Progeny Rebound

This weekend, my eldest child has come back home to live with us again, along with their partner.  As you can imagine, it’s been a hectic week with all the preparations.  So there’s not much to say here.  Hopefully more interestingness next week.

GM Philosophy: A Deeper Dive on Death

[This post contains minor spoilers for Critical Role and another show that I don’t even name explicitly, so you’re probably okay to read it even so.  But, still: you have been warned.  This is a post about characters dying in D&D games, with historical examples for context.  I try to avoid being too obvious, and the vast majority of what I discuss has been beaten to death on the Internet, but I can’t guarantee you won’t see something you can’t unsee.  Caveat emptor.]

I’ve already written once before about character death in D&D.  But recently there was an arc on Critical Role that some described as “breaking the Internet” by killing not one, but three player characters (although, to be fair, two of them didn’t stay dead very long).  This spawned yet another round of arguments about whether character death in D&D should be on the table (pun intended).  I’ve already stated my position: I don’t kill characters.  Whereas a lot of D&D luminaries are firmly in the opposite camp.  Perennial DM B. Dave Walters is quite fond of saying that he’s a monster and he will kill your characters (he even said this about the cast of Stranger Things, for whom he DMed a game after season 4).  As for Critical Role’s superstar DM Matt Mer Mercer, he once said about character death:

For me it’s hard to have high stakes in a game like Dungeons & Dragons if the threat isn’t there.

Not to mention doing a whole video giving advice on how to do it.

And yet, when all was said and done with the latest furor, I started to wonder if we really were on opposite sides.

Because my pledge not to kill your character (when you play D&D with me) is a little more nuanced than just “I don’t kill characters.” Specifically, I promise that I will not

• permanently
• kill
• a character that you created
• without your permission.

Each one of those qualifications is important.  So, will I temporarily kill your character?  Absolutely.  Will I give them permament consequences other than death?  In a heartbeat.  Will I kill a character you’ve grown fond of that it just so happens was created by me instead of you, such as a family member or mentor or henchman?  You betcha.  Will I obliterate your character if you ask me to, perhaps because you’re ready to move on to a new character and want your old one to go out in a blaze of glory?  Oh, yes: with wild abandon and sheer delight.

So I’m very clear that only permanent, non-consensual death is off the table: everything else is fair game.  And how about those staunch defenders of the right to kill characters?  Well, across 296 episodes of Critical Role—over a thousand hours of gameplay as of this writing¹—as near as I can tell Mercer has only ever permanently killed a character twice, and in both cases the players are on record as saying they were on board with the death.²  As for Walters, he always says he’s going to kill the characters, but as far as I know he’s only ever permanently done so once, and, considering the death in question took hours to play out on the screen, I can’t help but feel that the player was complicit.

So are we really saying things so differently?

What I’m saying is, if a character dies, I ask the player: What do you want to do?  Do you want to try another character? or figure out how to bring this one back?  And, whatever they choose, I will find a way to make it work.  And I actually know for a fact that Matt Mercer would agree with these words.  How can I possibly know that?  Because they’re almost exactly his words: I was just paraphrasing a Twitter thread that he posted after this most recent episode of killing a character.  Which, I might add, wasn’t, in the end, permanent.  Because the player (Marisha Ray) said she wasn’t ready to let that character go.  So now she’s back.  Which is exactly how I would have done it too.³

I’m actually starting to think we’re all saying the same thing.  It’s just a matter of where we place the emphasis.  Mercer and Walters and oh so many others put the emphasis on the death, and the possibility that it might not be permanent is an afterthought.  Whereas I feel more comfortable placing the emphasis on you as a player feeling safe, and the possibility for temporary death (or permanent maiming) is in the fine print.

Now, you might not agree with my point of view here, but at least you have to grant me that it’s an interesting perspective to consider.  And, granting that, why the difference in how the two positions (which are, possibly, really the same position) are stated?  Well, “stakes” is the magic word that most proponents of character death as a possibility bring up (you see it right in the Mercer quote at the very beginning of this piece).  Your game has to have stakes ... and how can there be stakes without death?  But, as my last foray into this topic shows, or as many other articles on the Internet attest, there are plenty of ways to provide stakes that aren’t irreversible death without consent.

