Shadowfall Equinox III

"Five Fathoms Below You"

[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.]

Although hardly any of my mixes are exclusive to a particular musical style, some of them are pretty close.  Shadowfall Equinox, for instance, focuses pretty strongly on ambient.  Oh, sure, there are touches of new age, world, and a healthy dose of darkwave, but the majority of the tracks are firmly in the camp of ambient.

But just what is ambient?  I recently stumbled on a pretty decent blog post exploring that exact topic, and, although the podcast the author references is no longer with us,¹ the discussion is still very much relevant.  In particular, he throws out some of what Brian Eno said about the subgenre, which he is generally credited with creating.  The (possibly apocryphal) story goes that Eno was inspired (or disgusted) by some Muzak he heard playing in an airpport.  Instead of taking “regular” music and watering it down, he reasoned, why not design music especially for being in the background of other activities?  This led to his landmark album Music for Airports, which many consider to be the first ambient album (or at least the first to be called “ambient”).  As the liner notes for that album proclaimed: “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

He expanded on these thoughts, being careful to distinguish ambient from Muzak:

The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak.  The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces—familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner.  Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music....  Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these.  Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities.  And whereas their intention is to “brighten” the environment by adding stimulus to it ... Ambient Music is intended to produce calm and a space to think.²

A space to think ... that is exactly what I use Shadowfall Equinox for.  And of course Eno says it better than I did (in my opening post for this mix), but allow me the indulgence of quoting myself here:

It’s the perfect mood music for contemplative thought, for creative endeavor, for living in the background while you go on living, not dragging you down but not lifting you up either; it doesn’t fade into the wallpaper, but rather makes you think; it doesn’t engage your brain actively, but somehow sneaks in under the radar, making your subconscious race and your dreaming self wake up and take notice.

I find Shadowfall Equinox quite stimulating, mentally.  And it mostly stems from my discovery of Hearts of Space (and particularly “Shadowfall II”).  From that particular HoS program we have, of course, another tune from Jeff Greinke, and another from Kevin Keller, but we open this volume with the same opener used for a different HoS program, “Tango Zero Hour”: “Milonga del Angel” by Astor Piazzolla.  Piazzolla was often considered to be the top tango composer and performer in the world: you’ve no doubt heard his music on the soundtrack for 12 Monkeys, and how many other tango artists have an airport named after them?  A “milonga” is a type of tango (or, more properly, the musical precursor to the tango), so one might translate “Milonga del Angel” as “tango of the angel.” And it’s quite a heavenly tune, one which establishes the mood immediately and strongly.

For a bit of Native American flavor, I’ve paired Robbie Robertson’s “Coyote Dance” with “Passage Two” from Kiva.  We last heard from Robertson on Porchwell Firetime; although I really hate his most prominent music,³ I’ve had much better luck with his solo efforts; this one is from his 1994 soundtrack Music for the Native Americans with the Red Road Ensemble, which included several members of his family.⁴  Kiva is a collaboration among Steve Roach—possibly the biggest name in ambient after Eno himself—and Michael Stearns (another well-known name in the ambient game) and Native American new age/ambient artist Ron Sunsinger.⁵  Kiva is the best example I’ve personally heard of ambient music with a Native American flair, although we may yet hear from another Stearns/Sunsinger collaboration, Sorcerer, on a future volume.

Surprisingly, we’ve no Falling You this time around, but our darkwave component is still represented admirably by darkwave godfather Sam Rosenthal in his usual guise of Black Tape for a Blue Girl, this time with the title track off his more recent Halo Star, with vocals provided by Bret Helm from goth-rockers Audra.⁶  Typically songs on Shadowfall Equinox don’t have words, but I tend to cut the darkwave tunes some slack.  Titles for the past two volumes were both provided by Falling You, as it happens, and “Halo Star” was in the running for doing so here, but it was narrowly beaten out by our other vocal track, “Five Seconds to Hold You” by Devics.  Devics, who we first heard from on Darkling Embrace but whom I spoke about at greatest length over on Smokelit Flashback IV, where I described them as dream pop crossed with darkwave, which is not a bad description.  “Five Seconds” has a slow, ponderous, nearly underwater feel that’s perfect for this contemplative mix, and it also provides our volume title.

Not quite darkwave but not not darkwave either, I introduced you to Nox Arcana in our last music mix installment, Phantasma Chorale, where I called them “gaming music,” which is appropos but insufficient.  Here I’ve chosen two tracks of theirs—one off Legion of Shadows and one off Grimm Tales.  The first provides our “almost-but-not-quite creepy” factor, and the second has a bit of a Renaissance-faire feel that flows nicely after Stellamara’s Balkan-infused selection, “Immrama.” As a bonus, “The Forgotten Path” makes a nice closer, and “Immrama” gives us a Magnatune representative to replace Falling You (and Lisa DeBenedictis from back on volume I).  And, speaking of worldmusic, Logical Drift gives us a bit of world-inflected ambient with “Judean Desert.” Logical Drift is a side project of producer John Matarazzo which I discovered via my satellite provider’s “Zen” music channel.⁷  So the closing triplet here on volume III is the nice 1-2-3 worldmusic punch of “Judean Desert,” “Immrama,” and “The Forgotten Path,” which all flow nicely into each other.

