After waiting patiently for almost two months, my most anticipated music purchase in a long time has finally arrived; Sekaiju no Meikyuu Piano To Gengakki No Namaensou Ni Yoru (Live Music by Piano and Strings: Sekaiju no MeiQ I & II Super Arrange Version), music from the game better known to English audiences as Etrian Odyssey, has finished ripping, and I am listening to its absolutely beautiful arrangements as I write, it (and Amarok) filling the room.

My love of Etrian Odyssey is well documented, so suffice it to say that if you are done hearing about my crush on this series, you can just stop reading now, but hopefully anyone with an appreciation for music can find something to love here.

Live Music by Piano and Strings is simply stunning. The album is thirteen lovely performances by a small ensemble (Chieko Amano, violin; Yuichiro Oonuki, piano; Minori Yamazaki, cello; Shuji Narikawa, guitar; Naoko Sato, percussion), which brings to life Norihiko Hibino’s arrangement of the Yuzo Koshiro compositions. Much more evenly than the recent Super Arrange Version of the second game, the album puts a very calming instrumental touch on the “retro” soundtrack, and the performances are noticeably emotive.

Nietzsche wrote that without music, life would be an error, and these are the class of albums that remind me, a gamer to the bone, of that fact — organic, live performances, nuanced in their composition, combining the theme of an original song with the love of an appreciative interpretation. For me, among video game albums, this is up there with Xenogears Light.

Someone was kind enough to upload one of the tracks, battle themes from the first and second games, made calming. I was sold on the album before I heard a note of it, but that preview made it a must-have, and now, as the album nears its end, I confidently say that it is one of my favorite albums. As I said when I was similarly (although more verbosely) gushing over Xenogears Light, these are the releases that prove video game music is, without a doubt, “real music,” and more ultimately, important as its own class of art.

Oh, and it comes with PDFs of the handwritten arrangements, sometimes appearing as little more than note scribbles and clues to the performers, which seems fitting in an ephemeral way. I find I can’t recommend any one track, but rather all of them. Every single one, in addition to standing on its own as a wonderful piece of music, serves another purpose — that being tickling my desire to play one of my favorite games all over again.

The Paprika soundtrack reminds me most of the evening pre-slumber, engrossed in a fantasy world of my own design, a particular blind, optimistic lie of that winter season. Fitting for a film of dreams. The root emotions attached to the film and soundtrack are almost ephemeral, an electricity not precisely recreated since. They are remembered, but not revisited.

It is par for the course that music invokes memories, but exceedingly rare that a film also has such an impact and such an attachment — perhaps that is a greater sign of those times than anything else. A rewatching while unpacking into my new house, nearly a year later, gave the film a much more baleful tone, inexplicably. I prefer the first memory, even if it was a prelude to delusion.

On a whim today, I decided to dust off a bit of my Jpop (Ayumi Hamasaki, to be precise) and give it a listen. It is amazing what memories are invoked from just the first few tracks off of LOVEppears, which I first started listening to in 2000 — my first total immersion dives into computing (nay, computer appreciation), fleeting loves, the Milwaukee School of Engineering, Gentoo Linux, compiling Gentoo Linux, breaking all of my computers at least once.

Lonely nights in a warm bedroom, surrounded by computers, Ayu blasting through XMMS, heralding my first great interest shift. The daily commutes to MSOE punctuated with long sessions before and after class in the student center, tasting for the first time the sweet nectar of broadband, filling my belly with Japanese culture. My last serious interest in anime, my first serious appreciation for the potpourri of the Internet.

The whiteness of an Ayu wallpaper. My rust bucket truck. The couches in the Cudahy Student Center. The cheeseburgers they served there. Windows file sharing clients, their names long lost, from an age before the luxury of BitTorrent. A certain kind of orange present in my Trillian IM client. Shit, Trillian itself. Conversations never saved, never remembered, no longer the highlight of a lazy afternoon between classes. People not seen in years. Quiet conversations outside, in the cold, revisiting the high school roof.

All from Ayu’s “Trauma". If I had one hope, it was that I never lost these memories. If I had one fear, it would be losing the ability of music to invoke them.

Monday, I twittered my greatest idea to date, and as it turns out, that was the impetus for something I’ve been meaning to start for a while, something that people have said I should do.

I now own an electric guitar.

It’s a Starcaster by Fender, commonly marketed and regarded as a beginner’s guitar, so pretty much perfect for me, as my guitar knowledge begins and ends with picking up acoustic guitars a couple assorted times in my youth and fumbling with the strings. This time, I’m going big. Instruction DVDs, guitar tab books, micro and macro goals.