And more importantly, from the perspective that roleplaying is storytelling, I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with unilaterally killing off someone else’s character with no hope of reversal.  I found that Adventure Zone’s non-GM⁴ Justin McElroy said it best (talking about his brother Griffin, who was the GM at the time):

This is a distinction between playing an RPG with your friends, and playing an RPG as a method of storytelling ...  Griffin ... is not going to unilaterally decide to kill one of our other creations. We are telling this story collaboratively, right?  ...  But, if Griffin ... is gonna take a player off the table, it is going to, like, be a discussion beforehand.

When I heard this, I realized that Justin (ever the practical McElroy) had put into words exactly what I was thinking but couldn’t quite formulate.  The only part I disagree with is that I don’t think this is something that should be different from using D&D for a show like The Adventure Zone or Critical Role.  Even when you’re just playing with your friends, you should treat their characters like their intellectual property, and you don’t really have the right to just decide to kill them off.  Unless you have a damn good idea how to bring them back, if that’s what they want.  At the end of the day, it’s their character, and you have to respect how they want to see that character’s story told.  You can influence it—that’s what the “collaborative” part of collaborative storytelling means, after all—but you can’t just single-handedly decide for them.

So I no longer believe that all those famous GMs and I are on opposite sides of this conundrum.  Rather, I think that we’re just looking at two sides of the same coin: heads, you die, but you can live again later; tails, you live, but only after you die first.  It’s all in how you look at it.

__________

1 Thank you, CritRoleStats.

2 And, honestly, even one of those didn’t stick, in the end.

3 Well, to be fair, I would have never made a player completely leave the table for as long as Matt made Marisha do so.  I would have either brought about the resurrection faster, or come up with some other thing for the player to do at the table in the meantime.  But Marisha seemed okay with the way Matt—who is, you know, her husband—handled it, so I consider that more of a nitpick than a true disagreement in philosophy.

4 At least at the time he said this; he’s since taken up the mantle.

Dearth of a Blog Post

Still trying to get caught up on everything while dealing with The Mother’s broken foot, so I’m going to skip one more week.  Hopefully next week gets us back to a more normal schedule.

Ossiferous Anomaly

Well, my “long post/short post” schedule has gotten a bit screwed up lately, what with the medium-sized “short” post on All Hallow’s Eve Eve followed by the complete skip “long” post on my birth-Boxing-day.  So technically this should be a short post week even though last week was a very short post, but mainly I’m making excuses because there’s just no way I could manage a long post this week.

But, to compensate, I shall expend a few words explaining why I can’t make that happen, which could be of interest if you happen to know me personally (say, you were redirected here from a social media post), or if you just dig medical anomalies.  This is not a story about me, but rather about The Mother (who, recall, is not my mother, but rather the mother of my children).

So The Mother was out in our back yard, cleaning up dog poop, and she twisted her foot a bit.  At first thinking nothing of it, she kept on walking for a bit, but she quickly realized it was more serious than she’d thought at first.  So she came in and woke me up (I have a tendency to sleep late on days that end in “Y”) and had me examine it.  Now, I am not a medical professional by any stretch.  However, my mother is a nurse (she was a nurse in our local hospital for many years, and then did in-home care after that), and I’ve had a CPR certification since my teen years, and even briefly held an EMT cert.  So I know just enough to be dangerous—but, more seriously, usually enough to know whether wait-and-see is a reasonable option, or if, no, you really need to get your ass to urgent care.  So I palpated her foot to look for swelling and perhaps detect signs of crepitus (that’s the “noise”—more typically felt as a vibration—of bones grinding together, which can indicate a fracture).  When you do this, you always paplate both sides at once.  Remember: everybody’s body is different, so feeling something that feels unusual because it doesn’t feel like that on you means nothing.  However, most people’s bodies are at least symmetrical, so feeling something on one foot (or hand, or hip, or what-have-you) that isn’t on the other can mean something’s up.  Not always, but it’s often enough to say “okay, this is beyond me: time to talk to a real medical person.”

So I immediatley hit a very obvious protrusion on her lateral metatarsal (i.e. the outside-most foot bone).  She tells me, “no, tha’s nothing; just a bone spur.  Ignore that.” I raised an eyebrow, but said okay.  But there was obvious swelling below that, and I could faintly detect some disturbing sensations: maybe not quite crepitus, but enough for me to say, “nope, I think this is serious, we should try to get you into urgent care ... not the ER, but let’s not wait for a doctor’s appointment either.” I did ask her for more info about the bone spur (which, for whatever reason, I’d never heard about before), and she said that, two or three doctors ago, she’d asked about it, and was told “oh, that’s most likely a bone spur, and there’s nothing you can really do about it other than some pretty serious surgery, so, as long as it’s not immediately bothering you, don’t worry about it.” Since then, each successive doctor would say “oh, what’s this?” and she would pass on the bone spur explanation, and they would all nod and say, “yep, that sounds about right.”