Shadowfall Equinox III
[ Five Fathoms Below You ]

“Milonga del Angel” by Astor Piazzolla, off Tango: Zero Hour
“Morpheus” by Delerium, off Morpheus
“Coyote Dance” by Robbie Robertson & The Red Road Ensemble, off Music for the Native Americans [Soundtrack]
“Passage Two” by Steve Roach, Michael Stearns & Ron Sunsinger, off Kiva
“Hidden Realm” by Nox Arcana, off Legion of Shadows
“Searching” by Kevin Keller, off The Day I Met Myself
“Coelocanth” by Shriekback, off Oil and Gold
“Halo Star” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off Halo Star
“Friday Afternoon” by the Hope Blister, off Underarms
“Five Seconds to Hold You” by Devics, off My Beautiful Sinking Ship
“Last Wave” by Jeff Greinke, off Wide View
“The Dogs of Breakfast” by Lawlor, off Mad Alice Lane (A Ghost Story) [CD Single]
“Judean Desert” by Logical Drift, off Logical Drift
“Immrama” by Stellamara, off Star of the Sea
“The Forgotten Path” by Nox Arcana, off Grimm Tales

Total:  15 tracks,  74:24

The remaining tracks are unexpected in various ways.  “Dogs of Breakfast” is from Lawlor’s impossible-to-find CD single Mad Alice Lane (A Ghost Story).  The title track of that disc is obviously what you want, and we will absolutely see it show up on another mix,⁸ but this “flip side” isn’t so bad itself, and it works well here.  (“Lawlor,” by the way, is in this case Peter Lawlor, most famous for providing music for BBC news and sports shows, including that used in the 2000 Olympics.  He was also a founding member of Stiltskin, but you probably never heard of them.⁹)

On the other hand, Hope Blister isn’t too surprising, and not but so obscure—especially once you realize that they are an Ivo Watts offshoot of This Mortal Coil, who graced us with a song each on the first two volumes.  Unlike This Mortal Coil’s constantly rotating personnel, Hope Blister was fairly fixed, with Louise Rutkowski (who also sang a few TMC tracks) providing the vocals, and the bass player from Dark Star playing bass.  Layer onto that a fair amount of cello and strings arrangements from Audrey Riley (who has done the same for bands ranging from the Style Council to the Smiths to the Smashing Pumpkins) and the occasional sax from Dif Juz’s amazing Ritchie Thomas,¹⁰ and you have a pretty decent continuation of what This Mortal Coil was trying to achieve.  While Hope Blister’s vocal tracks are decent enough, their instrumental tracks, like TMC’s, are ambient and occasionally fascinating.  “Friday Afternoon” is repetitive to the point of minimalism, but I find its synth-wash-over-the-sounds-of-a-rainy-day ambiance quite soothing.

“Coelocanth” by Shriekback is, with “Halo Star,” the centerpiece of the volume, so it has to be pretty strong.  Happily, it is: it has a ringing, echoey, undersea feel that befits its namesake.  If you ever saw the early Michael Mann film Manhunter, you may recognize it.  It’s quite atypical for a Shriekback tune, especially given that it comes from Oil & Gold, which, while not their poppiest album,¹¹ is certainly no Big Night Music either.¹²  It’s the closer for Oil & Gold, being a winding down after mostly upbeat tracks, but it’s much more evocative and central on a mix like this one.

Which just leaves us with our second track, “Morpheus” by Delerium.  Delerium is a curious entity; Wikipedia accuses them of being purveyors of “dark ethereal ambient trance,” which is such a tumbled-together profusion of musical styles that it nearly takes my breath away.  Still, I suppose it’s a not-entirely-incorrect description of “Morpheus,” at least, although Delerium’s “style” (if you can even pin them down with such a word) is fairly wide-ranging.  Delerium grows out of industrial greats Front Line Assembly, and later evolves (or devolves, depending on your point of view) into trip-hop aspirants Fauxliage, who you may remember encountering back on Smokelit Flashback IV.  But Delerium is sort of dark, and ambient, and ... yeah, okay, ethereal and trancy, I suppose.  I don’t like all of their music, but every once in a while they hit on something magical, and I think “Morpheus” may be the best of the best.

Next time, we look forward to the approaching holiday season.

⇐ Shadowfall Equinox II

Shadowfall Equinox IV ⇒

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1 The only remnant of the podcast I could find was There’s Been a Change, which is pretty interesting to listen to if you’re really into ambient.

2 I rely here on the excerpts from Eno’s liner notes presented in the essay “Brian Eno and the ‘Quiet Club’: Subtle Beauty as Social Critique”, which is, along with the Wikipedia article on ambient, quite an excellent source for diving into more detail on ambient than I have room for here.

3 By which I mean the Band.  While I at least like some examples of nearly every type of music, the one I can’t stand is country, and there are certain artists which just drift too close to that line to be tolerated.  The Band is definitely one of them.

4 His daughter is providing some of the wordless background vocals on this track, in fact.  The Robertsons are part Mohawk.

5 Coincidentally, Music for the Native Americans was recorded at Sunsinger Studios (among other places), and Sunsinger gets an engineer credit on that album.

6 Who are, unsurprisingly, signed to Rosenthal’s Projekt Records.

7 Which I first talked about back on Paradoxically Sized World I.

8 In the fullness of time ... as one of the mix-starters, even.

9 I know I hadn’t, until writing this post.

10 Who is, not coincidentally at all, the same person who gave the Cocteau Twins’ Victorialand a good deal of its awesomeness.

11 That dubious distinction would certainly have to go to Go Bang!, exclamation point and all.

12 The latter album being whence cometh tunes such as “The Reptiles and I,” which we saw on Slithy Toves, and “Cradle Song,” which I used on Numeric Driftwood II.

Reflections on a Disturbing Election

Last weekend was my birthday, so I celebrated by eating too much, drinking too much, going to see Doctor Strange, and spending lots of time playing D&D and Heroscape with my kids.^*  And definitely not thinking about the upcoming (at the time) election.

