spiral | |
| 11.α | G | Ὁ ζῐ́γγος αὔξεται μέγᾰς | Ho zíngos aúxetai mégas | The whirring grows loud | |
| 11.β | G | Ὀνειροπολεῖς βῐαίᾱν αὔξησῐν | Oneiropoleís biaíān auxísin | You dream of violent growth | |
| 11.γ | G | Μίᾰ ᾰ̓γᾰ́πη ἀνώτατη | Mía agápē anṓtate | A Love Supreme | |
| 11.δ | G | Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς | Hēmérā orgês | Diēs Īrae | |
| 12 | L | Tempestās īrae | A Storm of Wrath | ||
| 13 | L | Pende siccāre | Hang to Dry | ||
| 13.i | L | Tūtēla | Protection | ||
| 13.ii | L | Impetus | Attack | ||
| 14 | F | La fille qui volait les astres | The Girl Who Stole the Stars | ||
| 14.a | F | (acoustique) | (acoustic) | ||
| 14.b | F | (électrique) | (electric) | ||
| 15 | L | Īra temporis | Wrath of Time | ||
| 15.i | L | Ex tempore, ex locō | Out of Time, Out of Place | ||
| 15.ii | L | Nōn omnia in sua locō corrēctō erant | Not Everything Was in Its Right Place | ||
| 1b. | King Crimson, “Fracture” (Starless and Bible Black, 1974-03-29), written by Robert Fripp |
| 2a. |
Alex Seropian, “Fat Man” (Marathon, 1994-12-21) Nobuo Uematsu, “Those Who Fight Further” (Final Fantasy VII, 1997-01-31) |
| 2b. | Alex Seropian, “Chomber” (Marathon, 1994-12-21) |
| 4a. |
Unknown author, “Diēs Īrae” (unknown date) Genesis, “Supper’s Ready” (Foxtrot, 1972-09-15), written by Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett, & Mike Rutherford |
| 5. |
Kōji Kondō, “Lost Woods” (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, 1998-11-21) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, “Lacrimosa” (Requiem, 1791) |
| 6i. |
Rush, “YYZ” (Moving Pictures, 1981-02-12), written by Geddy Lee & Neil Peart Johann Sebastian Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 (date unknown) |
| 8a. | Edvard Grieg, “In the Hall of the Mountain King” (Peer Gynt, 1876-02-24) |
| 11γ. | Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral motif (1994-03-08) |
| 11δ. | Unknown author, Diēs Īrae (unknown date) |
| 15. | Alex Seropian, “Flowers in Heaven” (Marathon, 1994-12-21) |
| writing, arranging, mixing: | Apple Logic Pro |
| additional instruments: | East West Composer Cloud+ Cherry Audio GX-80 |
| mastering: | iZotope RX Standard |
| computer: | Apple M2 MacBook Air |
| speakers: | Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 THX |
| in-ear monitors: | Sennheiser IE 100 Pro |
| headphones: | Sennheiser HD-598 Sony WH-1000XM4 |
| bağlama, bongos: | Petros Anagnostoupoulos |
| keyboards, guitars, vocals, drums: | Chris Christodoulou |
| oboe, English horn: | Christos Tsogias-Razakov |
| violin, vocals: | Kalliopi Mitropoulou |
The European Southern Observatory composited the front cover image ( ⟨eso.org/public/images/eso2406a⟩) from an Event Horizon Telescope photo ( ⟨eso.org/public/news/eso2208-eht-mw⟩); its ⟨creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en⟩ license allows its reuse and adaptation so long as the ESO and the EHT are: (a) credited, and (b) not implied to directly endorse the group or work in question.
Its subject is the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*⟩ (or Sgr A*, “sadge a star”; the asterisk signifies a galaxy’s central body), with superimposed polarized light corresponding to the magnetic field around Sgr A*’s “shadow”. The underlying photo took some ⟨aasnova.org/2022/05/12/first-image-of-the-milky-ways-supermassive-black-hole⟩ to process.
For those wondering how we can photograph what light cannot escape, the moniker “black hole” is now known to not be strictly accurate: while light can’t escape an event horizon, electromagnetic radiation bends around its edges, causing the iridescent light seen around black holes’ “shadows”. Astronomer Heino Falcke ⟨skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/m87-black-hole-photograph-how⟩ to the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Sky at Night magazine.
Also perhaps of interest: ⟨eso.org/public/videos/eso2406bbh⟩.
We can thank/blame ⟨endless-sky.github.io⟩ for inspiring me to look up Sagittarius A*; I immediately knew I had my album cover image the instant I saw it.
(front cover: Sagittarius A*) |
(back cover: Messier 87*) |
The back cover’s background is ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A_view_of_the_M87_supermassive_black_hole_in_polarised_light.tif⟩, the ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87⟩. The provenance is otherwise identical: EHT released its photograph ⟨eso.org/public/images/eso1907a⟩, and ESO released its polarized light version ⟨eso.org/public/images/2105a⟩. Messier 87 refers to French astronomer ’s ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Messier⟩ ⟨en.wikipedia.org/Messier_object⟩; the galaxy is also known as Virgo A, NGC 4486, and the Smoking Gun Galaxy. M87* is literally, not figuratively, thousands of times larger than Sgr A*; it is also in a much more convenient angle to photograph from Earth. To date, these are the only two photographs of black holes.
Incidentally, this image’s similarity to the cover of Soundgarden’s Superunknown (1994-03-08), which includes their biggest hit “Black Hole Sun”, did not escape notice. Coincidence? Well, probably. But it’s an eerie one.
Since I haven’t yet finalized this album’s tracklist, tracklists and track/movement durations found in the album artwork may not be current – I’ll redo all the artwork once I’ve completed Tempus Irae Redux’s soundtrack.
Artist’s conception of the jet rising out of M87* by S. Dagnello (NRAO/AUI/NSF), ⟨eso.org/public/images/eso2305b⟩. Like both covers, it was produced under the ESO’s auspices and is licensed as CC-BY 4.0.
The tray liner is an impression of the SDSS J103027.09+052455.0 quasar by the ESO’s L. Calçada () ⟨eso.org/public/images/eso2016a⟩ ⟨eso.org/public/images/eso2016a⟩. The ESO’s Very Large Telescope enabled astronomers to find a cluster of six galaxies around a supermassive black hole, seen here shining brightly as it engulfs the surrounding matter. The almost polar opposite of the front and back covers’ color scheme felt somehow fitting here. I left 0.125” (0.3175 cm) of extra room at the edges in case the tray prints out misaligned – the correct dimensions of a CD tray liner are 5.906” (15 cm) wide by 4.646” (11.92784 cm) high, with creases 0.25” (0.635 cm) from the edges.
As with the back cover, some of these titles won’t match what’s on this page. I haven’t finalized all my track names, movement names, or even movement divisions yet.
Many of my favorite game composers were working against the limits of their era’s technology. This forced them to exercise a form of creativity that otherwise would’ve been absent. You see, I feel Igor Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons expresses an unassailable truth about the creative process:
“I have no use for a theoretic freedom. Let me have something finite, definite – matter that can lend itself to my operation only insofar as it is commensurate with my possibilities. And such matter presents itself to me together with limitations. I must in turn impose mine upon it.
So here we are, whether we like it or not, in the realm of necessity. And yet which of us has ever heard talk of art as other than a realm of freedom? This sort of heresy is uniformly widespread because it is imagined that art is outside the bounds of ordinary activity.
Well, in art as in everything else, one can build only upon a resisting foundation: whatever constantly gives way to pressure, constantly renders movement impossible. My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings.
I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.”
I am in no place to argue with a composer of such importance, whose works I am only beginning to understand. Unfortunately (or not), the era in which I am composing no longer imposes such restrictions upon video game music; in fact, I live in an era where synthesized DAWs can create often tolerable recreations of guitars, a feat I couldn’t even have imagined in 1997, the last time I’d seriously composed new music.
I therefore self-imposed many other restrictions instead. Some were fairly simple: “Write a pastiche of one of my favorite composers,” “Base a song on a mathematical pattern.” Some were more complicated: “Use Phrygian mode and several time signatures,” “Use Locrian mode and change time signatures every measure.” And I don’t even understand how I pulled this one off: “Write a pastiche of a song I’ve only heard once.”
This resulted in several forms of experimentation I doubt I’d have otherwise engaged in – and I suspect that restricting individual tracks’ content paradoxically made this album far more diverse overall. I hope you enjoy it.
My music for Tempus Irae Redux is deliberately anachronistic. For instance, «Μίᾰ ᾰ̓γᾰ́πη ἀνώτατη» and «Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς» mix:
And believe it or not, it’s actually more complex than that – Martin Hannett’s production for the post-punk act Joy Division (1977-1980) also influenced my cavernous production, while Brian Eno’s work with the post-punk act Talking Heads (1978-1980) heavily inspired my use of arpeggiation (as I note in the acknowledgements). Zeuhl can be considered to focus on rhythm just as much as minimalism does; minimalism in turn can be considered to have an atmosphere as hypnotic as zeuhl’s. I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point.
This is only slightly atypical; similar anachronisms abound throughout the soundtrack. I had several reasons for this. For starters, I saw Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001-05-09) at just the right age to give me a lifelong appreciation for musical anachronisms. But more importantly, Tempus Irae Redux is a time-travel story, and that has Implications (with a capital I).
In Tempus Irae Redux, the Security Officer (or SO, i.e., the player character) has come to Renaissance Italy from the 29th century CE, probably with only a vague sense of what Renaissance music actually sounded like. Just as importantly, an alien invasion has driven away the actual humans in the area. As a result, the SO doesn’t actually get a chance to hear Renaissance musicians perform – and, it’s statistically likely, probably has heard too little Renaissance music to have a clear mental picture of its sound. (“Mental picture” of sound? English is stupid.)
As a result, I decided the soundtrack should go more for “how the SO might imagine Renaissance music sounding” than for “how Renaissance music actually sounded” – and, lest we forget, at least 787 additional years (as of this writing) have elapsed between our time and the SO’s. (“The present” for Tempus Irae Redux’s time travellers is, per Marathon 2’s ending, between 2811 and 2881.) It’s therefore easy to imagine the SO having even more discombobulated a sense of musical chronology than we do today. Think how little most people know about actual Renaissance music’s traits, then imagine how much less they’ll know in eight centuries. Even people who’ve actually heard it might not be able to piece together its chronology accurately.
I also can’t stress enough that the SO, the Pfhor (the alien slavers that are the central antagonists of the series), and the S’pht (their former slaves and Tempus Irae Redux’s mission control) are all anachronistic themselves – none of them belong there! Thus, in my estimation, the soundtrack including, nay, being dominated by elements that don’t belong in Renaissance music serves the storytelling perfectly.
This approach had one final benefit: it allowed me to compose by instinct. Since I learned harmony from Bach, forcing myself into a pre-Bach harmonic mentality would be a stretch roughly like learning how to type on the Dvorak layout. I could do it – it would just take a long time, and since I’m already delaying Tempus Irae Redux’s release by writing these songs in the first place, I’d rather not delay it longer than necessary.
| composer: | Aaron Freed, 2022-12-29 to 2023-11-30 |
| primary inspiration: | Nobuo Uematsu |
Reviewing the file creation dates on my hard drive led me to realize this album’s name was inadvertently a lie: I started writing this track in late December 2022. I’d have to change the title in too many places to count (including the URL of this very file) to fix it, but nonetheless, I regret the error.
| inspired by: | (Final Fantasy IV, 1991-07-19; OST 1991-06-14) |
While writing this movement, I briefly thought I’d rewritten “Main Theme of Final Fantasy IV”; then I played it back and realized I hadn’t, which resulted in this song’s admittedly bizarre title. At this point, writing a pastiche of Nobuo Uematsu’s music felt inevitable, so I leaned into it and gave what became its three movements cheeky titles based on their obvious inspirations.