Everything fell together today. I tuned (which I do not have an ear for), started with some basics, learned a chord or two. I think I’ve already forgotten the names, but hopefully at least the fingerings will stick to tomorrow. Still getting used to the feel of the strings, the precision of it all. Wondering if the action is a bit too high, which I’m astonished to write, as I had no idea what that meant 48 hours ago.

I enjoy the weight of it in my hands, slung over my shoulder. Brings back pleasant memories of the saxophone days, implement across my body. In fact, come to think of it, the fingering situation is not entirely unlike my only other significant instrument, the piano; abandoned in the 4th grade in favor of the saxophone, which made it a bit into college. It feels good again, to have sound at my fingertips, and know that I may once again be able to conjure musicks from the air.

This will (hopefully) be the first instrument I’ve actually practiced at home — piano and saxophone I was mostly able to float by on rehearsal. This one, though, I have no such luxury; my success or failure rests in my bedroom, tied to a small amp.

I seek to multiclass as a DM/bard.

(Okay, I want to do more than that, but I still insist that it’s a pretty awesome idea.)

Joe Hisaishi’s soundtrack for Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫): spring and summer of 2001; warm days of my freshman year at MSOE spent waking up at 10 or 11, driving down to Milwaukee for a couple compressed hours of classes, driving back home and staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning (definitely, those were the days before week-long labs and projects).

I include the Japanese name for the film as this period was the height of my independent study of the language, and I remember teaching myself as best I knew how, learning hiragana and katakana, picking up what I could… listening to audio, letting the madness of watching Neon Genesis Evangelion at 3 AM take me. These events were the catalyst for becoming alienated from a group, which I reeled from for a bit, but in another sense, it was a self-defining moment, and worth the bizarre overimportance of how I’d been shunned.

Regardless, the songs from the album (and what I’m actually listening to now, Symphonic Suite Princess Mononoke) bring about memories of what I’m experiencing this very moment — dark nights alone in my bedroom, technology my implement of interest and my own curiosity my guide. The motif in song and memory is a kind of reserved contemplation; surely, I was at my most isolated and aloof then, but I believe it was therapeutic, and in the end it played no small part in crafting my personality as an aspiring intellectual (and maybe a bit of a misanthrope as well :).

At the end of the summer, I would dislocate my knee for a third time, and then things soon took an odd turn.

So, I’ve been thinking about that whole multimedia experience thing, and for the CthulhuTech game I’ve been running (which is to say, I’ve run it more than once, in a somewhat timely fashion) I want to try having some music playing in the background. This is kind of uncharted territory, so I’m open to suggestions.

I have some ground rules:

• It should not be “busy” — lyrics are almost definitely right out, as is metal and probably anything that you can’t just let sit in the background. Letting it be part of the game, good. Eclipsing the game, not so good.
  • No camp, either. The game may have horror threads woven into it, but I don’t want nonsense like howling wolves and creaking doors and so on.
• It should at least vaguely fit the theme of the game. No happy romance anime music during investigating unspeakable horrors on the fringe of civilization.
• There should be a lot of it within a theme, so I’m not managing the playlist more than I am the game. My initial thoughts are a looping “general play” playlist, a “conflict” playlist, maybe a “touching moment” playlist, and a “resolution” playlist.
• This is more of a personal preference, but contemporary music is preferable, because it’s a modern game. Also, there’s a lot of bland background music, I’m not interested in that; not to restrict myself that is only known and appreciated by the masses, but I’m interested in “popular” music.

So, like I said, I’m open to suggestions. Mark suggested the Vitamin String Quartet for his hypothetical game, which is interesting, and a pretty good suggestion. And, they have a lot to play with, what with their covering basically every artist known to man. Other ideas of my own include Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV, Dale North’s Silent Horror, and a couple video games with a modern/future/post-apocalyptic bent to them. Flirting with sprinkling in Nightwish’s instrumental half of Dark Passion Play into the appropriate theme playlists.

If you have other suggestions, or stories of what worked for you, let me know by leaving a comment or something.

I decided to play Still Alive in Rock Band to blow off some steam today, and after beating it on hard guitar, beating it on expert guitar, beating it on medium vocals, and beating it on hard vocals, I knew I was on a roll.

What followed was one and a half hours of slogging my way through the expert guitar solo tour. Didn’t do the greatest (but never did fail), and this is probably nothing special to some readers, but I’m excited. Suffragette City was my old obstacle, and it has been hurdled, for now, until it comes up again in band play. I finished out two cities and parts of a third before I had to stop. Where did I end off?

Enter God-Damned Sandman.

I’m going to need a dark pact to get through it, I am certain. I am already preparing the necessary sacrifices to some foul demon necessary to grace my left hand with enough metal to make it through. But, oh, what a night of unholy glory it will be when that song is a notch on my belt.

Anyway, Still Alive is loads of fun. Everyone (all three) here knows the song and just mentioning it invokes humming and singing and dry, informative recitals. Will be great when four are over for full band play.

