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Okay, Annie was kind enough to pass the torch from this thread, but I didn't want to confuse people with multiple reviewers in one thread. And I wanted to be able to change the topic if I felt like it. So this is my own thread. Review in progress... see you in a minute.
Posts: 2804 | Registered: May 2003
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posted
Wow, what a responsibility. Okay, let me give this a shot. My choices may not be as obscure, on the whole, as Annie's. But if I do manage to keep this up, I can promise that they'll be eclectic.
For my first selection, I wanted to include a disc out of one of the best series of soundtracks ever. But I couldn't decide which one to include. The series is so dynamic and wonderful that it's hard to recommend one out of context. So, since the thread has been dead for a while, I'm going to make up for lost time by resurrecting it with the entire series. So, without further ado, today's Music Du Jour is... The Silent Hill series, by Akira Yamaoka.
**Silent Hill 1 In case any of you are unfamiliar with Silent Hill, it's a series of survival horror games for the Playstation, and one of the scariest pieces of media ever concocted by the twisted human mind. The first game was made for PS1, and the next 3 for PS2.
Rather than doing the traditional MIDI type background music, they enlisted the aid of electronic music composer Akira Yamaoka. He created a piece of music unlike anything you'd expect to hear on a video game, or on any type of soundtrack at all. There are a few short framing tracks with traditional music (not video game MIDI-type music, though. Beautifully melancholy pieces played with a small band of traditional instruments.)
The meat of the piece, though, is a 36-track 47-minute ambient suite. It's broken into tracks for convenience only. It is, for all practical purposes, a single work. (In fact, I usually rip my CDs to my hard drive and listen to the mp3s, and with this one even the small pause the computer produces between tracks broke the mood, so I edited them all into a single track and listen to it that way.) It's a very progressive piece, much in the spirit of Brian Eno's discreet/ambient music experiments. Yamaoka isn't satisfied to merely mimic Eno, however. Where Eno is content to have music that is "as ignorable as it is interesting," Yamaoka makes his ambience impossible to ignore. It's as though Eno's "Music for Airports" had a bastard child with Gyorgy Ligeti's "Requiem" and George Crumb's "Black Angels". It features all manner of electronic, industrial and metallic noises with rhythms and even melodies subtley weaving their way in to create an atmosphere of tension and dread. It's the most difficult to listen to of the series. Not the kind of piece you'd want to put on at a party. But it does reward the listner with an experience that is in the same vein as some of the most progressive and influential 20th century music, but totally unique as well.
**Silent Hill 2 The genius of any artist isn't a single great work, but where they go after that work is finished. Do they try to re-create their earlier success? Do they change for the sake of change into something that sounds artificial? Or do they truly evolve? Silent Hill 2 is an example of an artist whose work builds naturally on a previous success in a way that makes it totally original.
Silent Hill 2 has the same ambient qualities that distinguished its predecessor. But Yamaoka has made some changes. He’s lengthened the tracks, and made them more self-contained. Thus, although the album still makes up a great whole, the tracks can still be listened to and enjoyed out of context. Also, he’s added more traditional music to the ambience. In Silent Hill 1, the melodies were very subtle, hidden in the mass of sound. Silent Hill 2 sounds sort of like a long walk through the narrow hallways of a dark building, past rooms in which different types of music are being played. There are fascinating melancholy rock songs, spare piano melodies, ominously entrancing electronic soundscapes, dark techno beats, rhythmic chants, acoustic guitar ballads, haunting violin solos, and even bursts of heavy metal, all coming from a background that makes up a single unbroken experience. And in this album, even the ambient framework is much easier to listen to. He hasn’t dumbed it down, but he’s managed to make it more traditionally musical. Even with all the diverse styles, however, there’s no sense that the composer is out of his element. And there’s no doubt that it’s all the product of the same mind. An incredible continuity in such diversity.
**Silent Hill 3 Silent Hill 3 continues the evolution from the last album. It contains all the things that made the first two soundtracks great, but adds several more noticeable improvements. The songs continue to become more autonomous and more sophisticated. He adds elements of trip-hop to the mix, and even seems to take a page from the masterful book of artists like DJ Shadow and DJ Krush. And, the most obvious change, he adds vocals to a few tracks. You may think that this would affect the flow or the continuity of the album, but it enhances it. The voice is so powerfully ethereal and the music so well written that it weaves through the landscape in a way that perfectly complements every other strength the music possesses. The songs are so hypnotic that once I hear the opening notes I can’t turn it off. I was making a sampler for work a few weeks ago and I put one of the vocal tracks from Silent Hill 3 on it. I put the CD in my stereo to listen to a few seconds of each track to make sure it transferred properly. When I got to the Silent Hill 3 track (the studio mix of I Want Love,) I couldn't turn it off. I had to listen to the entire song all the way through. There’s something about all these tracks, vocal and instrumental, that get inside your head and refuse to let go. It’s absolutely unique in all the albums that I’ve ever heard.