Since I hadn’t fully settled on this being a Final Fantasy pastiche when I wrote it, this movement probably has the most distinct identity. Despite its relative melodic and harmonic simplicity, its arrangement goes through several major changes that hopefully will keep it engaging. The transition at the end is probably this movement’s most complicated and unexpected aspect.
| inspired by: |
“” (Final Fantasy VI, 1994-04-02; OST 1994-03-25) “” (Final Fantasy VII, 1997-01-31; OST 1997-02-10) |
| briefly interpolating: | King Crimson, “”, by Robert Fripp (Starless and Bible Black, 1974-03-29) |
The first thing I’ve ever written entirely in a whole-tone scale. I planned for this movement to be a pastiche of “Another World of Beasts”, which has a very surreal, dreamlike feeling; a whole-tone scale felt perfect to replicate that. (And since “Another World of Beasts” is in 7/8, so is most of this movement.) A segment inspired by “Infiltrating Shinra Tower” snuck its way in while I was writing it – I hadn’t planned on that. (Neither “Another World of Beasts” nor “Infiltrating Shinra Tower” use whole-tone scales, I should note.) The brief quote from King Crimson’s “Fracture”, on the other hand, was entirely planned (and naturally shifts to 6/4).
| inspired by: |
“” (Final Fantasy V, 1992-12-06; OST 1992-12-07) “” (Final Fantasy VII, 1997-01-31; OST 1997-02-10) |
This movement wears its influences on its sleeve far more conspicuously. It initially sounded even more like them, but I changed several notes and chords because I felt it was too close. It’s still closer than I’d feel comfortable using in a commercial game, but hellpak’s entire OST is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike, and I think it’s distinct enough for noncommercial use.
Incidentally, as great as “” is, “J-E-N-O-V-A” is low-key the best track in Final Fantasy VII. But Uematsu’s best composition – and (with all due respect to Chris Christodoulou, Minako Hamano, Hiroki Kikuta, Kōji Kondō, Yasunori Mitsuda, Marty O’Donnell, Michael Salvatori, Yōko Shimomura, Kenji Yamamoto, and countless other great game composers throughout history) likely the greatest song in the history of video game music – is and always will be “”. I haven’t even begun to try writing a pastiche of that. (Uematsu, an entirely self-taught musician, has written dead-on pastiches of Johann Sebastian Bach; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; Igor Stravinsky; and several other infamously complex artists. That level of musical genius is beyond my ken.)
composer: Aaron Freed, 2023-09-23 to 2024-01-03
Believe it or not, I merely intended this to be a study in 5:4 polyrhythms (which are distinct from, though in this case coincidentally linked to, 5/4 time signatures). However, the bassline I wrote for the first movement steadfastly refused to work in anything except groups of seven; the ⟨stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html⟩ suggested keeping it that way, so I began this song with the extraordinarily unusual 7:5 polyrhythm. Groups of six and four naturally worked their way in as I wrote additional instrument parts, hence the song’s title.
For those curious, I actually notated this as 4/4 in Logic, so much like Meshuggah, I could truthfully claim the mind-warping polyrhythms I’ve created here are entirely in 4/4. However, time signatures are really products of feeling rather than of mathematics, and I don’t actually feel this song as 4/4; I usually feel it either as 5/4 or as 7/4, depending on whether I’m focusing more on the drums or the bass.
| briefly interpolating: |
Alex Seropian, “” (Marathon, 1994-12-21) Nobuo Uematsu, “” (Final Fantasy VII, 1997-01-31; OST 1997-02-10) |
I hadn’t planned on writing a blues track here, but I soon realized harmonic simplicity served ideally to introduce such extraordinary rhythmic complexity. (While neither usually work in what we could call blues idioms, I was effectively following Tool and Meshuggah’s examples in this regard.)
I don’t believe in concealing my influences, so I quoted “Fat Man” and “Those Who Fight Further” for eighteen seconds each near the end of this movement because I felt I’d been melodically aping them throughout it.
Pythagoras of Samos (Greek: Πυθαγόρας ὁ Σάμιος, romanized: Pythagóras ho Sámios, literally meaning Pythagoras the Samian) worked his way into this movement’s title because he’s credited with discovering the relationship between mathematics and music. (He’s also a little bit famous for studying the proportions of triangles. You may, after all, recall his theorem.)
| semi-interpolating: | Alex Seropian, “” (Marathon, 1994-12-21) |
The Mellotron introduces this new movement’s chords before the bass enters, followed by the organ and two different guitar parts. The bass line repeatedly suggests “Chomber” from Marathon – since I was writing this for a Marathon scenario and had by this point settled on using groupings of seven for the bass parts throughout the entire track, the reference felt obligatory. However, I always throw some additional notes into the mix.
I’m not entirely pleased with this guitar part & may rewrite it. The organ solo is delectable, though.
Euclid (Greek: Εὐκλείδης, romanized: Eukleídes, derived from εὖ-, eu-, meaning well, and -κλῆς, -klês, meaning fame, thus renowned or glorious) wrote the most famous studies of geometry in history.
Guitar and bass rarely engage in counterpoint in rock music. I love counterpoint and would love to hear more of it, so I wrote the guitar part as a counterpoint to the bass line. I’m extremely pleased with the effect; it almost sounds like a rock fugue.
Midway through this movement, I add strings and some ethereal Dark Side of the Moon-style choral vocals that end up being the song’s final elements as the others stop playing. (Before adding the strings, I’d begun writing a fourth movement that I yeeted after noticing that it was virtually identical to Chris Christodoulou’s “” [Risk of Rain, 2013].)
Sir Isaac Newton, while probably most famous for studying gravity, also independently invented calculus (he and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, unaware of each other’s work, developed it around the same time). In short, the movements are named for central figures of trigonometry (Pythagoras and Euclid), geometry (also Pythagoras and Euclid), and calculus (Newton).
The first Tempus Irae Redux song I started writing, though it didn’t actually turn into a song until roughly between “Ritratto in grigio” and “Tempo tempestuoso”. (In fact, I originally sequenced it between them, but ultimately decided placing it as track three was truer to the chronological approach I wanted this album to take.) I’d started writing it as an experiment with no particular idea what I would use it for, then forgot about it for several months until I went through old Logic projects. As a result, a case could be made that “Ambiēns aquātica” is the first proper Tempus Irae Redux song.
“Ludo mortale” is Italian for “Deadly Game” – I tentatively plan to use both movements of this track on the Tempus Irae Redux level “Game of Death”. For the OST (and for this release), I’ve merged them into a single track; in-game, “Danza frattale” will crossfade into 「フラクタル・ジャズ」 once the platforms necessary to leave the level are all active and the Juggernauts are all dead. This typifies my compositional approach to Tempus Irae Redux – more than half the tracks I wrote can respond in some way to players’ actions as they progress through a level, and I usually combined multiple versions into a single track for the OST mix.
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| composer: | Aaron Freed, 2024-02-18 to 2024-08-25 |
| briefly interpolating: | Edvard Grieg, “” (Peer Gynt, 1876-02-24) |
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“Danza frattale” (Italian for “Fractal Dance”) evolved from a mathematical pattern, hence the name. I began with a series of notes whose lowest note plays twice as often as the second-lowest note, thrice as often as the third-lowest note, four times as often as the fourth-lowest note, and so on. I arranged these into chords and threw a disco beat and bass line over them. It goes kinda hard, tbh. About midway through, “Danza frattale” switches to 5/4 without actually becoming any less disco (see below for further experiments in this – note that I actually made “Disco Apocalypse in 5/4” before writing the 5/4 part of this song, or 「フラクタル・ジャズ」 for that matter). This track’s guitar solo remains a work in progress, but it quotes Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” (Peer Gynt, 1876-02-24), very likely the most famous Norwegian composition in history and – more to the point – the most famous use of a continually increasing tempo in musical history. For that exact reason, I did something unexpected: I slowed down the second half of my quote. (This was partly to fit the existing chord progression, but it was also pure contrarianism.) |
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| composer: | Aaron Freed, 2024-08-02 to 2024-08-25 |
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As I was mixing “Danza frattale”, its solo keyboard parts captivated me enough to isolate them and use them as the basis of a new movement, which I ultimately named 「フラクタル・ジャズ」 (Japanese for “Fractal Jazz”, romanized “Furakutaru jazu”) for presumably obvious reasons. I’d originally named it the same thing in English, then Italian, before finally settling on naming it in Japanese. The reason is simple: from the moment I decided to make this its own movement, I felt it’d feel right at home in a late-’90s/early-’00s Japanese role-playing game soundtrack – indeed, that might be half the reason I did so. If I didn’t know better, I could probably be persuaded this was a Yasunori Mitsuda track from Chrono Cross or a Motoi Sakuraba track from Star Ocean: Till the End of Time – two woefully underrated soundtracks that have undoubtedly influenced my approach to game composition. |
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| composer: | Aaron Freed, 2024-06-11 to 2024-06-19 |
| inspired by: | David Wise, “Aquatic Ambiance” (Donkey Kong Country, 1994-11-18) |
I’ve never played a Donkey Kong Country game and, to my knowledge, hadn’t heard any of its brilliant music until 2024-06-11. I note this because any Donkey Kong Country fan will immediately peg “Ambiēns aquātica” as an unapologetic tribute to its most famous track, “Aquatic Ambiance”. (Right down to its title, in fact: “Ambiēns aquātica” is Latin for “Aquatic Ambiance”. I see little point in concealing my influences.)
I grew up listening to David Wise’s music; I played the NES Marble Madness ad nauseam as a child, plus California Games and likely Battletoads and maybe a few other games he worked on as well. But Wise’s reputation primarily rests on his Donkey Kong Country soundtracks, and with good reason: they use the Super Nintendo’s limited sound chip as virtuosically as Square’s greatest 16-bit composers (Hiroki Kikuta, Yasunori Mitsuda, Yōko Shimomura, Nobuo Uematsu, etc.) did. They’d be the absolute upper echelon in this category if Tim & Geoff Follin hadn’t existed – on which note, R.I.P. Geoff :(
I first heard “Aquatic Ambiance” in a jazz pianist Charles Cornell ostensibly made about Kōji Kondō’s (also brilliant) music for Super Mario 64’s “Dire, Dire Docks”. Cornell actually spent more than half its runtime gushing about Wise’s track, and I immediately understood why; it struck a nerve on a primal level. Not only did I know, on first listen, that it was a masterpiece, but I immediately wanted to write a more energetic track with an otherwise similar mood – which is not an urge I frequently get.
So, having heard Wise’s piece probably no more than twice, I sat down and put its first two chords (which Cornell had analyzed in detail) into Logic Pro’s arpeggiator. Overnight, going entirely by what felt natural, I wrote chords, melodies, and a basic arrangement; I already had a rough mix by sunrise of 2024-06-12. I’ve since added a few background embellishments, but its fundaments are unchanged.
