Nokturnal Mortum is a name one should only ever drop with caution. They are unfortunately the flagship band of the Ukrainian white supremacist nsbm scene. One might expect idiotic ideas to lead to pretty dim-witted music, but Nokturnal Mortum broke the mold. In fact, they’re one of the most talented bands I have ever heard. Knjaz Varggoth has a seemingly unshakable knack for infusing his music with the all of the pride and hatred that his ideology implies. From 1996 up to the present they have remained on the cutting edge of the folk/pagan metal scene, like it or not.
Cheremosh is conveniently a track with no ideological strings attached. Appearing initially on the 1997 Marble Moon ep and then in slightly more refined form on To the Gates of Blasphemous Fire in 1998, Cheremosh is an instrumental song. The name refers to the Cheremosh river in western Ukraine. With a distinct build-up and climax characteristic of many of their finest songs, Cheremosh transitions from a secluded scene of the river rolling along to some convincing and bizarre pagan ritual. The folk is mostly keyboards–Nokturnal Mortum did not begin to employ traditional instrumentation extensively until the following year on NeChrist. (NeChrist, I recently discovered, is a pun. “Nechist” are evil spirits in Russian folklore.) Nokturnal Mortum did a pretty impressive job of inventing their own folk sound through synth though, and their first three albums gain a lot from it. If you can stomach their ideology, Nokturnal Mortum present some of the most compelling pagan metal on the market, and this isn’t the last time I’ll be featuring them this month.
Here’s an obscure one for you. I don’t have much time to write today, so I’ll keep it short. Тарас Компаніченко (Taras Kompanichenko) is a Ukrainian early music and folk musician born in 1969. Wikipedia describes him as “an influential kobzar, bandurist, lutenist, lira player”, and I’ll leave those terms for you to investigate. The world of Ukrainian folk is vast, both unique in its own right and a major participant in the greater sphere of Eastern European music. It seems like over the last twenty years especially the former Soviet-dominated nations have exploded in a renaissance of music and tradition. If you like what you’re hearing here, dig around a bit for more. It might be hard to find at first, but when you learn where to look there’s a wealth of it out there.
Hungarian folk group Muzsikás have been around since 1973, but this song is much older. Dunántúli Friss Csárdások translates as “Transdanubian Fast Csárdás”, and “Csárdás” in turn refers to a Hungarian folk dance. It derives from an old Hungarian word for “tavern”.
It’s not always clear to me where exactly folk music comes from. Bands preserve it as best they can, but there aren’t exactly that many options for research. It’s not like we have a written record. What’s gone is gone. When the last village musician dies, hundreds, maybe thousands of years of musical tradition dies with him. With the aid of easy recording and generous grants, it is easy enough for what still remains today to be preserved (and more often than not exploited into that crime against culture we call ‘world music’), but at this point just how much is left? I don’t mean that to be rhetorical; I’d really like to know how modern folk and folk metal bands acquire their sources.
Dunántúli Friss Csárdások and the rest of the songs on this album are an exceptionally clear case. They result from the efforts of Béla Bartók (1881-1945), one of the earliest musicians to consciously recognize folk music’s peril and attempt to preserve it. Trained as a classical musician, from 1904 on he set his focus on Eastern European folk, not only transcribing it and incorporating it into his classical compositions, but also making over 1000 actual recordings, mostly between 1906 and the start of the war. A random example will more likely than not yield a bland 10 seconds of someone talking or humming, but after listening to twenty or so I found one that really impressed me:
Does Dunántúli Friss Csárdások and the rest of the Muzsikás album derive from one of Bartók’s field recordings, or from one of his original compositions based upon them? That I’m not sure about, but one could always just ask the band. Frankly I think it might be a bit more fun to dig through the full collection of Bartók recordings looking for them.
What I especially love about this song is the sustained, poor production quality noise. Utuk Xul, hailing from Cali, Colombia, are not a band to write home about, and The Goat of the Black Possession is not a particularly special album. One especially degrading review on Encyclopaedia Metallum gives it a lowly 25%, and I’m afraid there’s not much in the review that I can argue with. But what may well be entirely generic songs are masked by a really menacing and constant wall of sinister noise. The quality of the recording is spot on, whatever one might say about the song writing. On one hand “The Ancient God of Light (part II)” really captures the aural spirit of black metal. On the other hand it captures everything that’s especially cheesy about the genre it represents.
