Aftermath

@simonvolpert@twitter.com 2015-03-29 18:12:28:

This track was conceived as a potential idea for the backing track for the pre-Kickstarter teaser video for Jupiter Hell.³

Fortunately for the latter, a much better backing track was composed, thus rendering my concept obsolete. Still, good ideas have difficulty dying for good, and soon enough i heard in my mind what the end product might sound if the concept was built upon.

The composition did not go without incident:

Does one have to become a sound technician to get the right guitar sound from his softstudio? I want to make music, not design waveforms!

Eventually, this was sorted, and i did end up designing a sound effect anyway, as well as making greater use of sound effects in general.

The release was delayed due to a serious bug in the studio software, lying practically ready in the projects directory, but once the issue was resolved, the release happened practically on the same day.

This was also the first time i painfully realized (though, of course, the idea itself was not new to me) that some of my efforts are completely lost when listening to my music on crappy laptop speakers. A second revision of the track was released shortly after to address this issue, using the opportunity to examine if any other tracks suffer from the same problem.

02 - Blood Shall Be Shed (7:28)

Released 2015-03-09.

This track was suggested by Kornel Kisielewicz for one of his smaller games, Berserk! "a game of tactical bloodshed" (the domain for the game went down at some point and never came back up afterwards). The IRC conversation went:

(2012-03-31 18:58:08) epyon: Simon-v: you think you could do a piece for berserk? doesn't have to be very original

(2012-03-31 19:00:07) Game_Hunter: I guess if Simon's gonna make a Berserk song, just ONE song, he oughta make it very loopable and listenable.

(2012-03-31 19:03:55) Simon-v: It's going to be HARD. I'm not sure i'll be able to pull it off.

(2012-03-31 19:05:03) Simon-v: I don't even know what it sounds like.

Admitteldy, up to the point, i've only played the game once or twice and have never gotten around to reading the manga or watching the series on which the game is based. Still, giving a listen to the series' soundtrack (to see if anything suitable already existed) convinced me that what i was seeing on the screen while playing was not being done sufficient justice. Indeed, any amount of demon slaying in open spaces that paints the ground red deserves a heroic orchestral arrangement, doesn't it?

Well, this is the result.

The composition process was long and troubled, practically stopping for years to make way to the development of the DoomRL album and real life. Still, it appears that Kornel never really stopped hoping that it would happen someday, for which i am grateful.

Much like the battle in the game, the track starts relatively slow and quiet, then gradually builds up towards a medium-scale hurricane.

A "patched" version was released a few months later, addressing a mastering issue that only manifested when listening to the track on low-quality earphones.

03 - Dark (5:22)

Released 2014-12-29.

@simonvolpert@twitter.com 2015-02-27 07:57:09:

Originally, this track was intended for AliensRL,⁴ another game from ChaosForge.

AliensRL is not DoomRL. It has a different dynamic. In DoomRL you run around guns-a-blazing and can reasonably hope to be able to wipe out everything that is foolish enough to stand in your way. In AliensRL, you are alone, up against overwhelming force that will have no difficulty to wipe the floor with you many times over, a swarm that will utterly demolish you if you attract too much attention. Your main tactics are evasion and stealth, as you try to gather just about enough weapons, ammo and items to survive the next few fights.

In AliensRL, the game wants you to be paranoid. My idea was to help a little.

The style of the music reflects this dynamic. It is slow, dark, ambient, with sounds and noises sprinkled here and there. I knew i am doing something right when the following happened:

Prolonged listening to the track i'm working on is giving me auditory hallucinations. Perfect!

Then, life happened, and the project got put on hold. I only returned to it when a switch in the music production software provoked me to examine my drafts again; And, sure enough, with a few tweaks here and there, the track seemed good enough to be released on its own.

04 - Fear (3:56)

Released 2020-12-19.