It’s rare (get it? because Donkey Kong Country’s is… ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_(company)⟩ never mind) for a song to emerge almost fully formed so quickly for me; usually, something about my first attempt doesn’t work, but this (if you’ll allow an obvious water metaphor) just flowed out as an expression of my contemporary emotional and mental state. I felt particularly alienated by certain individuals within the Marathon community: one of my closest friends (who’s seriously ill) had poured eighteen months into tutoring me for seemingly fruitless ends. (I’ve withheld names and further specifics to protect the innocent guilty, but we ultimately ⟨github.com/Aleph-Bet-Marathon/alephbet⟩.) Reading this song as a reflection of the existential despair I felt at the time is not strictly incorrect.
“Aquatic Ambiance” is obviously one of the best game tracks of all time, and in no way do I think I’ve duplicated its quality – especially because, again, Wise was doing all of that on a Super Nintendo! To avoid plagiarism ( aside), I didn’t listen to Wise’s piece again until I finished writing mine – and when I did, I was pretty astonished at how closely I’d approximated its mood and atmosphere. But I can hardly consider myself an unbiased source, so I’ll quote one of my early listeners:
“I think you really captured the spirit of the OG while still giving it a danceable (beat, rhythm, etc. – not sure on the vocab). It’s got more energy than the source material :)”
So I’ll chalk that one up as a success.
This track will play on the Tempus Irae Redux level “Gauntlet”.
| composer: | Aaron Freed, 2024-06-12 to 2024-10-01 |
| briefly interpolating: |
unknown author, “Diēs Īrae” (unknown date) Genesis, “Supper’s Ready”, written by Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett, & Mike Rutherford (Foxtrot, 1972-09-15) |
| composer: | Aaron Freed, 2024-06-12 to 2024-08-03 |
This song was an experiment in two different ways:
Logic’s session keyboardists are… well, they’re quite good at coming up with jazzy accompaniments, but you couldn’t rely on them to come up with the main melodies of a track. The session bassist, though, is unbelievably good – the performance is full of realistic-sounding slides and unbelievable hooks. I’d already relied heavily on the session drummer in my previous arrangements – I’m not a drummer, and whenever I write drum parts myself, they feel less natural to me than the parts I’ve created with Logic’s session drummer. The bassist is even better than that.
Logic’s session players all require substantial user input to get the kinds of performances found here; users must, at the bare minimum, specify chords and performance styles. There are also parameters for the rhythmic patterns the session players use; the complexity, intensity, and dynamic range of their performances; how much swing they use; how much they deviate from the metronome (“humanize”); how far in front of or behind the beat they play (“feel”); the frequency and complexity of their fills; the bassist and keyboardist’s melodic range; what kinds of arpeggiation the “arpeggiated” keyboardist performs; the kind of voicings the keyboardist plays with each hand; how many grace notes the keyboardist plays; how many ghost notes the drummer plays; how many notes, slides, blue notes, and dead notes the bassist plays; the kind of grooves the bassist plays; and more beyond that. I always customize all of these; in particular, I usually crank “complexity”, “fill amount”, and “fill complexity” all the way up.
The first half of this song features a steadily building arrangement that I wrote for the OST, but the structure heard here will not necessarily match what players hear in the game exactly. As players complete mission objectives in the level this track will appear in, the game will add melodic layers to the existing arrangement. Thus, the music will get louder and more complex as players progress through the level.
That said, I was impressed enough with Logic’s session musicians that I decided to feature them without my added accompaniments for the second half of the song – it feels like a modern structural equivalent of extended 12” disco mixes that used to feature lengthy instrumental breakdowns towards the end.
The song title is a take-off on a movement of Genesis’ “”, namely “Apocalypse in 9/8 (co-starring the delicious talents of Gabble Ratchet)”. I began using this title semi-ironically, but the more I considered it, the more it felt appropriate. For starters, its chord progression strongly resembles one I used in a song I performed on my album ⟨aaronfreed.github.io/music/demos2014.html⟩, called simply “Love”, that I habitually used to perform after I covered an excerpt of “Supper’s Ready” that doesn’t strictly belong to either “Apocalypse in 9/8” or to its preceding movement, “Willow Farm”; in fact, it appears on Demos 2014 in that exact form. So, effectively, if “Love” used to take the place of “Apocalypse in 9/8” when I covered a segment of “Supper’s Ready”, then it feels appropriate to name a track with a similar chord progression after “Apocalypse in 9/8”.
So, in part, this track’s title is a tribute to one of my favourite bands. And of course, any self-respecting disco fan is aware of tracks like the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno” and David Shire’s “Night on Disco Mountain” (which in turn is a disco version of Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain).
The other major inspiration on this feels too obvious to note, but I’ll point it out anyway: Nobuo Uematsu’s “” from the Final Fantasy series. I’m noting it because, until I began watching Studio Ghibli’s filmography from start to finish in 2024, I didn’t realize how large an influence Joe Hisaishi had so many Japanese composers. I’d liken the experience to that of a person who’d only listened to Western pop music from the last 50 years for their entire life finally hearing the Beatles. None of the composers I’d listened to bothered mentioning Hisaishi as an influence because – well, wasn’t it obvious? As it turned out, not to people who hadn’t heard him. So, while the influence of Uematsu’s “Prelude” is no doubt obvious to those familiar with the Final Fantasy series’ music, I’ll point it out anyway.
Because I named this track after a movement from “Supper’s Ready”, I subsequently felt it incumbent upon myself to feature a brief quote of the aforementioned flute solo (especially since flutes are a near-mandatory element of disco). Additionally, I quoted the famous Gregorian chant setting of “Diēs Īrae” (whose words and music are both of uncertain authorship, albeit traditionally attributed to Thomas of Celano [b. ca. 1185, d. 1260-10-04]), which I plan to make a recurring motif throughout the soundtrack (it is, after all, the scenario’s namesake). It also feels quite fitting for the “Apocalypse” part of this song’s title.
I tentatively plan to use this on the Tempus Irae Redux level “La fine di innocenza”.
| composer: | Aaron Freed, 2024-06-19 to 2024-08-03 |
| briefly interpolating: |
Kōji Kondō, “” (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, 1998-11-21) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, “” (Requiem, 1791) |
Two different versions of the same song, written in Phrygian mode, which has an intrinsic Spanish feeling to it due to the flat second note of its scale. Most of it’s in 7/4, but it changes to 5/4 (on two separate occasions) for roughly half a minute of chords that I basically lifted verbatim from Mozart’s Requiem – which is thematically appropriate, given the events of the story in the game level I’ve written this song for. The final four measures of the Mozart quote are in 4/4. (Additionally, I threw in a few brief quotes of the Lost Woods theme from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, owing to it using the same key signature as this song.)
“Dōnā eī requiem” is a softer arrangement of “Pfhor Pfhōrī lupus” with the guitar and electric cello replaced with flute and oboe, respectively; most other instruments except the string quartet stripped away; a fretless bass replacing the electric; and a completely different drum track. The former is Latin for “Grant Him Rest”, and the latter for “Pfhor [Is] a Wolf to Pfhor”. (I bracket “[Is]” because est, Latin for is, is merely implied by the sentence structure; this linguistic device is called a ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_copula⟩.)
I plan to use these on the Tempus Irae Redux level “…evil so singularly personified…”, hence the name “Singulāris persōnificātiō mālōrum”, which means “The Singular Personification of Evils” in Latin.
| composer: | Aaron Freed, 2024-06-24 to 2024-07-24 |
| briefly interpolating: |
Rush, “”, by Geddy Lee & Neil Peart (Moving Pictures, 1981-02-12) Johann Sebastian Bach, (date unknown) |
| composer: | Aaron Freed, 2024-06-24 to 2024-07-24 |
A weird experiment that I’ve nonetheless grown quite fond of. It’s ancient Greek (romanized: Lokrôn thrênos) for “Locrian Lament”, so named because it’s written, to the extent one can manage to do so, in the Locrian mode. Of the major scale’s seven modes, Locrian is the only one with a diminished root chord; thus, where its counterparts base their root chords on the consonant interval of the perfect fifth, Locrian’s is based on the tritone, an interval dissonant enough to be associated with the phrase diabolus in musicā (Latin: the devil in music). This has some interesting side effects:
Which both feel thematically appropriate for a level in which antagonistic alien slavers attack the ship of their former slaves (also aliens) and the player helps the latter fight off the former. (This track is tentatively intended for the Tempus Irae Redux level “Polygonum opus”, which is Latin for “polygon work”.)
That’s not even getting into the time signature shenanigans: the first measure is 1/8, the second is 2/8, the third is 3/8, the fourth is 4/8, and so on, down to measure 21, which is 21/8. Then the cycle repeats. So if you thought this track was intentionally rhythmically disorienting… you’re right. It is.
For all of that, this track’s second movement is surprisingly chill. Locrian mode is full of paradoxes. The first movement is suitably frantic, but I had to work harder than I expected to get it to sound that way.
The Locrian mode roughly equates to the ancient Greeks’ diatonic Mixolydian tonos; our Mixolydian mode roughly equals their diatonic Hypophrygian tonos. Several of our other mode names are also historically inaccurate; I go into much greater detail ⟨aaronfreed.github.io/musicalmodes.html#etymology⟩. (I briefly considered renaming this to something involving “Mixolydian”, but I quickly elected not to because I suspected that being historically accurate would lead to me repeatedly feel obligated to give TEDx talks on why our names for modes are historically inaccurate, which might’ve annoyed me even more than it would’ve annoyed everyone else.)
This feels relatively close to finished now. After players finish the mission, I’ll strip away several layers, hence the OST mix’s subdued outro. (The game mix, by necessity, uses two completely separate audio files.)
The guitar in the first movement’s left channel quotes Rush’s “YYZ”. The guitar in the right channel quotes from Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565. This is actually the second time I’ve quoted both these compositions in the same track; my of Alex Seropian’s “Fat Man” (Marathon, 1994) does the same thing. I’d like to claim that I did this on purpose, but it didn’t occur to me until after I’d already done it. The Bach quote, incidentally, is one of the few times I broke from strictly adhering to the scale of B Locrian – it sounded wrong without the accidentals.
For the record, “τᾰρᾰχώδης” (romanized: tarakhṓdēs) means approximately chaotic in ancient Greek, while “γαληνός” (romanized: galēnós) means peaceful.
Additional note for you math nerds out there: the pitch ratio of a perfect fifth is approximately 3:2, and the pitch ratio of a perfect fourth (the interval needed to complete the octave above a perfect fifth) is approximately 4:3. The tritone, meanwhile, has a ratio of exactly √2:1.
Finally, a few notes on Bach (undoubtedly still my biggest musical influence): this on Toccata and Fugue in D minor’s reception might as well open Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities:
“The composition has been deemed both ‘particularly suited to the organ’ and ‘strikingly unorganistic’. It has been seen as united by a single ground-thought, but also as containing ‘passages which have no connection whatever with the chief idea’. It has been called ‘entirely a thing of virtuosity’ yet also described as being ‘not so difficult as it sounds’. It has been described as some sort of program music depicting a storm, but also as abstract music, quite the opposite of program music depicting a storm. It has been presented as an emanation of the galant style, yet too dramatic to be anything near that style. Its period of origin has been assumed to have been as early as around 1704, and as late as the 1750s. Its defining characteristics have been associated with extant compositions by Bach (BWV 531, 549a, 578, 911, 914, 922 and several of the solo violin sonatas and partitas), and by others (including Nicolaus Bruhns and Johann Heinrich Buttstett), as well as with untraceable earlier versions for other instruments and/or by other composers. It has been deemed too simplistic for it to have been written down by Bach, and too much a stroke of genius to have been composed by anyone else but Bach.”