**Silent Hill 4 I just got this yesterday, and I’ve only listened to it once, so I’m not going to have as much to say about it as the other ones. It appears to be more of the same type of music found in Silent Hill 3. But every time I finish listening to Silent Hill 3, I want nothing more than for it to continue, so I can’t complain.
*****
In summary, the truly brilliant things about these albums are how they build on each other, and how solidly they stand on their own, apart from whatever inspired them. If you listened to Silent Hill 3 and I didn’t tell you it was Japanese, you’d never guess. If I didn’t tell you it was music from a video game, you’d never guess. If I didn’t tell you it was associated with the horror genre, you’d never guess. If I didn’t tell you it was a soundtrack at all, you might never guess. They work flawlessly for the games for which they were composed, but they’re not inextricably tied to them. Music of the finest caliber.
So that’s my first entry into the Music Du Jour. Feel free to chime in. And if I get back to this, I promise to only do one album at a time now.
quote:If you listened to Silent Hill 3 and I didn’t tell you it was Japanese, you’d never guess. If I didn’t tell you it was music from a video game, you’d never guess. If I didn’t tell you it was associated with the horror genre, you’d never guess. If I didn’t tell you it was a soundtrack at all, you might never guess. They work flawlessly for the games for which they were composed, but they’re not inextricably tied to them. Music of the finest caliber.
Well said.
Speed, you have an uncanny ability to make me more fully appreciate my music (yes, I too have the first three Silent Hill soundTracks) with your written word.
Posts: 2445 | Registered: Oct 2004
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Anyway, I noticed that this post was missing one crucial element involved in the format of Annie's posts, and that was the clips. It was kind of hard to find clips for these discs, but I found something that might do. First you must realize that the slow organic building of the mood isn't well served by the clip format... you really can't get an understanding of these pieces in 30-60 seconds like you can with some other music. But at least this will give you some idea what I'm talking about.
Silent Hill 1 --Look on the left sidebar. Not many clips, but they're longer than average. Three from the ambient suite and two framing tracks. Pretty good representation.
Silent Hill 2 --Okay, I found some short, lo-fi clips that might help. There's not much ambient representation, and some of the most diverse pieces are absent, but it's still good for a general idea of what the disc sounds like. 1234567 .
Silent Hill 3 --Click on that link, then "English Site", then "Main Menu", then "Sounds". Unfortunately, they're only a few bars of some of the tracks looped. The cool thing about the soundtrack is how they set up the rhythmic and harmonic template and then slowly build on it. This just gives small bits of the initial templates repeated ad infinitum, so don't listen very long waiting for the clip to end. But at least it gives an idea of the atmosphere. And for longer clips: --This article has some links built in to a couple of the tracks, but they're kind of hard to find, so I'll link them directly. Thesetracks are cool, but not very representative of what the rest of the album sounds like. So, not the tracks I'd have chosen, but you take what you can find. And this one is the bonus vocal track. Again, kind of a standout track not representative of the overall disc. But still, it caps off the album perfectly and is an excellent track on its own, so listen.
Silent Hill 4 --Wait for the page to load and then go a little over half way down. Half of this is in Japanese, but you'll see the media player. Cradel of Forest is the only track on this disc that I wasn't too fond of. The rest... it hasn't grown on me like the other ones, but it's still quite good.
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breyerchic, I know there's a song by Hometown Hero (maybe Home Town Hero; I'm not sure) called "Eighteen." I'm not really sure how much it really applies to being 18, but it's a good song nonetheless.
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The one I used was "I'm Eighteen" by Alice Cooper. Not the best song I have, but not bad and very appropriate. Posts: 2804 | Registered: May 2003
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One more bump... I've got another one in the works (it may be a couple of days, but it's coming.) But I just wanted to give you one more chance to check out some of these samples I've posted on this one. I don't know if anyone heard any of those, but it'd be a shame if no one got a listen to them before they disappeared.
Posts: 2804 | Registered: May 2003
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I love that delightfully creepy song from Silent Hill 4 and this cool Silent Hill 3 theme song. But those games make me dizzy.
Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Well, I'm not going to delete them. But these samples were hard to find, and many of them are on some fairly fly-by-night websites. So I don't know how long the links will be good.
Oh, and Syn, I agree about the games. I've bought the first three, and I have yet to finish a single one of them. No matter what kind of cheerful, happy, sunny environment I set up for myself, I can last about an hour or two before I feel like my soul is being devoured. And if I ever try to play at night, heaven help me. I've never been so affected by a game. Or probably by a book or movie, for that matter. A couple hours of Silent Hill is good for about two weeks of nightmares.
I try not to think of the games when I'm listening to the discs.
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So this is my own thread. Review in progress... see you in a minute.
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