Now, I’ve made no secret about being a liberal, which many people conflate with being a Democrat.  The truth is, I really don’t care for the Democratic party.  It’s just as corrupt and hypocritical as the Republican party, and just as repsonsible for the two-party stranglehold on our system.  Furthermore, I don’t care for Hillary Clinton.  I liked Obama (before he got into office, anyway), but Clinton I never liked.  She’s too facile, too adaptable to whatever audience she’s addressing, and I don’t believe much of anything she says.  But, you know: that’s how I feel about most politicians, so that’s no great surprise.

And, while I staunchly protest against being labeled a “Democrat,” it’s certainly true that I voted for more Democrats than anything else on this past ballot—and on every ballot I’ve ever filled out, if I’m honest.  I only voted for a single Republican^** this year, and that was really only because I had to pick two people out of ten candidates which included eight avowed Republicans.  (And one total nutjob.^***  As much as I typically dislike Republicans, they’re still better than nutjobs.)  Which I suppose is the perfect segue into talking about Donald Trump.

But let’s be clear: I don’t disparage Trump because he’s a Republican—truth be told, he’s not much of a Republican.  I disparage Trump because he’s a nutjob.  And, in some ways, worse than a nutjob: he’s the worst sort of scummy salesperson, the kind of sleazy used-car salesman you run away from and decide that riding the bus isn’t so bad; he’s a “rich” guy with six bankruptcies who managed to lose nearly a billion dollars running a casino; and the only time he’s not saying whatever (some) people want to hear is when he’s saying things that are utterly insane.  Most bizarre of all, we now have a “grab-em-by-the-pussy” president.  When I can’t repeat the words of the president-elect of the United States of America at work because I would be committing an HR violation, I have to believe there’s something seriously wrong with our country.

And I’ve heard, and greatly respected, the words of some excellent speakers who have urged us to move on, and to heal, and to try to understand the position of the other side: Stephen Colbert, and Trevor Noah, and Chris Hardwick, and others.  Hell, Thandie Newton appearing on The Late Show was surprisingly (and beautifully) eloquent on the topic, telling all of us that we need to reach out to the people on the other side, and reminding us that the speech of hate is generally motivated by fear.

And I wish I could go along with that.  But I can’t.  Because of the whole “grab-em-by-the-pussy” thing.

And, yes, I keep saying that, and I’ll probably say it a few more times before we’re done, and, yes, it might offend you, but that’s a good thing.  If it doesn’t offend you, and you voted for Trump, well then I totally understand that and I’m not surprised.  But if it does offend you, and you voted for Trump anyway, then I have a problem with that.  Because, sure: Trump’s not a politician, and all politicians are scum.  I’m right there with you—hell, I voted for Ross Perot, once upon a time.  And Perot was a bit of a nutjob too, and quite probably a bit of a scumbag in business, just like Trump.  But he wasn’t morally repugnant.  And you were voting against Clinton, who is a liar and quite possibly an unconvicted criminal.  I’m with you on that one too, but the problem is that Trump is a liar and quite possibly an unconvicted criminal as well, plus he’s a bully, and a racist, and he said it was okay to grab women by the pussy.

Hopefully I’ve offended you again.  Now, it’s entirely possible that every person who voted for Trump was a racist misogynist scumbag just like he is, but I don’t believe that.  Mainly because I don’t believe that very very close to 50% of the people in this country—or at least 50% of those who voted—are that sort of person.  I’m a cynic, you may recall, but also a romantic, so I retain just enough optimism to refuse to believe that we have that many Ku Klux Klan supporters, and xenophobes, and male chauvinist douchebags.  Oh, there are a lot of them, I know—I’m related to a whole bunch of them, in fact—but half the country?  I’m just not buying it.  So, if you voted for Trump, but you’re not in one of the above categories, then I’m still having difficulty wrapping my head around it.

Oh, sure: I understand not voting for Clinton.  I didn’t vote for her either.  But you could have not voted at all, or voted for Johnson or Stein (or several others, even less well-known), as I did.  We whinge on and on about only having two choices, but no one put a gun to your head and said “pick one of these two.”  Now, many of my co-liberals are now going to scream at me: “you voted for a third party?!? people like you is why Clinton lost!”  I understand that viewpoint.  But it’s oversimplified.  For instance, I happen to live in California.  As I told my eldest while being bitched out for voting third party, it ain’t like if enough people had voted for Hillary California could’ve gone double-Clinton in the electoral college.  Sure, it’s true that in certain places (such as Florida) the difference between Trump’s votes and Clinton’s votes was smaller than the total votes for Johnson, but to assume Johnson cost Clinton the election means assuming that every disaffected Republican who voted Libertarian would have voted for Hillary if he hadn’t been an option ... and that’s just silly.  There were plenty of Republicans who voted for Johnson—or just plain stayed home—and that’s perfectly reasonable.  But they were never going to vote for Clinton.  And the ultimate point is, I have to believe that if only the Klan-loving, woman-hating extremists had voted for Trump, there’s no way he could have won.  (Note: Technically speaking, he didn’t win.  But the vagaries of our electoral college system are the subject of an entirely different rant.)

So I’m really trying to wrap my brain around the rationale for a rational human being voting for Trump.  Because, you may recall, this is a man who said it was okay to grab women by the pussy.  Now, I’ve heard a few defenses of this comment.  One of them goes like this: it’s just locker-room talk.  As Trump himself said: “It’s just words, people.”  Oh, good: because it’s not like we need the president of the United States to be able to talk to people or anything.  Nope, being a leader never involved actually speaking.  So that’s a moronic defense.  Here’s another one I heard today: we just don’t know what Trump will be like as president, so we need to give him a chance and see what he does.  Well, sure: we also don’t know what Charles Manson would be like as president, so let’s elect him next.  You know why we don’t know what Trump will be like as president?  Because he has no fucking experience.  He’s never been in charge of anything other than his daddy’s money.  So, yeah, we technically speaking don’t know what Trump will be like as a president.  But I know what spoiled rich boys are like, and I know what entitled old white men are like, so I think I can make a pretty good guess.