In short, it was a composition very much like present-d I’m sorry; I can’t even type that with a straight face.
For the record, I’ve performed the toccata in its entirety on both piano and pipe organ and didn’t find it especially difficult (this was 25 years ago, so I don’t have a recording; sorry). I also find it far too ingenious to not be by Bach, but then, I was taught Christian Petzold’s , BWV Anh. 114, as a Bach piece and was shocked to learn the attribution to Bach was spurious (and was known to be when I was taught it – pedagogy took a long time to catch up with scholarship). Here’s a of why Petzold’s work was misattributed for so long (followed by a lovely acoustic guitar performance). Enciende subtítulos cerrados si no entiendes español. (Lo siento; turn on closed captions if you don’t understand Spanish.)
I tentatively plan to use the chaotic version of this track on the Tempus Irae Redux levels “Repository Four” and “Polygonum opus”, before you complete the mission; the latter will switch to the calm variant, which I also intend to use on other repository levels (except “The End”).
composer: Aaron Freed, 2024-07-24 to 2024-08-24
I stole this song’s rhythm from the Allman Brothers Band’s “Whipping Post” (studio: , 1969; definitive live recording: , 1971), likely the most famous use of 11/8 in rock history (despite its composer Gregg Allman apparently not understanding this), so if it feels slightly off-kilter rhythmically, that’s entirely intentional. A few of its chords may be similar to those of “Whipping Post”, too. Another big influence is undoubtedly Led Zeppelin’s “” (Led Zeppelin, 1969).
However, it sounds quite different from either – despite the fairly metal-influenced (synthesized) guitar solo towards the end, it has a major jazz fusion/progressive electronic vibe, despite paradoxically having virtually no blue notes and sticking fairly strictly to the D Dorian scale. It’s also quite a bit more unpredictable and even chaotic than what I set out to make. A friend described it as sounding like Final Fantasy boss fight music, which feels entirely accurate. My mother also compared it to Tears for Fears’ “Sowing the Seeds of Love” (, 1989), which also feels accurate (The Seeds of Love, a lost classic of the late ’80s, has been one of my favorite albums for 35 years).
The title (Italian for “Portrait in Gray”) is a pun on the Dorian mode by way of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray – a sort of song title equivalent of Cockney rhyming slang.
I feel almost certain that I’ll write at least one more movement of this track (perhaps preceding the first one, perhaps following the last), and I have absolutely no idea where it’s going. I’ve had it suggested to me to use an ABB’A’ structure for this track, which I’m currently contemplating; if I do so, it’ll be entirely safe to wager money on me throwing in at least one brief reference to “Mamma Mia!” or some other ABBA banger. (“Mamma Mia!” is the likeliest due to its Italian title.)
The acoustic movement is currently a very early work in progress and does not qualify as the B’A’ section – it’s an early attempt at the “mission complete” music.
I tentatively plan to use this track on the Tempus Irae Redux level “Theatre of Pain”.
composer: Aaron Freed, 2024-07-30 to 2024-08-19
I wrote most of this song while Hurricane Debby was passing overhead. Logic Pro’s Latin percussionist, which I used on this track, has a preset called “Stormy Weather”; the movement titles were predestined, though I translated it to Italian for the first movement due to Tempus Irae Redux’s Italian setting, and to Spanish for the second due to the piece’s substantial Latin jazz influence; this created a nice pun in both languages. (Since the titles were so similar, I also ultimately added “elettrico” to the Italian title and “acústico” to the Spanish one; they mean exactly what you think.) I subsequently renamed the piece as a whole to “Tempus tempestātum” (Latin for “Time of Storms”) as Hurricane Milton approached Florida.
Overall, this is an experiment in tonality. Several tracks above deviate from the diatonic scale’s modes rarely, if ever; here, I took a more chromatic approach, aiming to seesaw between harmony and exceeding Locrian’s dissonance. I’m satisfied with the results. I considered it a work in progress for a while, but I’m increasingly convinced that the arpeggiation carries the track almost by itself. The 6/8 rhythm also helps a lot; its ebb and flow feels quite oceanic, which is appropriate for a level in which water plays such a major part.
I plan to use this track on the Tempus Irae Redux level “Towel Boy”. I’m considering adding new instruments as players progress through the level as a way to build up tension; at the bare minimum, we’ll switch to the jazz version once the Juggernaut dies.
| composer: | Aaron Freed, 2024-08-07 to 2024-08-16 |
| inspired by: |
System of a Down, “”, by Daron Malakian & Serj Tankian Radiohead, “”, by Colin Greenwood, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, Phil Selway, & Thom Yorke (Kid A, 2000-10-02) |
I may be the only person that actually hears this, but this song is vaguely inspired by System of a Down’s “” (Toxicity, 2001). The biggest tells are that, like its inspiration, it’s in G minor and makes heavy use of start-stop dynamics. (It’s also titled after a recurring line from “Chop Suey!”; it’s one of the few Tempus Irae Redux track titles I haven’t translated into a foreign language because neither Italian nor Latin have split infinitives.) It turned into something quite different, though.
The other vague inspiration I can name is Radiohead’s “” (Kid A, 2000), another song that lives rent-free in my head (actually, most of that album does). Whenever I hear a Fender Rhodes play a fuguelike melody, that song immediately comes to mind.
I didn’t even try to make this song’s jazz version resemble its metal version, besides their chords – in fact, they have no instrument parts in common. I don’t think that’s a problem: the transitions within the metal movement are meant to be jarring, so why shouldn’t the transition to jazz also come out of nowhere?
This is likely to remain the shortest track I write for Tempus Irae Redux; stretching it out too long would spoil the effect. I’ll likely use it for a short secret level like “Beyond the Black”.
This track’s name is Ancient Greek (romanized: “Kataibaté hélix”) for “Downward Spiral”, the name of the level I wrote it for. I’ll explain why I used Ancient Greek below, but I can’t stress enough that this song exists purely because Chris personally encouraged me to make it. I’m not sure I can actually express how personally meaningful and rewarding that is to me – especially because this has become one of my favorite pieces of music I’ve ever worked on (hence its almost twenty-minute length).
The central architectural feature of the level “Downward Spiral” is a cathedral. This is crucial to understanding almost every artistic choice I made for its soundtrack.
Incidentally, the etymon of cathedral is the ancient Greek (kathédrā: chair, column’s base, sitting posture, throne, etc.), derived from (katá: down) and (hédra: seat). Καταιβᾰτή is derived from κᾰτᾰ́ and (baínō: I go). The level wasn’t named for a Greek pun, though; it’s named for Nine Inch Nails’ 1994 classic. As a bonus, the player literally starts on the cathedral’s roof before descending a spiral staircase. (And yes, our word helix traces its etymology directly to .)
| composers: |
Chris Christodoulou, 2019 Aaron Freed, 2024-08-08 to 2024-10-07 |
| : |
“The Raindrop That Fell to the Sky” (Risk of Rain 2, 2019-03-28) |
A few days before I began working on this track, I’d sent Chris a mash-up I’d made of wowbobwow’s arrangement of Alex Seropian’s “” (Marathon, 1994) with his own “” and “.” (Chris’ song title game puts mine to shame.) Chris liked it and provided several constructive suggestions that I’m sure will improve the song immensely the next time I get around to working on it. I also mentioned that I wanted to attempt a few further mash-ups; he seemed to find that idea moderately interesting, but he directly encouraged me to try to write something entirely new based on the OST stems. (Just the fact that he released the OST stems at all is awesome, I have to add.)
I’d considered that idea several times before then, and every time I’d done so, I’d felt too intimidated to try. But since Chris had personally encouraged me, I put that aside and loaded four stems from “” into Logic: the lead melody, the drum and percussion tracks, and the bass guitar. I then attempted to write my own chords and accompaniment and was shocked at:
To be fair, part of this is because Chris’ work is on another level. (I already mentioned in an endnote for “Not Actually FFIV” that “The Raindrop That Fell to the Sky” is now tied with Nobuo Uematsu’s “Dancing Mad” as my favorite piece ever written for a video game.)
I did find myself stumped when I got to what, for lack of a better word, I’ll call the breakdown about four minutes into the piece. I’ve effectively copied the original chords, because even after transcribing the melody and harmony for that segment by ear, the theory behind it confounds me. Every chord I’ve tried there besides the originals has felt completely off. I don’t understand how or why it works, but the resolution it provides, both in Chris’ original and in my variation, is off the charts – which is especially remarkable because, until it hits, neither piece even feels like it’s been building tension.
I’ve also tweaked the notes of the original song’s bass line. I’m actually quite proud of this – in particular, I managed to change the interval between a pair of connected notes at around 4:24 in a way that sounded natural. This actually took some rather precise sound editing: I wound up cross-fading quickly between a version pitch-shifted up three half-steps and one pitch-shifted up four half-steps.
This movement’s title (if I haven’t made any mistakes, which is quite possible) is Ancient Greek (romanized: “Ho zíngos aúxetai mégas”) for “The Whirring Grows Loud”, the phrase Risk of Rain 2 displays just before the optional boss Alloy Worship Unit spawns (which, in the unmodded game, can only occur on Siren’s Call, whose BGM is “The Raindrop That Fell to the Sky”). I translated it to Greek partly because the name Marathon is itself Greek (μάραθον means fennel in ancient Greek; the toponym refers to the plant’s prevalence in the area), partly as a tribute to Vangelis (a massive influence on both Chris and me – why else do you think we both use so much CS-80?), and partly as a tribute to Chris himself.
| composers: | Chris Christodoulou, 2013-2022 Aaron Freed, 2024-08-09 to 2024-10-07 |
| : |
“The Raindrop That Fell to the Sky” (Risk of Rain 2, 2019-03-28) “They Might as Well Be Dead” (Survivors of the Void, 2022-03-01) “Moisture Deficit” (Risk of Rain, 2013-09-04) “Once in a Lullaby” (Survivors of the Void, 2022-03-01) |
| bağlama, bongos: | Petros Anagnostoupoulos |
| guitar, keyboard, vocals: | Chris Christodoulou |
| oboe, English horn: | Christos Tsogias-Razakov |
| violin, vocals: | Kalliopi Mitropoulou |
This transition is jarring, and I’m not even sure I want to fix it. In fact, I’m fairly sure I don’t. There’s a major emotional shift between these two movements, and I think it’s even more effective if it’s sudden.
I’ve experimented before with Frank Zappa’s concept of xenochrony (from ξένος [xénos; strange, alien] and χρόνος [khrónos; time]; thus, strange time), wherein a musical part is extracted outside its original context in one song and placed in another (which Zappa claimed was the only way to achieve certain rhythmic effects). Good examples include Eternal’s extended “Flippant” and “Fat Man” remixes and the Marathon/Risk of Rain 2 mash-up I mentioned in my commentary for movement α of this very track. But I think this is the furthest I’ve taken the concept to date.