The great thing about the song, I decided on my way to lunch today, is how beautifully Portal it is. Sure, the song is funny on its surface, but after playing the game, the song becomes a deep underground complex of dark humor. The entire game is brilliantly executed in the humor department, and after going through GLaDOS’ insincere banter and bloodthirsty pleading, the context of Still Alive becomes a deep black — the empty motivation in the people who are still alive especially. A perfect ominous closing.

And then it’s still a funny song.

I’ve written before about how, like what I imagine is common for music aficionados, I have a habit of associating music (generally, whole albums) with events in my life, or things I’m doing, or whatever. The concepts can be abstract “high school” or specific “that wide turn to the left around a hill somewhere right after Wildcat Mountain on Highway 33 heading east from La Crosse” (seriously), but they’re always associations that become hard to shake, in no small part due to how lovingly I embrace them.

In lieu of any sort of real informative update (er, I’ve been playing a lot of Etrian Odyssey and Rock Band, and so far fighting off my daydreaming of a new video card…), I decided to list another one, a more recent one.

Part of it, honestly, is because it is the merging of two suggestions I quickly grew to appreciate: Nightwish’s Dark Passion Play and George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. I’ve listened to Dark Passion Play too many times to count since I got it, and still have yet to finish A Game of Thrones (in part because I felt I was going through it too quickly), but nevertheless, this one is sticky. Two suggestions from two people. Doesn’t hurt that they arrived in the same box from Amazon.

For a week or two, my evening ritual was firing up DPP in Amarok, crawling into bed, and flying through five or so chapters of AGoT, enjoying both in tandem. The song that I think really makes the link, for whichever reason, is “For The Heart I Once Had,” which opens in a certain way that makes me think of cold Starks — I think it has something to do with the opening and the guitar bridge riffs. I don’t know why, so I won’t try to explain it.

Two updates this month… I must be getting sick. :)

Also, the Paprika soundtrack is as marvelous as one would expect from the movie. A very enjoyable mix of everything, it’s wonderfully all over the place.

Yes, I’m back on the net in full (yes, I was gone for a while). My hardware for the desktop came two weeks ago, but I spent most of the first week diagnosing a bad memory module and most of the second week waiting for the replacement to arrive. But here I am now, faster than ever. The critical goodies:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 overclocked to 3.0 GHz
• GeIL 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 800 SDRAM
• NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT (okay, I’ve had this for a while)

And add to that a couple disks and your standard DVD-RW burner and sound card, plug them into massive Logitech speakers and a widescreen monitor, and there’s my new box. Very exciting.

One of the things I want to try to get running, finally, for a change, is either Daggerfall or TIE Fighter. I haven’t looked too much into this renewed effort to get them running, so if anyone out there has experience getting them to work via something in x86_64 Linux, please let me know.

Also, just because I’d noted it elsewhere and was a little interested in the statistics, I calculated my last.fm contribution (results of course skewed by the “who do I tag as this track’s artist?” vs. “who is the world tagging as this track’s artist?” effect):

1. 久石譲 (Joe Hisaishi) — 7,111 of 1,959,578 — 0.36%
2. 浜崎あゆみ (Ayumi Hamasaki) — 4,785 of 7,065,223 — 0.06%
3. 菅野よう子 (Yoko Kanno) — 4,064 of 5,104,007 — 0.07%
4. Apocalyptica — 3,189 of 7,102,324 — 0.04%
5. Vienna Teng — 2,469 of 830,580 — 0.29%
6. Yo-Yo Ma — 1,560 of 761,039 — 0.20%
7. 植松伸夫 (Nobuo Uematsu) — 1,309 of 8,496,818 — 0.01%
8. Tool — 1,146 of 23,762,753 — 0.00%
9. 溝口肇 (Hajime Mizoguchi) — 1,103 of 87,274 — 1.26%
10. Queensrÿche — 1,037 of 1,903,280 — 0.54%

… and Hajime Mizoguchi is likely misleadingly high; a lot of his work on the Escaflowne soundtracks is probably improperly tagged as belonging to Yoko Kanno. Just to put things in perspective, Shrubey (who cheats by never stopping his player) has 6.2819% of Yasunori Mitsuda. Other interesting ones:

13. The Minibosses — 901 of 284,471 — 0.31%
16. Rie fu — 621 of 493,063 — 0.12%
19. Dale North — 522 of 61,124 — 0.85%
29. The Ray Hamilton Orchestra — 357 of 449 — 79.5%
232. Gail Parker — 27 of 126 — 21%

For a long while I was consistently in Joe Hisaishi’s top five for the week, but that has fallen by the wayside as of late. Still, 64,284 scrobbles ain’t bad.