And, you know what, you could accuse me of stereotyping, and being prejudiced in my own right ... except for that whole “grab-em-by-the-pussy” comment.  It really does all come back to that.  I am prejudiced if I assume that Trump will act in the worst way of entitled rich white men if all I know about him is that’s entitled, rich, white, and male.  But the fact of the matter is, I don’t have to make any assumptions about his actions—I don’t need to pre-judge him.  I can actually judge him, because he’s quite open and outspoken and rather blatant in his distasteful, shameful actions, and his almost pitiful need for attention.  People, this is a man whose handlers no longer trust him with his Twitter account.  But we thought he could be trusted with the most powerful military in the world?  I honestly just don’t get it.

I want to move on.  I want the country to heal, and I want to try to empathize with the disaffected and the disenfranchised and the ignored.  But I’m not sure I can.  Because it seems like a significant number of Americans may not have been racist and misogynist themselves, but they’re apparently okay with having a president who is.  And I’m not okay with that.

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* And missing another blog post for you guys.  Sorry about that.

** That I know of.  I voted for three people with no expressed party affiliation, so any or all of them may have been Republican as well.

*** Well, actually, I think one of the Republicans may have been a nutjob too.  But I wasn’t completely sure.

Phantasma Chorale I

"Shadows Are in Hiding"

[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.

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.]

I like creepy music.  Probably because I love horror novels and movies, because my favorite authors are people like Stephen King and Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman, because my favorite illustrators are people like HR Giger and Brian Froud and Edward Gorey ... and, yes, I quite like Tim Burton, and, while I wouldn’t name him my favorite filmmaker—that honor would probably go to Terry Gilliam, who has his own brand of creepy going on—Beetlejuice is definitely one of my favorite films.  So I’m a bit of a connoisseur of creepy music, and in fact I have about six different mixes that fall more or less into the general category of “creepy,” from one which features general goth music (which is not always creepy) to one which is more sound effects than music, for playing in the background while trick-or-treaters approach your porch.

But today, just in time for Hallowe’en, I want to share with you one of my favorite creepy mixes, Phantasma Chorale.  This mix is inspired by Bruno Coulais’ fantastic score for the quite excellent Coraline; when I first heard “End Credits,” which is our opener here on volume I, I was blown away by how awesome it was.  Creepy to the max, but also childlike and light.  It’s like a song sung by a chorus of ghost-children,¹ hence the name.  I immediately started toying around with songs which either had creepy, wordless, choral vocals or a childlike quality, or preferably both.

With such a specific theme, I have to be flexible.  Not every song can have a theremin or a soprano that can be convinced to just howl without using any words.  In fact, Bruno Coulais uses neither of these techniques: he got the Children’s Choir of Nice to sing nonsense syllables—meaningless morphemes that sound just enough like real words, in English or French or Italian, to drive you crazy trying to figure out what they “mean.” So I went scouring soundtracks, Internet music, and even a few “regular” albums for music that might fit this vibe.  Sometimes I settled for words in a language I had no chance of recognizing (like the Croatian of “U Plavu Zoru”) and sometimes I settled for no vocals at all, but a carnival-like atmosphere that provided childlike-but-creepy in spades.  The result is something which is not truly scary, but just enough unsettling to keep your mind from getting too comfortable.  Personally, I use it when I’m working on my novel: it keeps the creative juices flowing in just the right direction.

So, as I said, soundtracks were the first place to go looking.  There are three songs from Coraline here, including the mix starter, and I had to trim that down from how many I wanted to add originally.  On the one hand, they’re all very short—in fact, at 27 tracks, this is my second longest tracklist²—but, on the other, I want to save something for volume II, eh?  Beyond that, Danny Elfman was an obvious choice, so there are two tracks off his soundtrack for Beetlejuice, both offering the creepy carnival vibe.  As does Angelo Badalamenti’s contribution, a track off the City of Lost Children soundtrack.  On the other hand, “The Citrine Cross,” from the soundtrack for The Da Vinci Code, and “In Noctem,” from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, feature a classical chorus singing in what is most likely Latin, though it’s difficult to be sure.  The woman (or women?) in “Arrival at Rookford” from Daniel Pemberton’s³ score for The Awakening is probably singing in English, but the vocals are so haunted and eerie that I can’t quite tell.  Contrariwise, in “Betrayed!”, off Iain Ballamy’s trippy score for Mirrormask,⁴ I’m pretty sure the “vocals” aren’t actually vocals at all, but just synth-generated noises meant to sound like different vocal ranges of people going “aahhhh!” But it also maintains a strangely childlike musical motif, as does “Primeval Landscape” by John Corigliano (off the Altered States soundtrack).  Well, that last one is a bit of a stretch, if I’m honest.  But I can hear some childlike motifs in it at any rate.  To close out the soundtrack category, Four Rooms provides a couple of our bridges, although in a list of songs that are all this short, it’s tough to say what counts as a bridge and what doesn’t.  Still, these two tracks (both by Combustible Edison⁵) both count, in my book: one is under 30 seconds long, and the other is a minute and a half of building, which I pay off with “U Plavu Zoru.”

Which is itself quite a curious choice here.  You may remember my talking about Pink Martini before,⁶ and specifically about China Forbes’ amazing ability to sing in (but not speak) 15 different languages.  One of those 15 is, apparently, Croatian, whence cometh “U Plavu Zoru,” which, according to a couple of translations I found on the Internet,⁷ means “At Blue Dawn.” The lyrics for this are quite beautiful—so much so that the English translation of one line became our volume title, which is handy because it’s hard as hell to find a volume title for a tracklist composed almost entirely of instrumentals.  The music somehow reminds me of the theremin-laden theme from the original Star Trek.  So, you see, it fits perfectly here, despite being found on an album of popular rather than cinematic music.