From the very start, I’d intended this movement to mash up multiple Risk of Rain songs. In addition to further “Raindrop That Fell to the Sky” stems (i.e., the vocals), I worked in some stems from “” that, after I pitch-shifted them from D minor to C minor and slowed them from 100 to 88 bpm, dovetailed beautifully with the former song’s synthesizer solo, just according to keikaku. (“The Raindrop That Fell to the Sky” is actually 110 bpm, but it’s also 5/4, while “They Might as Well Be Dead” is 4/4; thus, lining the measures up requires making the latter’s tempo 80% of the former’s.)
But while I’d expected the two songs to fit together, I was absolutely flabbergasted at how well they fit. I’d expected to have to finagle the harmony of the “They Might as Well Be Dead” segments at least a little bit, but my instincts had been dead-on: everything fit perfectly as soon as I lined it up. It’s not that the chord progressions are identical – far from it, in fact. The melody of Chris’ solo in the back half of “The Raindrop That Fell to the Sky” simply happens to work perfectly over the chords from the back half of “They Might as Well Be Dead”.
Since that worked so well, I also added stems from “” and “”. “Moisture Deficit” was obvious: “They Might as Well Be Dead” is a remake of it. Most of “Once in a Lullaby”’s stems also fit flawlessly, but Kalliopi Mitropoulou’s harmonies are slightly out of phase with the other songs’ chord progressions during the climax – which I like, since the sensation of something being out of place feels appropriate for a game wherein alien slavers attack Renaissance Italy.
This movement contains some complex polyrhythms: “The Raindrop That Fell to the Sky” is in 5/8, while “They Might as Well Be Dead” is in 4/4. “Moisture Deficit” switches between 7/4, 4/4, and 5/4, while “Once in a Lullaby” uses 4/2 and 7/4, according to the PDF included with the stems. This gives us 5:4, 7:4, and 7:5 polyrhythms in places, though 5:4 is the most prominent by far. Most of this song predominantly feels like 5/8, but once the drums from “They Might as Well Be Dead” dominate the mix (starting at 9:51), it predominantly feels like 4/4 – in short, a classic example of time signature modulation (although, for my own convenience, I notated everything as 5/8 within Logic).
This title (again, if I haven’t made any errors) is Ancient Greek (romanized: “Oneiropoleís tḗn biaíān auxísin”) for “You Dream of Violent Growth”, Risk of Rain 2’s description of Sundered Grove (the stage that plays “They Might as Well Be Dead”) when it is selected as the next stage at the Lunar Seer.
I’m not totally sure I’ve gotten the grammar right – in fact, I’ve already changed it twice. I first incorrectly used the uncontracted form of the verb (-έεις instead of -εῖς); then I used «Ὀνειροπολεῖς τῆς βῐαίᾱς αὐξήσεος» (Oneiropoleís tês biaíās aúxēseos), which uses the Koine genitive case of the noun phrase ἡ βῐαίᾱ αὔξησις (hē biaíā aúxesis, the violent growth), since genitive is the equivalent of an English possessive (i.e., of violent growth. I specifically used Koine declensions because New Testament Greek’s dialect felt thematically appropriate for the level with the most memorable cathedral ever constructed in the Marathon engine.) However, I later confirmed that ὀνειροπολέω (oneiropoléo), when used to mean I dream of, governs the accusative case (the equivalent of an English direct object). Finally, I yeeted the definite article; it’s apparently unnecessary, and I wanted to match the original text more closely.
| composers: |
Aaron Freed, 2024-09-14 to 2024-10-07 Chris Christodoulou, 2013-2022 |
| interpolating: | Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral motif, written by Trent Reznor |
| lyrical source: | Τρισάγιον (author and date unknown) |
Ancient Greek for “A Love Supreme” (romanized: Mía agápē anṓtate), named for John Coltrane’s masterpiece. I hasten to note that ᾰ̓γᾰ́πη, often denoted in English as agape or agāpē, refers to a very specific kind of love (the Greeks had ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love⟩ that don’t map precisely to English words), which lexicographers Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott define as “unconditional love, charity; the love of God for person and of person for God”. This is, beyond question, the kind of love that Coltrane meant, and it was the only appropriate term to use.
| composers: |
Aaron Freed, 2024-09-14 to 2024-10-07 Chris Christodoulou, 2013-2022 |
| interpolating: | “Diēs Īrae” (ca. 13th century, author unknown) |
| lyrical source: | “Diēs Īrae” (ca. 13th century, author unknown) |
Ancient Greek for “Day of Wrath” (romanized: “Hēmérā orgês”), which in turn is English for “Diēs Īrae”, whence the lyrics of this section. Tempus Irae Redux had been sorely lacking in quotations of its namesake; it didn’t even have any ominous Latin chanting. This movement is my attempt to rectify that.
«Μίᾰ ᾰ̓γᾰ́πη ἀνώτατη» and «Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς» (conceived as a single movement, but split up when they broke the nine-minute mark) share most of the previous movement’s two primary chord progressions, but they go in a very different direction. Although they return to the 5/8 that most of the previous two movements were using, it often feels like 6/8 here. I must confess that I don’t fully understand why.
In any case, I took a ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_music⟩ approach here, reasoning that a mixture of rhythmic complexity and harmonic repetition would serve to create a sense that the surrounding structure had already exited for centuries and will undoubtedly stand for centuries if not millennia more. This also creates a steadily building tension, and when the chord sequence finally switches, the resolution is unbelievable.
This is turning into one of my favorite pieces of music I’ve ever (mostly) composed – and incidentally, one of my early listeners gave me undoubtedly one of the most flattering comparisons I’ve ever received on a work of music: she compared it to the work of Quincy Jones, who produced literally, not figuratively, the first album I ever fell in love with, Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1982-11-29) – it couldn’t be more correct to say I’m a lifelong fan of his work. (Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973-03-01), to no one’s surprise ever, was the second such album.)
And that isn’t even all; another early listener compared «Μίᾰ ᾰ̓γᾰ́πη ἀνώτατη» to the work of Tim Follin (known for going way harder than he has to, e.g., and ) and «Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς» to Nobuo Uematsu’s Final Fantasy soundtracks, which, among game soundtracks, are probably the single biggest influence on how I compose for games.
A third listener, meanwhile, compared it to Magma, one of my favorite bands ever. Magma’s work feels so alien that I never expected to receive comparisons to it, but now that they’ve made one, I totally hear the semblance to “Köhntarkösz” in particular. If a single track earns me four comparisons as varied and flattering as those, I can only figure I must be doing something right.
In the service of not concealing influences, I’ll also point out that both these movements are heavily influenced by Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s works and Maurice Ravel’s Boléro. Anyone who’s ever heard either won’t need me to explain how, but for the poor souls that haven’t: it’s the crescendo.
Other influences on «Μίᾰ ᾰ̓γᾰ́πη ἀνώτατη»: Ravi Shankar, George Harrison, Miles Davis’ fusion period (especially 1969-07-30’s In a Silent Way and 1970-03-30’s Bitches Brew), John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Pink Floyd’s lengthy instrumentals, and the Doors (partly by osmosis, since it derives its chords from “They Might as Well Be Dead”, which is also influenced by the Doors – it switches repeatedly between D minor and D major, a technique they used throughout tracks like “The End”. I transposed it down to C, but its first half still switches repeatedly between minor and major).
Meanwhile, «Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς», even more than everything else I’ve written for this collection, is profoundly influenced by Johann Sebastian Bach, to the extent that I tried to make its harmonies indistinguishable from something Bach might’ve written. They aren’t: there are nowhere enough surprises per minute for it to be a Bach piece. Or, as Pat Metheny has put it, “compared to Bach… man, we all suck.” I’m humble enough to agree completely with him, but not so humble that I haven’t tried anyway.
I felt it would’ve been wrong not to include a reference to the album this level (and therefore song) is named after, so at 14:29, the sitar starts playing a quote from Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral. This motif is used not just in the title track but also in “Closer”, “Piggy”, and “A Warm Place” (backwards).
I actually wasn’t planning this section to have lyrics until I’d been working on it for almost a month. It wasn’t so much that I felt something was missing without lyrics as that the Trisagion (from the Byzantine Greek Τρισάγιον, meaning Thrice Holy) added a mystery to the piece that felt appropriate for the atmosphere and tension I was trying to create. The fact that a traditional Catholic performance would have switched between Ancient Greek and Latin felt especially fitting.
I took a slight historical liberty in that usually, each Greek line is followed by its Latin equivalent. I did this for the first three lines, but I switched them around for the final line: the pacing felt more appopriate that way. This is, of course, far from the largest historical liberty I’ve taken with this soundtrack. On the other hand, the triple recitation of the Trisagion I employed is very much in keeping with tradition.
Beyond that, nearly everything I can think to say about “Diēs Īrae” (the lyrical source and namesake of «Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς») applies equally well to the Trisagion, so for the sake of avoiding redundancies, I’ll cut this section comparatively short.
I could probably be fairly described as almost aggressively agnostic, even ignostic (the position that gods are not defined clearly or consistently enough to make taking a stance on their existence or lack thereof worthwhile). Nonetheless, before I even started writing «Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς», I knew I wanted to end it with a choral segment, and that “Diēs Īrae” was its only fitting lyrical source. For one thing, Tempus Irae is literally named for it – indeed, its ⟨nardo.bungie.org⟩ features excerpts of it. (Splash pages were such an aggressively ’90s thing, weren’t they?) For another, it’s one of the most famous works that might’ve been sung in a cathedral in Renaissance Italy, and even today, people recognize it; I intentionally used only its best-known verses for that precise reason. (The melody I wrote deviates from the traditional one, but I did repeatedly quote its four-note opening here – just not, ironically, for the actual words “Diēs īrae”. That said, if you listen closely, you can hear the famous traditional “Diēs Īrae” melody played in the background more slowly, first on rhythm guitar, then on violin.)
(I should note that the level music for Eternal X 1.3’s “Run, Coward!” contains a parody of sorts of “Diēs Īrae”; I wrote its words myself (in Latin, at that), besides a few I simply kept from the original.)
Despite my agnosticism, I also strongly believe there’s more to this universe than our feeble senses are capable of comprehending – in fact, I’ve held for decades that if deities exist, mere humans would be incapable of comprehending them. (This doesn’t mean I’m convinced every religion necessarily has it wrong: for instance, both Judaism and Christianity often present God as ineffable, which in fact comports exactly with how I’d expect a divinity to come across to us.)
But let’s set aside what I regard as unclearly defined to discuss some clearly established scientific facts. We have clear evidence that the brain discards sensory signals it regards as irrelevant. This occurs without our conscious involvement, and in fact, it’s a necessary survival tactic: if we perceived every signal our senses gave us, we’d be totally unable to separate signal from noise, or indeed even to function.
But our brains are, as it happens, far from perfect at this – they rely on memory, which is an imperfect, even self-serving narrator. Memory isn’t read-only (ROM); it’s random-access (RAM), and, to extend the computer metaphor past its breaking point, each time we load a file in our memory, we overwrite our old memory with our current recollection of it. This is, to be clear, why the FBI requires agents to write down notes immediately after conducting interviews.
This is only one of several ways we fail to perceive everything around us; as another example, our senses of smell are thousands of times worse than dogs’ (and in fact, it’s hypothesized that they’ve gotten worse precisely because our dogs have warned us when something, quite literally, smells off, making our own senses of smell superfluous to our survival). So I’m quite prepared to accept that there’s more to the universe than mere humans can perceive. Indeed, there’s scientific proof of this.