Kicking off with a liturgical ode to Satan, the album goes on to mimic every stereotype of the genre in fairly generic form. It’s impossible to tell whether the band is trying really, really hard to be evil or whether the whole thing is tongue-in-cheek a la Carpathian Forest, but unlike Carpathian Forest they lack the relative fame to make that distinction relevant. This song’s title refers to Lucifer–the band present themselves as devout Satanists of the literal Christian sort, not LaVey’s variety–and the lyrics are everything one could hope for in especially cheesy black metal: “Call the moon, Lucifer, the morbid star! The ancient god of the light, my force! Lucifer prince of the abyss! Morbid star, light of the abyss! The hell light of the storms!”, etc.
The one thing the 25% review got definitively wrong, I think, is in chastising them for buying into the Swedish scene he dubs “norsecore”. The term is an entirely appropriate insult for one of black metal’s weakest subgenres, but part of what makes most bands in the Swedish scene pretty bad is their refined recording quality; the blast beat ad nauseam routine isn’t an innately bad thing. On “The Ancient God of Light (part II)” (What became of “part I” is anyone’s guess. It doesn’t appear on this album.) I think Utuk Xul really nailed it. The atmospheric noise just screams evil here, and, moreso than other tracks on the album, this song is sufficiently devoid of attempts at song construction to function as one continuous, sustained explosion. I love it.
I actually find The Goat of the Black Possession as a whole fairly enjoyable for the same reason I like this song, but there might be a bit of nostalgia playing into that too. It was the product of one of my earliest completely arbitrary purchasing sprees in search of unknown black metal bands, and in 2003 I had a lot less to compare it to. “The Ancient God of Light (part II)” is the only track I’ll flaunt without reservations, but if you really enjoy its effects as a background piece then you probably won’t be disappointed by the rest.
Whether Utuk Xul really take themselves seriously is anyone’s guess, but intentionally or not they succeeded in producing one of the lamest photo shoots I have ever seen. Enjoy:
I’m going to keep it fairly friendly for these first few entries before I delve into the darker side of the scene. Today’s feature song is Tunteellinen Valssi by Karelian folk band Myllärit, appearing on their 1999 release In the Light of the White Night. Though this is the only album I have by them, the band have been around for quite some time. They first formed in 1992, and they have since released seven albums.
I am not particularly good at tracing older musical styles, and I don’t know if there’s any sort of precedent for waltzes in Finnish/Karelian tradition, but Tunteellinen Valssi and the album as a whole keep the instrumentation fairly local. In the Light of the White Night consists of a wide range of styles which nevertheless all fall within the broader category I’ve come to associate with Karelian folk. Unlike Poropetra, Myllärit have no ties to the metal scene to the best of my knowledge. I can only speak for one album, but from what I’ve read I gather they stick pretty consistently to traditional folk forms.
I think the majority of their songs are sung in Finnish, but their Finnish Wikipedia entry (yay Google Translate) claims that they also sing in Ingrian, a Finnic language only spoken by about 500 people in the Ingria region just south of Karelia. It always excites me to see modern folk and metal bands doing their part to preserve fading linguistic and cultural traditions.
“Tuatha Dé Danann” refers to mythological pre-Christian inhabitants of Ireland, and contestedly translates as “peoples of the goddess Danu”. If an entirely appropriate name for an Irish folk metal band, what makes Tuatha de Danann especially odd is that they hail from Varginha, Brazil. The band can, moreover, claim to be one of the earliest-formed acts to perform folk metal, dating back to 1995 (though they quite recently broke up.)
Tuatha de Danann are fundamentally power metal–the definitive metal genre of Central and Southern America (I was in Costa Rica when Iron Maiden played there in 2009 and you’d have thought it was a national holiday). I’ve never been a big power metal enthusiast, so I never had much of a desire to explore Tuatha de Danann’s albums further, but the opening track to Tingaralatingadun, released in 2001, does a delightful (and historically, exceptionally early) job of flawlessly merging power and folk metal in a manner somewhat similar to Elvenking during their finer years. It is a bit more earthy than Elvenking, much to its advantage, and the effect of the constant guitar solo doodling, whistle, and generally airy production creates a lighthearted, mischievous vibe that I would describe as more fantasy than folk–or at least, it invokes a more fairytale superstition of early morning magic. Follow these guys into a cave and you might find a few hundred years have passed on your way back out.
