Guardian.co.uk‘s Naomi Alderman notes that the annual Ivor Novello Awards will include this year, for the first time, one for “best original videogame score”:
Game music has long been the venue for “earworms” — pieces of music that get stuck in your head. Anyone who ever played Tetris on a Gameboy will have the Soviet-style theme etched on their brain. And the chipper Super Mario tune is similarly unforgettable. But with technological developments audio quality has improved as much as graphics and the earworms have become more sophisticated.
And while the acknowledgment by the British professional music community of the role music plays in video games is appreciated, the award (pictured in silhouette below) could prove shortsighted.
Background music in video games is important, but the most innovative and expressive work in gaming these days isn’t about Hollywood-style scores of static music that plays in the background, but in (1) sound design, (2) music that changes as the game progresses, and (3) most importantly, games in which the music is manipulated by players. Alderman notes the latter (“from ElectroPlankton for the DS to Singstar, and the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games”), but we’ll have to wait to see how the Ivors wrestle with this conundrum. Will they solely focus on static scores, or will they reward the music that, to one degree or another, more fluidly interacts with (or is even the object of) game play.
Statements in a piece by Adam Sherwin at timesonline.co.uk from Mark Fishlock, director of one of the awards’ sponsoring organizations (BASCA, the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors) and an Ivors-committee member, get to the heart of the tension. On the one hand, Fishlock sees validation of video gaming in the adoption of traditional methods:
“The Ivors has always sought to reflect the ever-changing world of songwriting and composing. The video games market has matured beyond recognition and big budget orchestral scores are regularly being commissioned.”
On the other hand — and this is promising — he acknowledges the unique challenges and potential in game music:
“Writing music for games also requires a number of specialist skills compared with conventional film scoring, such as non-linear and multi-layered composition.”
Joystiq.com‘s Mike Schramm notes that for a game to be eligible, at least one third of the composers involved need to be “British or Irish.”
More on the awards at theivors.com.
The 16 tracks that comprise The Coat Hanger Clinic, its title and content reportedly informed by a binge of Korean horror flicks, range from vocoded computer vocals to elegiac piano to 8-bit giddiness to abstract electronica to saccharine pop. Recorded by Cursed Chimera (aka Benatos Thompson, and formerly L.A.M.P.), it’s a purposeful mixed bag, but in that bag are some fine treats. These are the highlights: “Desi Watfah,” a mix of church bells and choking androids, intermittently punctuated by ritual percussion (
The excellent Complementary Distribution netlabel isn’t as prolific as it has been in the past, but a recent EP makes up for lost time with five tracks by four different artists, among them nAsty, Banyek, and NiT Grit, all working broadly speaking in a dubstep vein. The highlight of the record, titled Dubstep Is Fun! Vol. 2, is by tOOk. His is a nearly six-minute piece titled “Honvágy,” which appears to mean homesickness or nostalgia in Hungarian (the label is based in Hungary, though tOOk appears to be in Belgium). The latter definition, nostalgia, fits with the sample of haunting vocals that is the core of the piece. The track opens with the voice all contorted, and when it shows up later, a verbal lamentation heard amid pounding drums and somnolent synths, it’s all the more affecting (
When they remake the film Deliverance — and they will, because everything gets remade, whether directly or indirectly — Scott Tuma (long ago guitarist with Souled American) will be hired to do the score. There will be no dueling banjos this time around. There will only be the creaky, meandering, semi-melodic noodling of old coots on a porch, a porch swamped by kudzu and collapsing under its own weight, what weight there is left in those old boards, eaten through as they have been by termites. The old coots’s half-remembered songs will break apart like the distracted thoughts they are, and they’ll be heard, in the film’s score, as mere fragments, muddied by audio effects that simulate the dank environs. That score may exist already in the form of Dandelion, Tuma’s new solo album, three tracks of which have been made available for free download by its releasing label, Digitalis.