That said, only a few things make me feel something intrinsically inexplicable about the cosmos can’t be explained in purely ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism⟩ terms. (To clarify, I’m not referring to acquiring material goods.) One of these is ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler's_identity⟩, eiπ+1=0. Twenty-five years ago, I could’ve clearly explained exactly why it was true and why I found it so transcendently beautiful. Unfortunately, some of the requisite knowledge has faded, but my recollection of its sublime beauty remains absolutely vivid (even though, for reasons just outlined, I know my memory of events twenty-five years ago can no longer be considered reliable).
Music is another – the main thing, in fact. Occasionally, a piece of music strikes me so deeply I wonder if its inspiration came from beyond the material realm. If that matches your definition of divine inspiration, I’m not inclined to argue. (To reiterate, I don’t have any personal religious beliefs.) I’d never wondered that about any of my own music – until these movemens. Everything I’ve typed out attempting to explain why, or even how, has looked foolish when I’ve read it on the screen, so I’ll leave it at that; if I’ve done what I think I’ve done here, they’ll communicate to listeners why they make me feel that way without the need for any further explanation on my part, anyway.
Through the entire process of working on this song, I was quite conscious that I was working within an ancient tradition that many people across the globe consider to extend beyond a life-or-death matter. There’s a dimension to this tradition that makes me feel like a dabbler. A trespasser, even.
That said, much of the world’s greatest music, from Bach’s chorales to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (1965-01), is explicitly religious and evokes many emotional sentiments that secular music rarely manages to bring out in me. I think, to some extent, this is because it’s religious: it conveys a sense of awe and wonder that non-believers rarely feel comfortable expressing. “Awe” is, to reiterate, exactly what I was aiming for in this piece. Standing within a cathedral, a structure that is already centuries old and that will undoubtedly outlast us and everyone we know by centuries, gives me a sense of personal insignificance next to the scope of history. It makes all our modern squabbles look petty and unimportant. Which, I hasten to add, they mostly are.
“Diēs Īrae” also conveys several sentiments I relate to, especially within its final few lines (most notably “Huic ergō parce, Deus” and “Dōnā eis requiem”). If I didn’t fully believe this was one of my best works to date, I’d never have used “Diēs Īrae” for its words – those words carry too much significance to too many people for me to treat them lightly. Including me, for that matter: it is, in fact, one of the most beautiful Latin works I have read.
| Greek | Romanized Greek | Latin | Translation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ἅγιος ὁ Θεός |
Hágios ho Theós |
Sānctus Deus |
Holy God |
| Ἅγιος ἰσχυρός |
Hágios iskhūrós |
Sānctus fortis |
Holy mighty |
| Ἅγιος ἀθάνατος |
Hágios āthánatos |
Sānctus immortālis |
Holy immortal |
Ἐλέησον ἡμᾶς |
Eléēson hēmâs |
Miserēre nōbīs |
Have mercy on us |
[Note: Following , ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dies_Irae⟩ I’ve chosen to print both a poetic translation that replicates “Diēs Īrae”’s rhyme and rhythm (i.e., formal equivalence), and a translation that aims for more literal accuracy (i.e., dynamic equivalence). While I started from Wikipedia’s versions, I’ve made numerous amendments, either for reasons of aesthetics (translating “Diēs Īrae” to any dialect newer than Early Modern English feels like a violation of the Geneva Convention) or accuracy (though, as a perfectly accurate translation is impossible, even the “more literal” translation takes a few liberties for comprehensibility’s sake – e.g., teste on line three translates literally as from the witness). The original poetic translation was by William Josiah Irons; the more literal translation is uncredited. (I can never see Irons’ translation without thinking of ⟨public-domain-poetry.com/ambrose-bierce/day-of-wrath-2675⟩ by Ambrose Bierce.)
Since all verses of “Diēs Īrae” except the last two only have three lines, and I didn’t want to stretch out syllables over multiple notes, I elected to repeat the first three stanzas’ first lines after their third. This felt like the most acceptable solution.]
| More poetic (formal equivalence) | Lyrica latīna | More literal (dynamic equivalence) |
| Day of wrath and doom impending Heav'n and Earth in ashes ending David's word with Sibyl's blending Day of wrath and doom impending |
Diēs īrae, diēs illa Solvet saeclum in favillā Teste Dāvīd cum Sibyllā Diēs īrae, diēs illa |
Day of wrath, that day Shall dissolve the world into ashes As David and the Sibyl attestèd Day of wrath, that day |
| King of Majesty tremendous Who dost free salvation send us Fount of pity, then befriend us King of Majesty tremendous |
Rēx tremendae māiestātis Qui salvandōs salvās grātīs Salvā mē, fōns pietātis Rēx tremendae māiestātis |
King of fearsome majesty Who freely saveth the elect Save me, O fount of mercy King of fearsome majesty |
| Once the damn’d have been confoundèd Doom’d to acrid flames unboundèd Call me with Thy saints surroundèd Once the damn’d have been confoundèd |
Cōnfūtātis maledictīs Flammīs ācribus addictīs Vocā mē cum benedictīs Cōnfūtātis maledictīs |
Once the wicked are restrain’d Damnèd to acrid flames Call me with the blessèd Once the wicked are restrain’d |
| Ah! that day of tears and mourning From the dust of earth returning Man for judgement must prepare him Spare, O God, in mercy spare him |
Lacrimōsa diēs illa Quā resurget ex favillā Iūdicandus homō reus Huic ergō parce, Deus |
Tearful [shall be] that day When from glowing embers ariseth The guilty man to be judg’d Thus spare him, O God |
| Lord, all-pitying, Jesus blest Grant them Thine eternal rest Amen |
Pie Iēsū Domine Dōnā eis requiem Amen |
O Holy Lord Jesus Grant them rest Amen |
composer: Aaron Freed, 2024-08-22 to 2024-08-24
A fast-paced track in 13/8 – a mixture of (5+5+3)/8 and (4+4+5)/8, if you prefer subdivisions of time signatures this complex – that mostly sticks to diminished chords. It wound up a couple minutes longer than I planned it to be, mostly because it turned out far catchier than it has any right to be – every time I listened to the shorter version, I found myself wanting more of it, so I wrote more. I don’t expect to make a “subdued” version of this – I’m planning to use it for “Big Man with a Gun”, which has effectively little to no exploration left once the player clears the most intense segment of the level.
The title, Latin for “a storm of wrath”, is naturally a pun on Tempus Irae (“time of wrath”) – related is the fact that in most Romance languages, the word for time can also mean weather. This is true in Spanish (tiempo), Italian (tempo), Portuguese (also tempo), French (temps), Romanian (timp)…
Perhaps coincidentally, this track has something in common with this collection’s other storm-related track (besides a heavy use of diminished chords): I wrote most of it after being awakened by a nasty storm early that morning. At the time, I lived in the stormiest part of the country, so it’s not that coincidental, but I’d thought of the title a few weeks prior, and only after applying it did I notice the connection.
| composer: | Aaron Freed, 2024-08-27 to 2024-08-29 |
| inspired by: |
Massive Attack, “Protection” (Protection, 1994-09-26), The Beatles, “” (Magical Mystery Tour, 1967-11-24), |
I don’t understand what possessed me to start writing what is effectively a Massive Attack track at 7 am, but that’s what happened. (I’ve joked before that if you look up “nocturnal music” in the dictionary, it will play you a sample of Massive Attack’s music to define the term.) “Tūtēla” is Latin for “Protection”, the name of the track that most heavily inspired this – the largest tells are probably that it’s written in a mix of B major and B minor and uses descending chord progressions throughout its entire runtime. (Tūtēlā can also mean tutelage, as one might expect; meanwhile, “Apologiīs Impetuī Immēnsō”, found in the tag comments, is Latin for “With apologies to Massive Attack”.)
Ultimately, my arrangement isn’t nearly as sparse as Massive Attack’s; this chord progression is very jazzy, so I played that up heavily. I also threw an even heavier emphasis on the dance elements that already dominate Massive Attack’s song. However – and if you’ve listened to enough of the previous tracks or even read my commentary for them, I’m sure you’ve already predicted this – I also wrote the entire song in 5/4.
“Tūtēla”, unsurprisingly, is the “mission finished” version of this track. For most tracks here, I wrote the more intense ”mission unfinished” version first and then stripped it down or made an acoustic arrangement of it for the “mission finished” version, but here, the contemplative mood felt appropriate for the “mission complete” track. I hadn’t planned on each loop lasting for 7:12, but that’s about the length of “Protection” (the album version, at least), so that seems appropriate somehow.
I naturally called the metal version “Impetus”, which, beyond its English meaning, also means attack (noun, not verb) in Latin. Interestingly, despite having almost entirely different instrumentation and a very different atmosphere, I feel like it kept roughly the same mood as “Tūtēla”. I’m low-key proud of that.
Another influence also crept in: the Beatles’ “” (Magical Mystery Tour, 1967-11-24). George Martin’s string arrangement influenced both my chord progression (a subconscious influence) and my own string arrangement (a similarity I consciously played up after noticing it). Then again, Massive Attack explicitly acknowledge the Beatles as a formative influence (e.g., the string arrangement in “”’s back half couldn’t be more “I Am the Walrus” if it tried), so this is undoubtedly a case where a major influence on a conscious influence, in turn, subconsciously influenced me.
As a final note, writing this piece really drove home for me how context-dependent our perception of dissonance or consonance is – several of these chords would sound awful in isolation but work fine in the context of the harmonic progression. My favorite example is G♯m7(maj7), which I actually had to enter manually into Logic (Apple apparently can’t comprehend someone wanting to use both a minor 7th and a major 7th in the same chord). It sounded wrong when I listened to it in isolation, and I had to listen repeatedly to the entire progression in succession to feel satisfied that I really wanted that chord between D♯m7(11)/A and Bmaj7. (Trying to replace it with other chords confirmed this – nothing else had the emotional impact I intended.) The entire progression, numbered starting from 0, is printed below. A few notes:
| Chord Progression of “Pende siccāre” | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| # | Chord | C | C♯ | D | D♯ | E | F | F♯ | G | G♯ | A | A♯ | B |
| 0 | Bmaj7 | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
| 1 | Bm7 | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
| 2 | D♯m7(11)/A | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||
| 3 | G♯m7(maj7) | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||
| 4 | Bmaj7 | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
| 5 | A6 | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
| 6 | G♯m7 | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
| 7 | Gaugmaj7 | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
| 8 | Bmmaj7 | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
| 9 | A6(9) | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||
| 10 | G♯m7(11) | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||
| 11 | Gmaj7 | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
| 12 | D6(9)/F♯ | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||
| 13 | E7(9) | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||
| 14 | Gmaj7/D | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
| 15 | Amaj7(9,11,13)/C♯ | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||
This is thus both one of my harmonically simpler tracks (it contains just one repeating chord progression) and one of my more harmonically complex tracks (it’s a sixteen-chord progression with several convoluted chords that deviate heavily from the key signature – which is B minor, by the way, though it was an effectively arbitrary choice, since my scales rarely conform cleanly to either B minor or B major).
“Pende siccāre” is Latin for “Hang to Dry”, the Tempus Irae Redux level on which I plan to use this track.