The biggest selling point for me in this song is the tone of the whistle. I cannot sufficiently emphasize my love for whistles. There is no instrument I enjoy more, either to listen to or to play (banjos get a close second, though I’d be kidding myself if I claimed I could play one). “The Dance of the Little Ones” is especially successful in generating a sort of ‘through the fog’ whistle tone which I’ve heard employed by such diverse musicians as Belarusian folk band Stary Olsa (Стары Ольса) and Japanese video game composer Miki Higashino, and which I desperately wish I knew how to reproduce.
October is a fine month for music. Everything from the cheesiest of black metal to the most ethereal of folk finds its home in a season which glorifies gore and the old gods together in a grand renunciation of conventional Christian values. I make an effort every year to present a sort of soundtrack to the season. Last year this amounted to a meager one post, but this go around I aim to do a song a day every day from now until the 31st.
The criteria will be two-fold: the song must be either dark, pagan, fantasy-oriented, or at least authentically folk; and I cannot have ever featured it on Shattered Lens before. It’s going to be an interesting ride. I feel at the moment completely out of touch with my music collection, and too hopelessly bereft of time to do anything about it. Musically, I spent the grand bulk of this year focusing on vgm. I must say the venture was eye-opening, and I have a much broader appreciation of video game music to show for it, but it’s a subject quite far from my typical focus. I will be putting my vgm series on hold for the month (it is incomplete anyway, and such a break will hopefully give me time to extend it), and focusing on music a bit more relevant to the season.
Today’s feature song is Tunturikukka by Finnish folk act Poropetra, taken from their self-titled 2004 demo release. While their full-length album features substantial rock influence, their demo is an outstanding example of uncompromised contemporary folk of the Finnish/Karelian variety. The band’s name is, according to Encyclopaedia Metallum, “the name of a mythological blue moose which travels through the sky”. Their founder, Juha Jyrkäs, has supposedly collaborated with folk metal legends Korpiklaani.
Tunturikukka is a track I’ve been keeping around for years now. I don’t recall when exactly I discovered the band, but I may have had it in my collection since the year of its release, and it still never fails to make an impression on me. I’ve always extracted a warm, sort of wintery vibe from the tune, and there’s something a bit reverent about it. From what I’ve read, I gather the lyrics pay ample homage to Finnish mythology, and on Tunturikukka most among the demo tracks I get a real sense of connection with the past.
VGM Entry 60: Splatterhouse
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)
Today is October 1st, and Shattered Lens readers probably have a good idea of what that means.
Namco’s Splatterhouse series first emerged in the arcades in 1988. As the advertisement poster used in this music video suggests, it was one of the first video games that really possessed the graphical capacity for some good old fashion gore. You play as Rick Taylor, a run of the mill college student who takes refuge from a thunderstorm in an old rickety mansion and inevitably finds himself demonically possessed, hacking and slashing his way through all sorts of hellspawn and ultimately butchering his girlfriend before defeating the mansion’s demon fetus-spawning womb and escaping. Quality stuff.
The game is accompanied by quite an impressive soundtrack.
When not taken to weird, incoherent noises such as on “Poltergeist”, the game has a knack for some rather pretty tunes that are only disturbing when placed in context. (The theme for Jennifer is one such instance; let’s not forget that the scene results in you chopping her head off.) I am not sure whether Yoshinori Kawamoto or Katsuro Tajima composed Splatterhouse. The former name crops up slightly more often on vgm websites, but trusting the majority consensus has lead me astray plenty of times before. Unfortunately, Namco have featured so seldom in my gaming music compilation that I am not really in a position to take an educated guess.
Splatterhouse is probably not thought of by most gamers as an arcade series. The original 1988 Splatterhouse only found obscure ports–to the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 in 1990 and the Fujitsu FM Towns in 1992. Its sequels made a bigger splash, becoming staples of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. Splatterhouse 2 and Splatterhouse 3 were released only seven months apart, in August 1992 and March 1993 respectively.
Both sequels were composed by Milky Eiko, and despite their wide acclaim, Milky’s rather outlandish pseudonym does not seem to have surfaced since. I could not find any other Eiko associated with Namco, and he must be regarded as both one of the last and one of the most famous game composers to be buried in complete anonymity, before composition credits became standard.