So we set about trying to find an urgent care place.  We’ve changed insurance companies about 4 times in the past several years, so this was trickier than we first expected.  But we eventually found an orthopedic urgent care place fairly close by—lucky!—and, at 5pm (the earliest time they were accepting walk-ins), I drove her out to it.

And, of course, they actually X-rayed the thing.  And then they came back and did more X-rays (never a great sign).  And then they came and told her that that bump she’d had forever what not a bone spur at all.  It was actually a piece of her heel. It had broken off at some point, and apparently not hurt badly enough for her to get medical attention at the time, and the stray piece of bone just floated around inside her foot for a while, and eventually it settled into that position, on the proximal end of the lateral metatarsal, just below her ankle, and just fused with the metatarsal.  And there it stayed until this past Wednesday, when she twisted her foot just so, and it snapped off.

If you didn’t at least wince at that last part, you may want to get your empathy meter checked.

So you can imagine how painful that is, and how unpleasant just the thought of it is, and how it might make it difficult to get around.  The doc said that they’re going to immobilize it (primarily via the use of an orthopedic boot) and see if it will re-stabilize.  If so, perhaps we can get by without any further intervention ... although that seems pretty unlikely.  Worst case scenario, she’ll need surgery to have the stray bone removed.  But, honestly, the urgent care doc (orthopedic specialist though she was), admitted that she had never seen anything like this before, so I think the main reason for waiting a week is to get some availability with the podiatry specialist.  But we’ll see what that fellow has to say on Thursday.

So, I can’t really complain but so much—I mean, my foot isn’t hurting all the time, and I’m not the one wearing a giant boot that you have to pump up when you put it on and then you bump it into everything you try to walk past—but at the same time, it’s a little exhausting being father and mother.  In the past five days, I’ve probably left the house more than in the past five months: two urgent care runs, two doctor’s appointments for the smallies, a “teen drop-off” (and subsequent pick-up), and a trip to Costco.  Hopefully this will get better going forward, but, realistically, it may well get worse if surgery ends up being necessary.  We’ll have to wait and see.

Date of birth, 56th of its name

Well, it’s my birthday weekend this weekend, and I gave you rather a long “short” post last week.  So I think I’ll just leave you here and see you next week.  Till then.

Push Poetry (an addendum)

Some time back, in the beforetimes prior to the pandemic, I wrote about my ”push poetry.” You should review that post to see what it is and how it came to be.  As that was over 3 years ago now, you can imagine that I’ve pushed a few more times since then, and generated a bit more “poetry.” I thought I’d just take this opportunity to share a few more bits and bobs I’ve slapped together in the meantime.

Last time, I shared my most prized example, this cento:

once upon a time, when it lived in the woods,
and be was finale of seem,
the push machine past, the push machine future,
and the dreaming moment between.
tenders of paradox, tenders of measure,
tenders of shadows that fall,
black seas of infinity, most merciful thing,
my god, full of stars, all.

(For a full provenance, see the original post.)

Here are some others that I’ve put together in the past few years, and where they come from.

the sky was darkened, and a low rumbling sound was heard in the air.  there was a rushing of many wings, a great chattering and laughing, and the sun came out of the dark sky to show a crowd of monkeys, each with a pair of immense and powerful wings on his shoulders.  then, with a great deal of chattering and noise, the winged monkeys flew to the place where the push machine and its tender bots were working.

some of the monkeys threw pieces of stout rope around the machine and wound many coils about its chassis and control panel and caterpillar treads, until it was unable to roll or rotate or move in any way.

others of the monkeys caught the machine, and with their long fingers pulled all of the wires and hoses out of its logic circuits. they made its valve caps and control dials and gauges into a small bundle and threw it into the top branches of a tall tree.

the remaining monkeys seized the machine and carried it through the air until they were over a country thickly covered with sharp rocks.  here they dropped the poor push machine, which fell a great distance to the rocks, where it lay so battered and dented that it could neither extend its control arms nor generate any steam.

then all the winged monkeys, with much laughing and chattering and noise, flew into the air and were soon out of sight.