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|
| composer: | Aaron Freed, 2024-08-29 to 2024-10-11 |
| inspired by: | Yasunori Mitsuda, “” (Chrono Cross, 1999-11-18; OST 1999-12-18) |
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| composer: | Aaron Freed, 2024-10-10 to 2024-10-11 |
A very early work in progress that I’m not even sure will actually fit into Tempus Irae Redux – if it doesn’t, then I’ll probably either use it for my unfinished scenario Marathon Chronicles or just leave it as an exclusive for this collection. I’ve been subconsciously ripping off Yasunori Mitsuda for so long that I felt he was long past due an outright tribute. This is named after a horrifically underrated track from Chrono Cross. I have , but its OST is probably third only to Final Fantasy VI and Risk of Rain 2 on my “favourite game OSTs of all time” list, and it’s a defensible pick for the greatest of all time.
Although the main melody is pretty much written by now, I haven’t yet finished orchestrating this track, nor are all the instrument choices final; I plan to make the song feel more “Renaissance” overall by adding instruments like viole da gamba and lutes. I think its atmosphere would be better served by just having it loop in-game, so I haven’t written a proper ending. Instead, it leads into the electric version, which I arranged around a month and a half after the acoustic one.
I didn’t actually change much for the electric version, melody-wise – I used a different bass line (which was more just for the sake of variety than necessity), and I transposed a few of the instruments either up or down an octave, but the chord progression and the main melodies are all the same. It came together rather quickly, and I’m quite pleased with it, especially for an early draft.
The name is French for, well, “The Girl Who Stole the Stars” – again, I’m not one to be coy about my influences. (Astres apparently implies all the stars or an entire galaxy of stars; étoilles suggests a smaller number, but I prefer the former connotation.) Why French, rather than Italian or Latin? Honestly, pure aesthetics: I just preferred the French translation’s sound. 「光田さんに御免なさい」, found in the song tags, means roughly “With apologies to Mitsuda-san” (rōmaji: “Mitsuda-san ni gomen’nasai”).
I still haven’t determined which level, if any, I’ll use this track on.
| composer: | Aaron Freed, 2024-08-31 to 2024-09-02 |
| inspired by: |
Radiohead, “”, by Colin Greenwood, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, Phil Selway, & Thom Yorke (Kid A, 2000-10-02) |
| briefly interpolating: |
Alex Seropian, “” (Marathon, 1994-12-21) |
One lesson Bungie learned from the design process for Marathon (1994-12-21) was not to make the opening levels before the rest of the game: you won’t have even figured out the game’s vibe yet, much less crucial aspects like its core gameplay loop. I suspect this applies equally well to soundtracks, so naturally, Tempus Irae Redux’s first few levels were among the last I tried writing music for – I wanted a solid grasp on the style and overall vibe, and I knew that, no matter how solid my plans were, they would inevitably change. (I didn’t know when I started out, for example, that roughly half the songs I wrote for it would be in 5/4.)
Almost as soon as I began writing “Ex tempore, ex locō” (Latin for “Out of Time, Out of Place”), I knew I wanted to use it for Tempus Irae Redux’s second level (and first Earth level), “Gates of Delirium”. Its rather dreadful mood feels appropriate: alien slavers have followed you back in time to Renaissance Italy, leading to potentially disastrous results. It also feels quite mysterious, which is equally appropriate, since the reason you’ve gone back in time is to recover a series of ten manuscripts by Leonardo da Vinci.
This may not be apparent to anyone else, but this track began life inspired by Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place”. Its first three chords are quite similar, and as , “Everything in Its Right Place” uses a grand total of four chords across its entire four-minute running time (this is another case of a Charles Cornell video inspiring me to write a song). Ultimately, however, I wound up changing the chords (and the overall vibe) substantially.
Below is one possible way (among several) to notate this track’s chord progression, numbered from 0-7. As with my similar table for “Pende siccāre”, an X denotes a note that appears in at least one octave. Bold, blue notes correspond to a pattern involving the C Locrian scale that I’ll explain below.
| Chord Progression of “Īra temporis” | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| # | Chord | C | D♭ | D | E♭ | E | F | G♭ | G | A♭ | A | B♭ | B |
| 0 | C(♭6,11) | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||
| 1 | C7(♭9,11) | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||
| 2 | A♭maj7(9,13)/C | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||
| 3 | G♭dimmaj7/C | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
| 4 | B♭6sus2/C | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
| 5 | A♭/C | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
| 6 | Cdim7(♭9)/C | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||
| 7 | Cm | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
What’s absolutely wild to me is that half these chords are technically major, yet it sounds amazingly dark. And what key signature is it in? I believe the correct answer to this question is “Yes”. (If forced to pick, I’d say C Locrian: although the opening and closing chords aren’t diminished, the upper notes travel down the C Locrian scale, while, with one exception, its lower notes above the drone on C travel up it – this is the pattern I’ve highlighted in blue in the above table.) I used to think I didn’t understand jazz. I still don’t think I understand jazz, but clearly, I somehow learned how to write it.
At any rate, while this began life as a set of three borrowed chords from Radiohead, I quickly tweaked them and knew immediately that I was headed somewhere much different. (Though I probably don’t even need to tell you by now that I wrote this song in 5/4 – “Everything in Its Right Place” is in 10/4.) I open the track with primarily acoustic instrumentation before adding several synth arpeggiator layers, as one does. Closing the movement with the arpeggiation isolated is meant to emphasize that something is indeed out of place and time – namely, you (and the aliens that followed you).
This track is probably complete, apart from tweaks to the mix. Overall, I wanted Tempus Irae Redux to have a musical identity as distinct from Marathon’s as I was capable of crafting (while still sounding good), but I ultimately couldn’t resist throwing in a single reference to Alex Seropian’s original Marathon soundtrack. The bass flute that harmonizes with the oboe near the end quotes “Flowers in Heaven”, which is probably as close as Marathon has to a main theme (several other tracks, such as “Swirls” and “Splash (Marathon)”, use similar melodies). It feels appropriate for the sole musical reference to Marathon to appear in what’s highly likely to be the first original track in the game that most players will hear.
It occurred to me after completing a satisfactory draft of “Ex tempore, ex locō” that the chords and melodies I’d written would, with little transmogrification necessary, make a fantastic atmospheric black metal track. It also occurred to me that bookending the original Earth campaign with variants of the same song would help make the soundtrack a lot more coherent and indeed satisfactory: it’ll give players a sense of accomplishment, as though they’ve come full circle. Enter “Nōn omnia in sua locō corrēctō erant” (Latin for “Not everything was in its right place”), which will start to play once the player picks up the manuscript on “Mt. Vesuvius”. This track proved to be a massive pain to export, but I’m satisfied with the results.
“Īra temporis” is Latin for “Wrath of Time” – so, effectively, Tempus Irae (Time of Wrath) flipped on its axis. It is highly likely to be this collection’s last track: I’ve given it a strict limit of two CDs, and «Καταιβᾰτή ἕλῐξ» is likely to expand still further. I’ve started writing new pieces since this one, but they’re all very early drafts, and I’ve set them to the side while I finish Tempus Irae Redux.
I’ve acknowledged and thanked many people above. However, I feel I owe further thanks to:
A complete list of my influences would double the length of this document, but I feel I must single out a few, either because I didn’t directly mention them above, or because their influence on me was more profound than those mentions suggested. With the caveat that not being mentioned here doesn’t preclude you from being a profound influence on me (my memory is notoriously spotty, and I’m trying to keep this from being mere name-dropping), I wish to mention in particular:
All Western music of the past two centuries exists in Bach’s shadow, due either to his harmonic influence or to trying to escape his harmonic influence. I’ve studied and performed works by too many composers to recount, and Bach still surprises me more than all the others. His four-part harmonies are the pinnacle of the form: not merely do they sound genuinely divine together, but each part also sounds fantastic in isolation. The Well-Tempered Clavier remains a foundation of modern piano pedagogy because it has never been bettered. His masterful use of counterpoint was so revolutionary that, largely due to his influence, eighteenth-century counterpoint barely resembles sixteenth-century counterpoint. (I chose not to emulate sixteenth-century musical idioms partly because writing music without Bach’s harmonic guidance breaks my brain.) He uses chords, progressions, and other harmonic ideas that don’t reappear again in music for centuries.
I could go on, but this quote from Pat Metheny sums up what I’d have said in far fewer words: “Compared to Bach… man, we all suck.” Bach will forever remain my profoundest musical influence.(Full disclosure: I’ve technically performed with Ringo; as a child, I sang the chorus of “Yellow Submarine” at an All-Starr Band concert⁽¹⁰⁾, which probably gives me a closer musical association with the Beatles than anyone who has even a remote chance of reading this except Marty O’Donnell, who still undoubtedly has better things to read than my rambling.)
Frank Zappa. The 20th century’s back half had few finer composers or sharper minds, musical or otherwise. Not all his jokes have aged well, but when he got serious, as on “Trouble Every Day”, he wrote songs that are more relevant now than they were when he wrote them. That’s not even getting into the musical complexity and sophistication of his best compositions, and let’s not forget that with Absolutely Free, he basically invented progressive rock. The only twentieth-century musicians I can compare to him in terms of both musical influence and compositional genius are probably Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Beatles, but none of those acts worked in nearly as many genres as Zappa did. And somehow he did them all well.
Beyond his music itself, Zappa’s concept of xenochrony, the act of extracting a musical part from one work and placing it within another, has profoundly influenced me; «Καταιβᾰτή ἕλῐξ», especially its movement «Ὀνειροπολεῖς βῐαίᾱν αὔξησῐν», is my most in-depth use of the technique to date. «Καταιβᾰτή ἕλῐξ» is without question my favourite track I’ve ever worked on, and while I might’ve had the idea to combine parts from disparate tracks even if Zappa hadn’t put it into my head, I don’t know if I’d have had as solid a sense of how to do it if he hadn’t shown the way all those years ago.
For those puzzled by his cult following, I have an odd recommendation: Läther (1996-09-24). Yes, it’s a four-LP set that was only officially released posthumously, and it contains a lot of material that was released on other albums. However, it’s the presentation Zappa actually intended to give this material, and I’d argue it showcases his stylistic diversity and brilliant compositional skills better than any other work in his discography. It certainly changed me from a casual fan into a devotee.
Deathspell Omega. Surely my least obvious (and likely most controversial) profound musical influence: try as I might to mimic their compositional style, it’s inimitable, or at least requires far better grasp of music theory than mine – but I’ve never heard anyone else convincingly imitate it, either, so I’m convinced it’s the former. In any case, songs like “Tempestās īrae” and “Nōn omnia in sua locō corrēctō erant”, at least in part, represent my attempts to emulate their peculiar mix of dissonance and melody.
I’ve ⟨aaronfreed.github.io/reviews/deathspellomega.html⟩, partly because I think it’s often misinterpreted: I read it not as prescription (i.e., “this is how things should be”) but diagnosis (i.e., “this is how things actually are”). In this, I find they resemble another widely misunderstood writer, the Marquis de Sade, who follows only the novelist and antifascist philosopher Georges Bataille on their list of literary inspirations. (Not only have they cited Bataille as such for over two decades, but 2005’s “Diabolus absconditus” and 2007’s Fas – ite, maledicti, in ignem aeternum quote him at length.) And as long as we’re discussing Bataille’s influence, The Furnaces of Palingenesia is one of the most eloquent musical catalogues I’ve encountered of modern political follies (rivalled only by Ashenspire’s Hostile Architecture, ⟨aaronfreed.github.io/reviews/hostilearchitecture.html⟩).