On an odd final note, there was actually another series game, Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti, released in 1989. It was an SD game, that is, super deformed, which generally refers in video games to over the top, excessively cute anime portrayals of familiar characters from earlier games. Released exclusively on the Famicom, Wanpaku Graffiti offered good clean serial murder for the whole family.
VGM Entry 59: Street Fighter II and SNES domination
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)
An enormous disparity had emerged between the Super Nintendo and competing platforms by the early to mid-90s. The Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, released two years sooner, still didn’t have much to offer, and the arcade was fading fast. The former simply couldn’t compete with the SNES’s ability to simulate real instrumentation, and the latter, I suspect, was no longer funded the way it used to be. This lends itself to a number of comparisons, but in consideration of the fact that my available time for writing these articles is rapidly coming to an end, let’s just jump straight to the point.
The Street Fighter II series is a massive and confusing string of titles through which Capcom managed to milk a great deal of money releasing minor updates and new characters over a short period of time. The original Street Fighter II came out for the arcade in 1991. This was followed (in the arcade) by Street Fighter II: Champion Edition (April 1992), Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting (December 1992), Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers (October 1993), and Super Street Fighter II Turbo (March 1994).
If that were all, it would be fairly easy to sort out, but each of these games was given a different title based on region and platform. Street Fighter II Turbo for the SNES, for instance, was a port of Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting, not Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive was not a port of Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, but rather of Hyper Fighting. The additions made in the original Champion Edition were carried over into most future versions of the game and ports, such that the original Sega Master System Street Fighter II (released in Brazil, where there was inexplicably still an SMS market, in 1997) was actually Street Fighter II: Champion Edition.
I would love to sort all this in a nice coherent list, but it would take me all day, and as I said, my time for writing these articles is starting to run short. So let’s just look at the version currently playing: Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers. This one was released for the Super Nintendo in 1994 as simply Super Street Fighter II. Skip ahead to 5:12 and you’ll hear a delicious little oriental arrangement reminiscent of Miki Higashino’s Yie Ar Kung-Fu. (Again, time restricts me from actually finding the name of the song.)
Wikipedia credits Isao Abe and Syun Nishigaki with composing the Super Street Fighter II soundtrack. This is a little confusing as well, since Isao Abe and Yoko Shimomura get credited for the original Street Fighter II and a lot of the music is the same, but whoever wrote it, you’ve now heard the arcade version of the song, and I think we can all agree that at least in the 80s sound quality (not necessarily composition and arrangement) was substantially better in the arcade than on any home system.
The same song appears in the SNES Super Street Fighter II song compilation at 4:29, and I don’t think I need to point out how it’s better. Here’s a game released for a 1990 system, and the quality of sound is decisively better than Capcom’s 1993 arcade release. Forget about state of the art technology in the arcade; I think at this point companies were cutting costs, and high-end sound systems had to go.
Here’s another case in point. Shining Force (Sega, 1992) was a tactical RPG released for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. Composed by Masahiko Yoshimura, it is one of the most highly regarded soundtracks on the system. Aside from a ton of spin-off titles, Shining Force as a series only saw three installments, and each of these featured a different composer. Motoaki Takenouchi, for all his talents, didn’t do such a hot job with Shining Force II (Sega, 1993), and the third was released on the Saturn, so we’ll just focus on the original.
Masahiko Yoshimura did a really outstanding job here with the limited resources available to him, especially when the gameplay situation called for intensity. The tracks beginning at 1:47 and 2:34 especially impress me in this regard. Yoshimura’s militant snare carries the day, and there’s also something interesting going on in company with the bass. The deep piano tones on this second track play tricks on my ears, projecting a piano vibration onto the bass when I listen to the song as a whole which clearly isn’t there when I focus on the bass specifically. Both at the start of the 1:47 track and mid-way into the next, around 3:19, he musically employs a tone that sounds more like a jumping sound effect in order to simulate an instrument sample that probably wasn’t available on the system, and it works. You can catch some more of this in the track that kicks off at 7:23.
Packed with catchy songs creatively arranged to artificially simulate a higher degree of orchestration than the system allowed, Shining Force was a great success.