But, still, cinematic music is the best place to find these sorts of tracks, and, once I ran out of soundtracks, I had to look for other sources of it.  My first thought was to turn from the people who had actually written soundtracks to those who just wish they were writing them.  The Internet is full of what I call “pseudo-soundtracks,” which I imagine⁸ are composed by people who want to write music for movies one day, so right now they’re putting out the soundtrack equivalent of a portfolio.  The end result seems to be soundtracks for movies that never existed, often really weird, genre-blending movies, to show off the composer’s range.  If you too are interested in this sort of thing, there are many places on the Internet you can look, but my personal favorite is Jamendo.  All music on Jamendo is free for personal use; what they really want to do is attract people who wish to license the music for use in video games, or YouTube videos, or—of course—movies.  So this is the perfect place for wannabe soundtrack artists to show off their stuff.  My absolute favorite such artist is Xcyril, a French composer who seems to specialize in fantasy and sci-fi music, which is of course perfect for this mix.  The two tracks of his that I use here both feature some wordless “vocals” (again, likely electronically generated); “Séraphine” has a bit of a Danny Elfman feel to it, and “Discovery,” from his album StarGate Odyssea is a little more sci-fi focussed (as its name suggests).

So where else can you go for cinematic music?  Well, there’s videogames, of course.  Next volume, we’ll hear a track from an actual videogame, but here I want to share with you something I discovered way back in 1997—before my kids were born, before I moved to California, back when I had my own company and my own fat Internet pipe and not a whole lot to do with my spare time but surf the dingier corners of the proto-web.⁹  And I stumbled across this page in the back rooms of CSU Long Beach’s website which talked about lucid dreaming, and music, and 3D rendering, and an “upcoming” videogame which was to be titled Chthon.  It’s now almost 20 years later, and, like ever-so-many pages on the Internet, it’s still there, untouched in over 15 years, talking about a game that will never be made, produced by people who probably don’t even know each other any more.  The music files they offer are just samples, snippets of full songs.  But they’re all so surreal that the fact that they fade in and out at odd times almost seems by design, so I’ve happily been using them in various mixes for years.  Mostly in my Dreamtime mix,¹⁰ but occasionally something will work elsewhere as well.  Like this one.

There is one more great source for cinematic music: gaming music.  At least that’s what I call it ... it’s cinematic music that seems to exist only to provide a backdrop for playing D&D to (or, more likely, LARPing for Vampire: The Masquerade).  To be fair, it can also be used as mood music for Hallowe’en haunted house attractions.  After that, though, I’m mostly drawing a blank.  The trouble is, outside of listening to it while you’re actually gaming, most gaming music is too monochromatic to listen to an entire album straight through, but also too good to ignore entirely.  So it lends itself very nicely to mixes, but it has to be a particular kind of mix, and luckily this is one of those kinds.  The two primary purveyors of what I call gaming music are Midnight Syndicate and Nox Arcana.  I’m not sure that either of those groups would appreciate being pigeonholed so narrowly, but then again I doubt either one would deny that background for gaming sessions is an excellent use for their music.  I have several albums by both artists, but we’ve never seen them on in any of my mixes ... until now.  Here we have two from Midnight Syndicate (one from Gates of Delirium and one from Vampyre: Symphonies from the Crypt) and one from Nox Arcana (from Winter’s Majesty); all three tunes have the wordless vocals we’re looking for (“Adelaide” in particular has some über creepy wailing in the background).  And I can’t neglect the album that was my actual introduction to the wonderful world of gaming music: Shards of Eberron, by David P. Davidson, which was included for free when I bought my copy of Sharn: City of Towers.¹¹  “Dreams of the Inspired” is quite possibly the best track on this album (which is saying something), and the one which best stands alone.  It’s perfect here.

And, when you run out of cinematic music, where can you go then?  Well, what I call “cinematic” is more often referred to as “neoclassical,” so perhaps there’s something to be found in the realm of classical music.  It turns out this this is a tough genre to find in the classical métier, but I did stumble across one good example ... completely accidentally, as it was being used in someone’s Kickstarter project video that I looked at.  It’s “Aquarium” by Camille Saint-Saëns, a short piece from Le carnaval des animaux (The Carnival of the Animals) that has a spooky underwater sound which stems primarily from its use of the glass harmonica, a bizarre instrument created by Benjamin Franklin as a more efficient version of rubbing wet fingers around the rims of wineglasses filled to different heights with water.¹²  Once I heard it, I knew I had to slot it in here.

Phantasma Chorale I
[ Shadows Are in Hiding ]

“End Credits” by Bruno Coulais, off Coraline [Soundtrack]
“Dreams of the Inspired” by David P. Davidson, off Shards of Eberron [Game Soundtrack]¹³
“Arrival at Rookford” by Daniel Pemberton, off The Awakening [Soundtrack]
“Aquarium” by Camille Saint-Saëns, off Le Carnaval des Animaux
“Séraphine” by Xcyril, off Séraphine [EP]
“Enter ... "The Family" / Sand Worm Planet” by Danny Elfman, off Beetlejuice [Soundtrack]
“Strange Brew” by Combustible Edison, off Four Rooms [Soundtrack]
“Adelaide” by Midnight Syndicate, off Gates of Delirium
“Oompa Radar” by Goldfrapp, off Felt Mountain
“L'Exécution” by Angelo Badalamenti, off The City of Lost Children [Soundtrack]
“Interlude II” by Stratus, off Fear of Magnetism
“The Night Garden” by Waldeck, off The Night Garden
“Discovery” by Xcyril, off StarGate Odyssea
“Windfall” by Dead Can Dance, off Within the Realm of a Dying Sun
“The Supper” by Bruno Coulais, off Coraline [Soundtrack]
“Betrayed!” by Iain Ballamy, off Mirrormask [Soundtrack]
“Primeval Landscape” by John Corigliano, off Altered States [Soundtrack]
“Awakening” by Midnight Syndicate, off Vampyre: Symphonies from the Crypt
“Chthon: Modules” by Ensemble of the Dreamings, off Chthon [Videogame Soundtrack]¹⁴
“It Was Fantastic” by Bruno Coulais, off Coraline [Soundtrack]
“Theme (from - "It's Better to Travel")” by Swing out Sister, off It's Better to Travel
“Lydia Discovers?” by Danny Elfman, off Beetlejuice [Soundtrack]
“In noctem” by Nicholas Hooper, off Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince [Soundtrack]
“The Citrine Cross” by Hans Zimmer, off The Da Vinci Code [Soundtrack]
“Invocation” by Combustible Edison, off Four Rooms [Soundtrack]
“U Plavu Zoru” by Pink Martini, off Hang on Little Tomato
“Solstice Spirits” by Nox Arcana, off Winter's Majesty