Their biggest influence on this album, however, is likely being at least partly responsible for my use (most would say overuse) of Latin, as while Marathon’s use of Latin was my strongest impetus to learn it, theirs was a not insignificant secondary motivator. (Please don’t hold this against them.) The final part of the tie.
Chris’ release of his stems (which I desperately wish more artists would do, while I’m at it) has proved something of a Rosetta stone for me: not merely has it provided material for two fantastic mixes I’ve now done incorporating his tracks – one of which, mashing up “The Raindrop That Fell to the Sky” ( ⟨aaronfreed.github.io/reviews/theraindropthatfelltothesky.html⟩), “They Might as Well Be Dead”, “Moisture Deficit”, and “Once in a Lullaby”, is on this album – but it’s shown me how his mixes are even denser than they sound and served as a how-to guide.
(For what it’s worth, I received the following comments on “Ambiēns aquātica” earlier this year: “Man, your mixing is so good; it feels like such a textured track.” I won’t attribute this purely to Chris’ influence, especially since the song is explicitly a David Wise tribute, but I doubt I’d have spent so long trying to get the perfect mix if Chris hadn’t convinced me it was possible.)
I can’t hope to express how personally meaningful it is to me that Chris personally encouraged me to continue working with his material – the encouragement of such an influential and accomplished composer means more than I can possibly hope to express, but I am eternally grateful for it. ( ⟨chrischristodoulou.bandcamp.com⟩)
Thank you for reading (and, I hope, listening). I hope you find something you enjoy here!
—Aaron Freed
Sarasota/Tallahassee, FL
2023-01-13 to 2024-10-07
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| 1. | Pronunciation etiquette note: Rush are Canadian and named this instrumental after the three-letter code for the Toronto airport, so Z is pronounced zed, not zee. (The opening riff spells out ”YYZ” in Morse code. It also happens to live rent-free in my head, which is why I’ve quoted it so many times.) Also, the drummer’s surname is pronounced Peert, not Pert. |
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Popular as it is to cite Black Sabbath (1970-02-13) as the birth of heavy metal, this is oversimplifying just as much as calling In the Court of the Crimson King (1969-10-10) the first progressive rock album is, on which more below. Blue Cheer’s “Summertime Blues” (Vincebus Eruptum, 1968-01-16) is a strong candidate for the first heavy metal song, and while the rest of Vincebus Eruptum isn’t as well remembered, a strong case can be made that it’s the first metal album. Jeff Beck’s Truth (1968-07-29) also deserves mention, as it precedes Black Sabbath (1970-02-13) by seventeen and a half months, and Led Zeppelin (1969-01-13) by four and a half. We mustn’t forget Deep Purple’s contributions to early metal, either. None of this is meant to take away anything from Sabbath; three generations of metal guitarists have made careers out of essentially rewriting Tony Iommi riffs, and Geezer Butler and Bill Ward are quite possibly the most underrated rhythm section in rock history – in particular, the swing in Ward’s playing is rarely noted, and it’s one of the magic ingredients of Sabbath’s sound that few of their many imitators have managed to equal. It also astonishes me that a power trio managed to create that thunderous racket with amplifiers from 1970. Ozzy Osbourne, meanwhile, was an oddly charismatic frontman, and while no one would ever describe him as having a perfect voice, he had the perfect voice for Sabbath’s material. And what can I say about the late, great Ronnie James Dio that others haven’t said already in fewer words? In short, Sabbath are without question one of the most influential rock acts of all time, and they don’t need to be the first heavy metal act to be the most influential. Which they unquestionably are. As for King Crimson – look, I love King Crimson. The cover of In the Court of the Crimson King (1969-10-10) has been my Discord profile picture for five years and my last.fm profile picture for eight. It’s the second-most influential progressive rock album after Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973-03-01). But it isn’t the first. Neither is the Beatles’ Abbey Road (1969-09-26), nor even The Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed (1967-11-10). The first progressive rock album is The Mothers of Invention’s Absolutely Free, released 1967-05-26 – the same day as the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, to give you an idea just how far ahead of the popular consciousness Frank Zappa was. It’s comprised entirely of two self-referential twenty-minute suites that employ odd time signatures, unusual song structures, and influences from avant-garde, jazz, and classical music. And it was delayed by five months due to record company censorship, so really, Zappa was even ahead of Sgt. Pepper. What more do you want? On the subject of Crimson, though, two additional observations*: “21st Century Schizoid Man” (from their debut) is the first progressive metal song and one of the earliest songs in any metal subgenre – notably, it precedes Sabbath’s debut by about four months. Also, if you like Crimson’s ’80s material, go see Beat while you can. (But bring earplugs.) One of the best concerts I’ve seen since… well, just keep reading the footnotes. (Spoiler: I sang with one of the Beatles at the first rock concert I ever attended.) *In the Court of the Crimson King is subtitled An Observation by King Crimson. The only other person in the world that might be amused by this pun is Mikael Åkerfeldt (several of Opeth’s albums are “observations” as well, almost certainly in tribute to Crimson), but I’ve left it in anyway. |
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I wrote these remarks in 2023. In July 2024, an epiphany led me to rank Chris Christodoulou’s “” (from 2020’s Risk of Rain 2) just as highly; however, I’ve left my original remarks intact and have merely added this footnote. And… well, see the eleventh track on this album. I stand by what I wrote about “J-E-N-O-V-A”, though. That song slaps. |
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However, claims that the tritone was banned in medieval harmony or that composers or singers could be excommunciated for using it are urban legends. Although heavily discouraged, it was never banned. Also, diabolus in musicā can refer to other intervals; the tritone is merely its most common referent. |
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More precisely, in twelve-tone equal temperament (12-TET, the basis of modern Western instrument tuning, which uses the the pitch ratio of 2¹⁄₁₂ [≈1.05946309436]), a perfect fifth’s ratio is 2⁷⁄₁₂:1 (≈1.49830707688:1; cf. ³⁄₂ = 1.5:1), while a perfect fourth’s is 2⁵⁄₁₂:1 (≈1.33483985417; cf. ⁴⁄₃ = 1.333333…:1). 12-TET very likely became standard because it’s the smallest equal temperament that so closely approximates 3:2 and 4:3, which have been considered fundamental ratios of musical harmony at least since Pythagoras’ day.
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Performance by Lang Lang; also includes Petzold’s less famous Minuet in G minor, BWV Anh. 115, which is part of a pair with BWV Anh. 114, and which I think I actually like more. Lang also comments on why both minuets are works of genius, and why they’re such fantastic pieces for beginners to learn. BWV Anh. stands for Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis Anhang, German for Bach works catalogue annex, “a list of lost, doubtful, or spurious compositions by, or once attributed to, Johann Sebastian Bach” (Wikipedia). |
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Per the man himself: “I didn’t know the intro was in 11/4 time. I just saw it as three sets of three, and then two to jump on the next three sets with: it was like 1,2,3–1,2,3–1,2,3–1,2; I didn’t count it as 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11. It was one beat short, but it didn’t feel one short, because to get back to the triad, you had two steps to go up. You’d really hit those two hard, to accent them, so that would separate the threes.… [Gregg’s brother Duane] said, ‘That’s good, man; I didn’t know that you understood 11/4.’ Of course, I said something intelligent like, ‘What’s 11/4?’ Duane just said, ‘Okay, dumbass, I’ll try to draw it up on paper for you.’” (Note that while notating the intro as 11/4 isn’t strictly wrong, its triplets are really more characteristic of 11/8. Notating it as (3+3+3+2)/8, as Gregg was effectively doing in the first place, is also acceptable.) |
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Translator’s note: keikaku means plan. (In case you were curious, “keikaku-dōri”, the source of the memetic “just as planned”, is written in kanji as 「計画 通り」 or 「計劃 通り」 and in hiragana as 「けいかく どおり」.) |
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I like Chrono Cross overall, but among all works I’ve ever experienced across all media, I suspect the only work whose ending has infuriated me more is La La Land (2016, dir. Damien Chazelle) – though to be fair to Chrono Cross, and to explain my complaints in as spoiler-free a manner as possible, La La Land’s ending is flawed due to a writing misstep I still find incomprehensible (my stock comparison is to a mystery that ends immediately after introducing the killer, without providing a single hint as to their motives or even their personality traits), while Chrono Cross’ is flawed because its devs literally ran out of time to finish it and had to relegate several planned plot twists to an end-of-game infodump. I still contend that the ending is a major reason La La Land infamously lost the 89th Academy Award for Best Picture to Moonlight (2016, dir. Barry Jenkins). To this day, even though I greatly enjoyed the rest of La La Land, I’ve been unable to sit through it again or even listen to its soundtrack – I found its ending’s aftertaste that bitter. (Full disclosure: I went to school and worked on several plays with one of Moonlight’s producers, and incidentally, it’s my favourite film of all time – though not for that reason.) My fix to La La Land’s ending is quite simple: cut the time-skip epilogue. The questions it resolves didn’t need to be resolved, and it raises vastly more questions than it answers – which would’ve been fine for a second-act scene of a film like this, but not for its final scene: we’re not exactly talking about Inception (2010, dir. Christopher Nolan) here. Unfortunately, my brain won’t allow me to simply pretend the epilogue doesn’t exist – as I alluded to in the previous paragraph, I’ve tried. My fix to Chrono Cross’ ending is potentially much more complicated, but the simplest plausible solution can be succinctly summarized as “Hire back the original devs and give them the resources they need to tell the story they wanted to tell in the first place” (which would be enormously expensive by “1999 game dev” standards, but is a drop in the bucket by “2024 game dev” standards). Despite my complaints with its ending, though, I still think Chrono Cross is a great game, and I’m sure I could replay it without issue – it’s just not the 10/10 classic Chrono Trigger is. Cross definitely feels tonally quite different, too, which is one reason I have complaints about it as a Chrono Trigger sequel. The other reason is delving into spoiler territory, but again, in as spoiler-free a manner as I can manage, it has to do with how Cross handles Trigger’s characters – or doesn’t, as the case may be. |
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As I (lightly adapted to suit this page’s format): They double-sold the tickets in our row, so they moved us to the front row. Ringo handed me the mic to sing the chorus of “Yellow Submarine”. I was all of nine years old at the time. I’m actually amazed I didn’t freeze, and I’m sure I must’ve been off-key, but I did sing it. My only regret about that show is that I |
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My favorite example of the “Mandela Effect”, the brain insisting on a memory in the face of documented evidence to the contrary. This is because our memory is not read-only (ROM) but random-access (RAM): we overwrite a memory whenever we think about it, so the more we think about it, the less reliable it is. This is why the FBI requires agents to write notes on interviews immediately after conducting them. Memory also shapes perception, as the brain subconsciously disregards signals it considers unimportant (a necessary survival tactic, since otherwise we’d be constantly bombarded with noise, with no way to isolate signals), and memories directly shape its perception of importance. Even if we know this is happening, we can’t counteract it entirely. I distinctly remember the children’s book series being not Berenstain Bears, nor even Berenstein Bears, but Bernstein Bears, with no a and two e’s. Likely this is because a close friend spelled her surname Bernstein, but I like to entertain the thought that somewhere, some other timeline is less chaotic, and that maybe someday I’ll be able to return to that one. |