But what it took a lot of creativity to pull off on the Genesis the SNES made easy. Jun Ishikawa and Hirokazu Ando (both of Kirby series fame) composed Arcana (HAL Laboratory, 1992) the same year Shining Force came out, and the improvement in sound quality was staggering. RPGs to a large extent defined the SNES. I have no statistics to back this up, but I have to imagine more popular games outside of Japan fell into the RPG/adventure/tactics spectrum on the SNES than on any other system, to such an extent that NOA even incorporated an “Epic Center” column into Nintendo Power for two years (March 1995-November 1996).
An end date of late 1996 roughly coincides with the North American launch of the Nintendo 64, when Nintendo Power subscribers began to feel the effects of the cartridge gaming fallout. RPGs were big games, calling for big capacity, and the Playstation rapidly became developers’ new system of choice.
But this was 1992, and even little known, quickly forgotten titles like Arcana were blowing Sega and arcade gaming out of the water.
VGM Entry 58: Illusion City
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)
Illusion City never saw an English translation. Micro Cabin first released it in December 1991 for the MSX turboR, and this was rapidly followed by versions for the PC-9801/PC-88VA (January 1992), FM Towns (July 1992), Sharp X68000 (July 1992), and a bit later the Sega CD (May 1993).
On a completely irrelevant note, I finally looked up why they called it the Towns, and apparently Fujitsu named their 1989 PC after 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics winner Charles Hard Townes. Aaanyway, Illusion City had a soundtrack to rival the SNES legends, and that’s about all you’ll ever find concerning the game in English. It *gasp* doesn’t even have an English Wikipedia page.
The music collections you’ll find scattered across youtube–and these are relatively abundant–showcase the MSX turboR version, so I will to. Two years behind our current historical progression or three years after the original release of Snatcher, I thought it best to bring the game up now since they’re occasionally compared. The two have next to nothing in common concerning gameplay, but they are both cyberpunk, and I gather they have some common plot features. (Not that I would know, short of digging up a fan translation.)
Illusion City is not a visual novel. It’s an RPG. The best you’ll find concerning what style of RPG are a few stills here and there; I am thoroughly convinced that no Illusion City gameplay video exists on youtube. You’ll find plenty of videos of the introduction, and there’s an ending/credits roll video out there for the Sega CD version. That’s about it. But with these credits, conveniently originally in English, and a last resort Google Translate of the game’s Japanese Wikipedia entry, we can piece together its authorship easily enough.
The music was composed by Tadahiro Nitta (the same Nitta responsible for Micro Cabin’s Final Fantasy MSX port), Yasufumi Fukuda, and Koji Urita (Kouji Urita in the credits). These are the names listed on the wiki, and the Sega CD credits clearly distinguish them (“Music Compose”) from composers contributing new material to the port (“Mega-CD Special Music”). This latter group consists of Hirokazu Ohta, who “arranged and computer programmed” the intro and end-game music, and Yasufumi Fukuda, who added new combat music. Lastly the credits list Hirotoshi Moriya and Masato Takahashi under “sound” for the “Mega-CD Work Staff”.
There we go: clean and concise credits. How often does that happen on a Japanese PC game port?
In so far as this is the first cyberpunk RPG I know of (the Phantasy Star series comes to mind as a similar comparison), Tadahiro Nitta, Yasufumi Fukuda, and Kouji Urita had their work cut out for them. Where Masahiro Ikariko and company were able to score Snatcher more or less like a movie, Illusion City required themes for all of the contrivances of a standard RPG. The sort of poppy vibe with which Tokuhiko Uwabo flavored Phantasy Star II, to use a game I’ve previously showcased, can’t fly in cyberpunk–if that is in fact what kind of game Illusion City is, as many have claimed. It needed something a bit more dark and grimy.
Whether they really pulled it off is debatable, but if “City Noise” (3:37 in the present video) is in fact the main town theme then they definitely had the right idea. Oh, it’s not dark on the scale of Snatcher, but I get the sneaking suspicion anyway–mainly from the Sega CD intro and outros–that this is more of a futuristic adventure game with cyberpunk overtones than Akira-worship. It definitely succeeds in creating a futuristic RPG soundtrack to a far greater extent than what I’ve heard of Phantasy Star, and it’s got a decently dark edge.
Through the Shattered Lens 