Total:  27 tracks,  76:55

And that just leaves us with the unexpected tracks, primarily those which are coming from popular music rather than classical or cinematic music.  First up we have “Oompa Radar” by Goldfrapp.  Now you may recall Goldfrapp from Smokelit Flashback III (and IV, and V), but we’ve also seen them on Darkling Embrace, Sirenexiv Cola, and even Totally Different Head, thus demonstrating their amazing versatility.  “Oompa Radar” is a rare instrumental tune from them, very bizarre and carnivalesque, and it works well here.

Then we have a short connective tune from Stratus¹⁵ which flows directly into our centerpiece, the amazing track “The Night Garden,” by Waldeck.  Waldeck is an Austrian trip-hop artist who I first discovered via his cover of “Bei mir bist du schon” and so had him pegged as electroswing.  But he really is more suited for Smokelit Flashback,¹⁶ and of course the title track of his second studio album¹⁷ is practically tailor-made for this mix.  I have no idea if the primary feature of this tune is an actual theremin, or just electronically-generated “vocals” as we’ve seen on other tracks here, but it’s really quite stunning.

From there we hit the second Xcyril track, and then into a Dead Can Dance instrumental, “Windfall,” which somehow manages to be both wordlessly-vocal and carnival-like despite not really being either.  I’m not sure what instruments they’re using, but the combination of pipes and chimes, backed by the sound effect of a howling wind, gives the whole thing what one Internet reivewer described as “an almost macabre carnival style.” Exquisite, and quite perfect here.

Which just leaves us with one of Swing out Sister’s instrumental tracks off of It’s Better to Travel.  Swing out Sister is of course best known for their tracks worthy of Smooth as Whispercats, but they have a bit of range as well, as this track shows.  It’s not quite as creepy as some of the tunes here, but it fills its slot here in the final stretch very nicely, bridging a Coulais and an Elfman, and setting us up for the 1-2-3 closing punch of Combustible Edison, Pink Martini, and Nox Arcana.

Next time, I think it’s time (and the proper season) to return to some autumnal meditations.

Phantasma Chorale II ⇒

__________

1 Which are, as you know if you’ve seen the film, an actual thing in Coraline.

2 My first, coincidentally enough, is the aforementioned Hallowe’en mix.

3 Pemberton I discovered from his work on LittleBigPlanet; The Awakening I discovered while aimlessly flipping through cheesy horror movies on Netflix.  It’s not too shoddy, really.

4 A trippy little movie by one of my literary idols, Neil Gaiman.

5 As are nearly all the songs on the Four Rooms soundtrack, to be fair.  You may recall my first mentioning Combustible Edison back on Paradoxically Sized World III.

6 Specifically, on Salsatic Vibrato III and then again on Moonside by Riverlight.

7 You always want to find at least two sources that agree for this sort of thing.  Otherwise it’s likely someone just pulling shit out of their ass.

8 I must stress I have no data to back this up.

9 And, honestly, they were all pretty dingy back in those days.

10 Which we shall come to in the fullness of time.  Probably.  Dreamtime and its cousins are not exactly “modern mixes”, but they’re not exactly pre-modern mixes either.  They live in a strange half-state that may or may not ever see them fleshed out in this series.

11 Please note that I have no idea if new printings of the book still include the free CD.

12 And, if you’re looking for a version of this track, make sure you find one that uses the glass harmonica and not an inferior substitute such as a celesta.

13 Again, while I normally hate to point you to places where you can download things for free and the original artist will get nothing, this album is impossile to find, so you gotta do what ya gotta do. Since I originally wrote this, this music has become more popular, primarily due to Wizards of the Coast (the owners of D&D) using it for background music in several D&D liveplay videos (e.g. Force Grey, season 2).  I’m guessing they used it because they already owned it, so it saved them beaucoux bux in music royalty fees.  Anyhow, I still can’t find a way for you to purchase it legitimately, but you can get it via the SoundCloud link I’ve updated the mix list to use, or you should be able to find it by searching YouTube.

14 Not really a soundtrack, and arguably not even a videogame, since it was never actually produced.  But you can still download the music files for free in .wav format (or .au format, if you know of a program that can decode that).