Obviously, this one is from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (the book, not the movie).

the figure turns half round, and the light falls upon the face.  it is perfectly white—perfectly bloodless. the eyes look like polished tin; the lips are drawn back, and the principal feature next to those dreadful eyes is the teeth—the fearful looking teeth—projecting like those of some wild animal, hideously, glaringly white, and fang-like. 

with a sudden rush that could not be foreseen—with a strange howling cry that was enough to awaken terror in the breast of every tender bot, the figure seized the exposed tubes and wires of the push machine, and twining them round his bony hands he held it to the riverbank. electronic whine followed the scream of grinding metal in rapid succession. the glassy, horrible eyes of the figure ran over that mettalic form with a hideous satisfaction—horrible profanation. with a plunge he seizes the primary coolant hose in his fang-like teeth—a gush of fluid, and a hideous sucking noise follows. the push machine has fallen still, and the attacker is at his hideous repast!

I loved researching this one.  This is from Varney the Vampire, often considered to be the first modern vampire story (preceding Dracula by nearly fifty years).

life is short
and pleasures few
and holed the ship
and drowned the crew
but o! but o!
how very blue
the sea is.

i dreamt a limitless machine, a machine unbound,
its gears scattered in fantastic abundance,
on every tooth there was a new horizon drawn.
new heavens supposed;
new states, new souls.

i dreamed i spoke in the push’s language,
i dreamed i lived in the push’s skin;
i dreamed i was my own tender bot,
i dreamed i was a tiger’s kin.

here is a list of terrible things:
the jaws of sharks, a vultures wings,
the rabid bite of the bots of war,
the voice of one who went before,
but most of all the push’s gaze,
which counts us out our numbered days.

o push machine,
my little one,
come with me,
your life is done.

forget the future,
forget the past.
life is over:
belch out your last.

a machine lies in wait in me,
a stew of wounds and misery,
but fiercer still in life and limb,
the push that lies in wait for him.

life is short
and labor steep
rusted the bots
and ruined the keep
but o! but o!
how very deep
the river is.

This one comes from gluing together some of Clive Barker’s poetry.  Though Barker is of course known for writing excellent horror stories (and is in fact one of my pentagram of literary idols), he does occasionally dabble in poetry, and he’s not too shoddy at it.  I believe all of these are from the Abarat series, though from different poems, probably in different volumes.

forward, the push machine!
and every tender bot unseen.
not though they all knew
someone had blundered.
theirs not to make reply,
theirs not to reason why,
theirs but to do and die.
into the valley of death
went the push machine unencumbered.

then from the bank it seem’d there came, but faint
as from beyond the limit of the world,
like the last echo born of a great cry,
sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
around a machine returning from its labours.

twilight and evening bell,
and after that the dark.
and may there be no sadness of farewell,
when the push machine embarks.

cannon to right of it,
cannon to left of it,
cannon in front of it
volleyed and thundered;
stormed at with shot and shell,
boldly it rolled, but fell
into the jaws of death,
into the mouth of hell
went the push machine, now encumbered.

thereat once more through the mud clomb the tender bots,
ev’n to the highest they could reach, and saw,
straining their sensors beneath the rolling door,
or thought they saw, the speck that bore the machine
down that long river opening on the deep
somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
from less to less and vanish into light.
and the sun set, bringing on the night.

These are all Tennyson poems.  The first and fourth stanzas are from “The Charge of the Light Brigade”; the second and fifth (final) stanzas are from “Idylls of the King: The Passing of Arthur”; and the centerpiece is from the classic “Crossing the Bar.”

twas a dark and stormy night
and the torrents fell like rain;
you may get there by candle-light:
the place where the push machine was slain.

no less liquid than their shadows
at night, the ice weasels come.
obsequious as darkness, under the gallows,
they came; consumed; now are gone.

as hollow and empty, in the bleak december,
as the spaces between the stars.
the ghost of each separate dying ember
illuminates the scars.

now the rain (like tears) is perfunctory;
i can assure you, there was exquisite pain—
fear is the mind-killer; blood is compulsory—
on the night the push machine was slain.

And here’s another cento; I really love writing these.

Stanza 1

• Lines 1 & 2: The classic opening line of the bad novel Paul Clifford, which inspired the awesome Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
• Line 3: I’ve reused line 4 from my original cento; it’s a traditional nursery rhyme, though I first became aware of it courtesy of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust.
• Line 4: Original.

