OCR04842 - *YES* Skies of Arcadia "Sacrulen Shroud"

[Liontamer ⚖️]

Artist Name: Michael Hudak

There was an awful lot going through my mind when I made this, but not much I want to actually say... I approached this piece like I was painting a picture as much as I was making a piece of music (I'm an awful visual artist). That's often how I work, but for a ReMix I'm a slave to the source, so it's exciting to find more ambient sources that I can find a reflective quality in that also happen to be from a game I love. 

The source is based around the following (seemingly endless) arpeggio progression:

Ax6, Bx6, Cx3, Ax4, Bx7, Dx7, Ax3, Ex6, Fx6, Gx3, Hx3, Ix4, Jx3, Kx6, Lx6, Ax6, Mx6

I don't know what these chords are, but essentially what I did was this - Line them up the proper order, use some as arps, use some as held chords, test out instruments with different granular synth and reverb sends (sometimes just using the sends' audio and ditching the instrument VST audio after bouncing them separately into the track), and start painting. Lots field recording snippets. I faded out a lot of the transients in lieu of the smeared nature of the song, but kept some because I like how they sound and the rhythms they generate. 

There are all kinds of extra bits of melodic content floating over top of these arps in the source, and I was happy to ignore them, aside from the magical bit at 1:58 that appears at the very end of my version.

It's a quiet master, but it's ambient/post-rock/room noise/whatever, so I think it's fine. The dynamic range is much more important to me in this particular case (I think it's around 15 LUFS of range). Originally, I had a bit more in the subs in the mix, but I rolled them back because they were too overpowering and IDM-like. The granular plugins I used were Fritz Granular Engine, which is part of the Reason rack, and Imagiro Autochroma. This write-up looks a little pretentious reading it back. A couple of the songs I listened to while making this were "New Grass" by Talk Talk and "In a Silent Way" by Miles Davis. Now it looks even more pretentious! 

---

Games & Sources

"Ancient Temple Dungeon" from Skies of Arcadia is the lone source. YouTube link. That is the official song title listed on the game's OST. Yutaka Minobe & Tatsuyuki Maeda are the composers.

[Chimpazilla ⚖️]

Ooooooooooooooo.  This is utterly luscious.  The beautiful long-release-heavy-on-the-reverb arps and chord beds are then mangled, tastefully, with glitching and sudden surprises.  I always say this, but this will not be everyone's cup of tea..... but for me, it is a delicious chai tea with just the right amount of honey and cream and some spicy cinnamon sprinkled on top. 

The mixing and mastering are appropriate, and there's really not that much here to even mix.  The first synth is very full and almost too mid-low heavy in the intro (hitting me hard at 300-400Hz making it sound just a tad boxy) but since there isn't anything else competing with it, it works.

I think the source use is fine, it is just the source arps laid out as they are in the source, as Michael said sometimes in arp form and other times in chord form.  I'm not doing a timestamp but it feels more than adequate to my ears.

YES

[prophetik music ⚖️]

this reminds me of something i'd hear on echoes.

i don't think it makes sense to do a timing walkthrough on this, so i'll summarize. the timbral expansion here is significant and reflective of other heavily adapted arrangements we've had in the past. i appreciated the use of the entire sound stage throughout, and the willingness to explore elements that in general we don't see explored (mostly timing elements, a 180-degree soundstage, and some phase concepts). i agree with chimpa that the arrangement is fine and we don't need timestamps - in fact, had the chords been altogether different but consisting of the same pattern and roughly the same function, i'd still have said it was OK.

i think that this is an excellent example of a style that we don't see near enough, given the volume of ambient/non-melodic tracks on popular soundtracks. i would have loved even more messiness and exploration in the first half, to be honest. but what's here is great and i appreciate it a lot.

 

 

YES

 

[Emunator ⚖️]

Every so often, Michael drops a submission where I immediately feel compelled to share it with someone else, just to make sure I didn't hallucinate it. In this case, before I'd even done a source check or looked at the song through a critical lens, I messaged @Chimpazilla and said "you HAVE to listen to this." As a submissions evaluator, this is perhaps the best compliment I can give - in that moment, my personal enjoyment as a listener grabbed the wheel and superseded my role as critic.

There are a few moments that resonated with me which I want to highlight. The first :50 seconds set the stage with the types of sounds and techniques you would go on to explore, but the wash of sound at :49, and the few seconds of trickling ambiance that precede it, felt like the floodgates suddenly burst open. This was the most emotionally cathartic moment of the entire arrangement and had me hooked. The simple legato melody at 2:26 similarly offered a moment of solace before delving into the most challenging, emotionally fraught part of the arrangement. Such a simple touch, but it feels like a lantern that I can carry with me through the turmoil that comes within the next minute.

Then we arrive at 3:27, and as everything faded to silence, I found myself yearning for the experience to continue. I wasn't ready to leave. So it was such a pleasant surprise to realize that it did, indeed, have several more minutes of time left on the clock. The last two minutes don't necessarily introduce any groundbreaking new musical ideas or sound design techniques. In fact, what follows feels comparatively straightforward and unassuming compared to the experimentation that came before it, which on paper, could easily seem like unnecessary padding to an arrangement that already said what it needed to say. Yet somehow, by the time we actually reach the end of the final arpeggio, I found myself completely content. Something about the decision to play the rest of the song straight with nothing but uninterrupted arpeggios and field recordings for nearly two additional minutes hits perfectly. 

I could try for days to articulate why this all works from a compositional level and still probably come up short, which tells me that this is the kind of piece you just need to feel. 

YES