15 Who we heard from briefly on Paradoxically Sized World I.

16 And we’ll start seeing there once we get to Smokelit Flashback VI.

17 By which I mean not counting his EP and remix albums.

National Heroscape Day 2016

Refreshers:

• what Heroscape is
• the demonspawn: my eldest child, currently 18
• the Smaller Animal: my middle child, currently 10
• the Skype Squad: the demonspawn plus three inseparable friends¹
• the Smaller Animal’s introduction to the game
• Previous tournaments: NHSD 2012, NHSD 2013, NHSD 2014, NHSD 2015

SoCal Heroscape League members (forum names):

• “warriorneedsfoodbadly,” a.k.a. “wnfb,” a.k.a. our host: the fellow who generously puts up the rec room of his apartment complex for us to play in
• “Leotheanimal87,” a.k.a. “Leo”: league member and past tournament champion
• “hivelord”: league member and past tournament champion; hasn’t been able to attend the past 4 years
• “Detrimentalman,” a.k.a. “Dman”: league member and past tournament champion; hasn’t been able to make the tournament for a couple of years, although often comes after the tourney is over for after-games
• “Xotli”: me
• “Quillon”: the demonspawn
• tourney thread on our Heroscapers forum

Before I tell you how our annual National Heroscape Day tournament went, I should give you a little background on how “Swiss-style” tourneys work, and in particular how ours works.  If you want the super-gory-detailed version of Swiss tournaments, Wikipedia exists to fill that need.²  But I’ll give you an abbreviated version.

In Heroscape, each player has an army consisting of a certain number of points.  Heroscape itself is very flexible on point values, map sizes, and even what the object of a given game is, but tourneys are generally more constrained.  Some areas of the country have more interesting options, but our league is more conservative.³  So it’s pretty basic: we use small-ish, usually symmetrical maps,⁴ we play 1-on-1 with identical point value armies, and we play “kill ’em all,” which means the object of the game is always just to wipe out your opponent.  You bring two armies: one is your primary army, which you start out playing with, and the other is your backup army, which you can switch to if your primary army is not living up to your expectations.  We happen to use 520 points, but that’s not really crucial to the outcomes.  We generally build 1 or 2 more maps than we absolutely need, to allow a bit of flexibility—the ultimate goal is for no one to have to play on the same map twice.

So the basic way our tourney works is this:  The first round, opponents are assigned completely at random.  After that, all the winners play each other, and all the losers play each other.  Then the people who are 2-0 play each other, and those who are 1-1 play each other, and those who are 0-2 play each other.  And so it goes until you’ve played enough rounds.  How many rounds you need depends entirely on how many participants you have, and often things don’t work out perfectly: perhaps there are 5 people with the same record and 3 people with the next lowest, or maybe you have an odd number of total players.  In those cases you just do the best you can—mostly choosing things at random, although, for an odd number of entrants, there are somewhat complicated rules on who gets the “bye” after the first round, but we needn’t go into that level of detail.

At the end of all the rounds, you look at who won the most games.  If there’s a tie for number of games won, you look at the “strength of schedule” (or SoS): that is, the total number of games won by all your opponents.  The idea here is that people with higher SoSes played tougher opponents than people with lower SoSes, so they rank higher.  If there’s a tie in number of wins and SoS, then you look at “points remaining,” which means how many points you had left on the board at the end of the game.  If your opponent succeeded in wiping you out, then you get 0 for that round.  But each round is also timed,⁵ so two good players may not be able to put much of a hurting on each other if both are playing defensively.  If neither player is wiped out, then the winner is the one with the most points remaining, so points are important in determining wins as well as figuring out the tiebreaker for the tiebreaker.

This year, we started out with 11 players, 6 of whom came in my car.⁶  hivelord brought his pop and his roommate; our host was of course there, as was Leo, and Dman would not be arriving until after the tourney.  The second round, it was one of the Skype Squad who drew the short straw,⁷ and I ended up playing the demonspawn while she watched our game.  The third round, the Smaller Animal was scheduled to sit out, which he was really unhappy about, but then Dman showed up early, so we just threw him into the tourney,⁸ bringing us to a total of 12 people.  (Side note: not only is this more than last year, it’s more than we’ve had since 2011.  I’m pretty happy about that.)  So the Smaller Animal got to play with Dman ... and of course my kid got schooled, but I gather that was still better than sitting out entirely.  After that, we only needed one more round to settle final standings.

This year I was quite intrigued to try out an army with a Native American theme.  There was a brand new unit that had only been out for a few days at the time I was building my army: the Teeth of the Makwa.  Combining them with the existing Heroscape tribesmen—the Mohicans—gave me this army, which has the unusual property of having the only “chained bonding” in the game: normally, when one unit bonds with another, if that second unit can bond with a third unit, there is specific language to disallow taking all 3 turns at once.  But this combo specifically allows the chain, mainly because it’s both conditional and not a full turn with the third unit.  The exact situation is, you take a turn with the Mohican squad, and if you end that turn with 2 of them engaged, then you can take a turn with Brave Arrow (the Mohican hero), and that triggers the ability to move (but not attack with!) 6 Makwa,⁹ but only up to 3 spaces each.  This has two major downsides: 3 spaces is not very much in Herosacpe, and, generally speaking, if you still have 2 Mohicans engaged at the end of their turn, it means they failed to kill their enemies, which makes the triple turn somewhat of a consolation prize.

In any event, my first game was vs the demonspawn and his dwarves, led by the dwarf-ridden giant Mok.  This was a fairly close game, but in the end my kid came in 100 or so points ahead of me.  I’d like to say that it came down to luck, but honestly I think my kid just played smarter than I did.  My second game¹⁰ was against one of the Skype Squad who was sporting cybermonkeys, led by Zaeus and those sneaky Nakita agents.  This game was much closer: in the end, I lost by a paltry 30 points.  The armies were pretty evenly matched: Mohicans are pretty hard to kill at range, Makwa are just plain hard to kill,¹¹ and the whole army has decent range and gets even stronger when you get in their faces.  In contrast, Gorillinators are also tough to kill, the whole army is excellent against range because of the Nakita’s Smoke Powder, and they’re way more mobile than the tribesmen.  So it was a tight game: with one less round, I would have lost decisively; with one more round, I think I could have come out on top.