Stanza 2

• Line 1, line 3 (first half): “Cats,” by A.S.J. Tessimond, contains one of my all time favorite opening couplets, and I often reach for it in cento writing.
• Line 2: This is from a quote from Matt Groening’s Big Book of Hell.  Fun fact: I wove this exact line into a wedding speech I gave once.
• Line 3 (second half), line 4: I can’t quite remember where these came from, but at least some of it is original, I’m pretty sure.

Stanza 3

• Line 1 (first half), line 2: This is a line from The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler.
• Line 1 (second half), line 3: From “The Raven,” by Edgar Allen Poe.
• Line 4: Original.

Stanza 4

• Line 2: A classic line from “The Forbidden,” Clive Barker’s short story that was the basis for Candyman (just slightly rearranged).
• Line 3 (first half): This is part of the Bene Gesserit litany against fear, from Dune.
• Line 3 (second half): The penultimate line from my favorite speech of Richard Dreyfuss’ character in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
• Line 1, line 4: Original.

That’s all I got for ya this week.  Tune in next time for a more substantial post.

Shadowfall Equinox VII

"The Garden, by Moonlight, Turning Dark"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

In the race to the most volumes in a mix, Salsatic Vibrato has definitely been leading the pack.  However, Shadowfall Equinox is catching up.  Probably this is because, for the past few years, I’ve been involved in an intense project at my work that’s required more thinking than mindless doing.  And, as I talked about last volume, this is the perfect mix for music that lets me concentrate.  This time out, things seem to have taken a strong neoclassical bent, though we do have many returning artists: in fact, all of the top 5 most featured artists for the mix¹ are here, plus a couple more.  But the neoclassical thing probably shouldn’t be ignored.

Neoclassical music (not to be confused with neoclassicism) is definitely not classical, but only in the same way that retro-swing is not really swing.  It’s music composed in the classical style, but produced with modern sensibilities.  We’ve dabbled in neoclassical before, with dark neoclassical such as Dark Sanctuary² and Arcana,³ ambient chamber music such as Kevin Keller⁴ and Amber Asylum,⁵ or folks who like to combine electronic with classical leanings, such as Tim Story⁶ and Mira Calix.⁷  Of those folks, only Keller is back this time—technically, credited to the Kevin Keller Ensemble—with a bit of ambient chamber music called “Reflection.” It’s a piece with Keller’s characteristic spare piano, accompanied only by a string trio at first, then a light woodwind instrument (according to the Bandcamp page, it’s an English horn) comes in; true to its name, it’s a calm, reflective piece.  And speaking of spare piano pieces, Ruben Garcia isn’t too far from neoclassical himself.  “Eyes Wander” is a dark, not quite menacing (but verging) solo piano track that’s right at home here.  “Danse Morialta,” on the other hand, appears to be a piano duet, and is very light and fluffy.  It’s the first appearance in these mixes by prolific modern composer Kevin MacLeod, whose policy of creating royalty-free tunes “has led to his music being used in thousands of films, millions of videos on YouTube, and in video games such as Kerbal Space Program.”⁸  A lot of his music is more electronic, and more suited to an entirely different mix (we just haven’t gotten that far yet), but this one is very neoclassical in its formulation.  But perhaps the neoclassicalest neoclassical entry here is Eklipse, a proper string quartet of goth-appareled German women who like to take modern songs and neoclassical them up.  In this case, the original version of “Where the Wild Roses Grow” (by Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue) was already chamber-music-adjacent, so it didn’t take much.  Eklipse’s instrumental version somehow retains all the haunting beauty of the original, despite losing the lyrics about murdered lovers and all that.

Still, I think the biggest find here is A Winged Victory for the Sullen, who was suggested to me by a coworker, one of the few I’ve had who also likes ambient.  For the most part, his taste runs to bands like Sigur Rós, who I’m not the hugest fan of,⁹ but we still find common ground.  I turned him on to Greinke, and he turned me on to AWVftS.  Now, this duo (Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran) were (individually) mostly known for flim and television composing and sound engineering, until a chance meeting in Italy led to AWVftS; originally planned as a one-off project, it’s now produced 4 full-length albums, 2 soundtracks, and an EP.  Personally, I find their output a bit uneven: some tracks are nothing special, but a few, including the opener to their third album The Undivided Five, “Our Lord Debussy,” are simply sublime.  This track takes nearly 5 minutes to reach its peak, then settles into a 2-minute long crescendo, then takes another 3 minutes of denouement before it fades into silence.  It seemed like the perfect opener for this volume.