In the meantime, the demonspawn had lost his first game, beat me in the second, then went on to win the third (against hivelord’s roommate).  The Smaller Animal, meanwhile, had just had a run of three really tough opponents: hivelord’s pop first, then hivelord himself, then Dman (as previously mentioned).  In the final round of the tourney, hivelord and his dad went head-to-head and the father beat the son, thus securing the tourney win and consigning his son to second place.  Which meant that the Smaller Animal’s first two games were, in fact, against the two players who ended up coming in #1 and #2.  So both he and I were scoreless going into the final round, while the demonspawn was 2-1 and looking pretty good.

I drew hivelord’s roommate, the demonspawn ended up with our host, who was also doing pretty well, and the Smaller Animal ended up going against the final member of the Skype Squad, who, like him, had not won any games thus far.  I won my game, pushing me back up towards the middle of the pack, which is where I often end up in these sorts of things, and the demonspawn won the final game to end up in third place, which is the highest anyone in our family has ever managed in our ten years of attendance.  The Smaller Animal’s game literally came down to the last throw of the dice.  By this point, he had given up on his primary army (a Marro army led by the bone dragon) and had gone with a ninja army, led by the mysterious jonin.¹²  Now, the way the jonin’s leadership works is, the ninja don’t have to be anywhere near him,¹³ but the jonin himself must be unengaged.  Happily, he has Phantom Walk, just like a proper ninja, so, if he is engaged, you just disengage with him and get on with your ninja taking their turns.  Because of this, he hardly ever actually attacks anyone,¹⁴ and his attack isn’t that impressive anyway.  So, it’s the last turn of the last round of the last game in the last round of the tournament.  Everyone else has finished playing by this point, and we’re just standing around playing peanut gallery for my kid and his opponent.  His final order marker is, of course, on the jonin, who happens to be engaged.  He starts to move him away from his enemy.  The demonspawn and I, at about the same time, realize that he only has one ninja left—all the others have been taken out already.  And, as it happens, she’s too far away to reach anyone.  So we point out to him that, while his first instinct would normally be correct, in this case he’s not doing any good disengaging and taking a useless turn.  Just go ahead and attack the person you’re next to.  It probably won’t do anything, but at least you’ve got a chance of inflicting a final wound or two.  He studies the board and then notices that there’s another enemy that he can reach: his opponent is also using her backup army, which is led by an elf wizard on a pegasus, and that exact fellow is just sitting there, 3 spaces and 2 levels down, only 1 wound away from being totally dead.  So my child decides this is a better target—partially from being mostly dead and partially from potentially being worth more points, but mostly because being higher gives the jonin one more attack die to roll¹⁵—rolls the dice, gets 2 skulls, his oppoenent rolls a single shield, pegasus-boy goes down, and the Smaller Animal wins the game by 3 points.  By a single skull, on the last die roll of the tourney.  It was pretty spectacular, let me tell you.

To top everything off, Leo’s contribution for the tournarment prizes was a copy of Arena of the Planeswalkers, which is a new-ish game that has a lot of similarities to Heroscape,¹⁶ and worth a decent chunk of change.  Enough that we had been putting off buying it ever since it came out.  Enough that it was a pretty impressive prize sitting there on the prize table.  But, as it happens, hivelord and his pop (who came in #1 and #2, you may recall) already had the game, so they went for other prizes.¹⁷  Which meant that the demonspawn was able to snatch it up by coming in third.  And the Smaller Animal, by dint of having an insane SoS (9 games, all in all), came out ahead of everyone else with his same record, making him 3rd or 4th from the bottom, which he felt pretty good about.  All in all, a mighty fine day for the family.

__________

1 From their tendency to stay up until 3 in the morning talking to each other on Skype, obviously.

2 As always.

3 Not from my lack of lobbying for change, I can tell you.

4 As I discussed last week.

5 In our tourney, we play for 45 minutes, then you get to finish the particular round of that game.  “Round” is unfortunately an overloaded term in Heroscape tournaments: each round of the tourney consists of several games (one game per pair of opponents), and each game consists of rounds, and each round in a game consists of three turns per player.

6 As mentioned above: myself, the Smaller Animal, and the Skype Squad.

7 So to speak.  As I mentioned before, it isn’t really random.

8 Of course, at that point, having missed two games, he had no real chance of winning, but at least nobody had to sit out any more.  So he graciously agreed to jump in.

9 By the way, if you’re wondering what “Makwa” are, they’re the bear clan of the Anishinaabe, which is a group of tribes which include the Ojibwe and Algonquins.

10 Remember, this is the third round of the tourney, because I sat out the first round.

11 Well, okay, they should be hard to kill: their Shield of the Great Bear power theoretically keeps them alive 25% of the time when otherwise they would be killed.  In practice, however, the Great Bear was not much interested in my poor Makwa this tourney.  I think I only hit that die roll 2 or 3 times out of the dozens of times it came up.

12 And, if you’re wondering what a jonin is, then you don’t watch enough Naruto.

13 Unlike, say, an elemental army, where the elementals have to be within 8 spaces of the elementalist.  8 spaces is a pretty long leash in Heroscape terms, but it’s a leash nonetheless.

14 Because, in Heroscape, you must always move first, attack afterwards.  Unless you have a special power that says otherwise, of course.

15 My kid is surprisingly analytical for a 10-year-old sometimes.

16 Including reusing some of the terrain for it.

17 Actually, it was my prize donation that was chosen by the #1 winner.  So I was pretty pleased about that.

Tournament afterglow

As I mentioned last week, yesterday was our annual Heroscape tournament.  So this weekend I haven’t even had time to come up with a partial post for you.  Next week I’ll bring you a report of how the tourney went.  But this week I’m just too tuckered out to write any more than this.