And just as any discussion of neoclassical must inevitably drift into the cinematic—A Winged Victory for the Sullen themselves produced a number of soundtracks—“Our Lord Debussy” doesn’t actually fade into silence, but rather into “Rain,” a piece from the Blade Runner 2049 soundtrack by Hans Zimmer (whose excellent soundtrack for Inception was featured on Classical Plasma) and Benjamin Wallfisch.  “Our Lord Debussy” plays with silence so much that it’s really hard to notice where one track ends and the next begins, despite the very gradual fade-in of “Rain.” But the two have a very similar vibe, with a lot of slow notes and building minor chords.  It’s one of my best transitions, I think, and therefore makes the perfect bridge to talk about my use of cinematic music as an offshoot of neoclassical (although probably it’s really the other way around).  There are a whopping five soundtracks represented here, which is a lot outside of mixes such as Classical Plasma or Phantasma Chorale.  Blade Runner 2049 is the only film; there’s a short piece from television’s Grimm called “Juliette Wakes Up.” Like pretty much all music from that show,¹⁰ composer Richard Marvin starts out slow and pretty, but quickly builds to something much more menacing.  The other three soundtracks are from videogames: “Vale of Shadows” by Jeremy Soule is a short, mildly spooky bridge from Icewind Dale; “Galean Bayle Sailing” by Michael Hoenig is a darker, exploratory bridge from Baldur’s Gate II; and “After the Storm” by Mikolai Stroinski is bridge-length, but more self-contained—it’s a light, reflective piece from Witcher 3.  All three are fantasy videogames, and I was mainly mining them for Eldritch Ætherium, but they also had a few pieces which fit in nicely here.  And cinematic music is by its very nature closely aligned with neoclassical.

For the volume title, I was suffering another dearth of lyrics to draw from, so I fell back on the naming scheme I’ve used for Classical Plasma and Eldritch Ætherium: I just cherry-picked a few phrases from 3 of the track titles and strung them together into an interesting title.

Shadowfall Equinox VII
[ The Garden, by Moonlight, Turning Dark ]

“Our Lord Debussy” by A Winged Victory for the Sullen, off The Undivided Five
“Rain” by Hans Zimmer & Benjamin Wallfisch, off Blade Runner 2049 [Soundtrack]
“Danse Morialta” by Kevin MacLeod, off Calming
“Reflection” by Kevin Keller, off In Absentia
“The Kiss: Juliette Wakes Up” by Richard Marvin, off Grimm: Seasons 1 & 2 [Soundtrack]
“Where the Wild Roses Grow” by Eklipse, off Electric Air [Covers]
“After the Storm” by Mikolai Stroinski, off The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Soundtrack [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Eyes Wander” by Ruben Garcia, off Lakeland
“Entr'acte (The Garden Awaits Us)” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off As One Aflame Laid Bare by Desire
“reading the leaves (by moonlight)” by Falling You, off Touch
“Gunga Din” by Dr. Didg, off Dust Devils
“Galean Bayle Sailing” by Michael Hoenig, off Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Turning Dark” by Jeff Greinke, off Ride
“Illuminata” by Deborah Martin & J. Arif Verner, off Anno Domini
“Vale of Shadows” by Jeremy Soule, off Icewind Dale [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Element of Hope” by Carmen Rizzo, off Looking Through Leaves
“The Big Sleep” by A Produce, off Smile on the Void

Total:  17 tracks,  78:12

Of course, we can’t have all neoclassical tunes, now, can we?  I wouldn’t let a volume of SfE go by without at least a touch of darkwave, which here is provided by the usual suspects: Black Tape for a Blue Girl¹¹ and Falling You.¹²  “Entr’acte” is a quiet, flute-driven bridge, but of course retaining that ominous, grumbling undertone that almost every BTfaBG tune has.  It leads nicely into “reading the leaves (by moonlight),” which is another excellent, ethereal outing from Falling You, only more or less instrumental—there are some gorgeous, swooping vocals from Aimee Page,¹³ but they’re completely wordless.  What really makes this track, though, is the heartbeat-like thump of the bassline, which will forever be the defining characteristic of Falling You for me.

When it comes to the “proper” ambient, we can’t of course skip over Jeff Greinke.  As I’ve noted previously, every album of his is a little different; Ride is strangely jazzy, occasionally even funky, so there are few tracks on it that will work here, of which the aptly named “Turning Dark” is easily the best.  It’s slow and meandering, with a lot of synth notes reminiscent of bells, and a subtle but almost groovy bassline.  I thought it was pretty perfect here.  And it flows nicely into the soaring, angelic but somehow also tribal “Illuminata.” This is from Deborah Martin’s collaboration with J. Arif Verner Anno Domini, which we first heard from last volume.  In this one, there’s some mumbled vocals in the background that provide yet another layer of mystery.  And of course you can’t get more ambient than A Produce, who describes himself as “exploring the vast realm of trance-oriented musical expression.” Which is why it’s a bit surprising that we haven’t seen him here before.¹⁴  “The Big Sleep” is fairly typical of his output, although perhaps a bit mellower than such outings as “Insect Justice” or “The Dreaming Room.” But I often find that A Produce provides the best closers, and the nearly 9 hypnotic minutes of “The Big Sleep” is the perfect end for this particular volume.

There’s nothing really unexpected here, but I did decide to take things a bit farther afield by adding a couple of touches of worldmusic.  This is our first time hearing Dr. Didg proper, although its founder and primary member is Graham Wiggins, who of course provided what must surely be the only other didgeridoo track we’ve heard on these mixes: “Aziz Aziz,” from Apparently World.  After Outback split up, Wiggins went on to form the band based on his old college nickame and gave us 3 albums across a 7-year stretch.  “Gunga Din” is from the most recent one, and pairs the drone of the didgeridoo with some interesting woodwinds which go back and forth between sounding like bird calls and snake charmers.  Overall it’s a very interesting pairing.  And I couldn’t forget about my all-time favorite worldmusic-meets-downtempo artist, Carmen Rizzo, who I’ve featured a number of times on a number of other mixes,¹⁵ and once previously on this one.¹⁶  “Element of Hope” dispenses with the breathy female vocals many of his songs feature and opts instead for really interesting mixes of synth washes, digitized beats, and the occasional brassy electronic break in this mostly upbeat tune.  It’s the closer for his second solo effort Looking Through Leaves, but I thought it made for a good penultimate track here, sliding into the long wind-down of “The Big Sleep.”

Next time, we’ll go a bit lighter as we return to that happy-making music that makes you feel like you’re in a videogame.

⇐ Shadowfall Equinox VI

Shadowfall Equinox VIII ⇒

__________

1 As of time of writing, naturally.

2 On volume II.

3 On volume VI.

4 Every volume except the first.

5 Volumes I and II.

6 Volumes II and IV.

7 Also on volume VI.

8 According to Wikipedia, of course.  They also add: “One of his compositions, ‘Monkeys Spinning Monkeys,’ is among the most-played on TikTok; from January through June 2021 it was played 31,612,975,915 times.” Whoa.

9 Don’t get me wrong: they’re perfectly fine.  I’m just not the fanboy that many ambient afficionados are.

10 Which we’ve heard before, on Eldritch Ætherium II.

11 Seen on every volume so far.

12 Seen on volumes I, II, and V.

13 Who’s done all the vocals on Falling You tracks for this mix so far, except for “Varenka” on volume V (that was Erica Mulkey).

14 We did see him on other mixes though: once on Smokelit Flashback V and twice on Dreamtime I.

15 Specifically: Smokelit Flashback IV, Moonside by Riverlight II, Rose-Coloured Brainpan II, and Dreamsea Lucidity I.

16 Volume IV.

That's a big pile of ...

To say that the computer gods have shat on me would only be an accurate assessment if the pile of shit you’re imagining is the one from Jurassic Park.  There was a point last night when I was pretty sure my $work computer was complete toast and would have be reinstalled from scratch.  But I managed to find some advice on the Internet that helped me figure out how to fix it.

So now I’m mostly back to normal, but there’s still several lingering issues that I’m going to have to deal with over the next few days.  On the plus side, I jumped my operating system forward not one, but two fulll versions.  Which should eliminate several of the problems I’ve been experiencing lately (and, to be fair, will definitely introduce a few more).  It remains to be seen if, on balance, I come out ahead.  Given my history, it seems unlikely, but I remain ever optimistic.  Foolishly.