Alterna Citizen Program M-00: Init (System Noise)

Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: soundtrack album (w/music info), iTunes/Apple Music, extracted+emulated audio

Info

Funny li’l furry guy has a dream adventure. The Klonoa 1 & 2 soundtracks are extremely beloved in the main music sphere I inhabit, and it’s well deserved; they’re cute and quirky with a lot of neat musical moments and have ’90s romplers piled on top for a smooth, glossy finish. The inspiration for the first game’s musical direction, as given by director Hideo Yoshizawa to initial composer Eriko Imura, was the song “Sha-Lion”^[1], a jazzish fantasy folk song with nonsense lyrics written by Michiru Oshima as the theme song for the live action TV show The Adventure of Wordsworth. The soundtrack embraces the folk angle in its instrumentation a lot more than that song does: there’s plenty of guitar (and charango!), hand percussion, panflute, sitar, and so on thrown into the mix for some world music vibes.

A weird part of the musical identity of the Klonoa series, at least the games done by the Namco sound team, is that there’s a lot of odd time signatures in it. To an extent this makes sense, since several of the involved composers use odd time everywhere (Hiromi Shibano, Yuji Masubuchi, and Yoshinori Kawamoto in particular), but it goes beyond them: most of the composers got in on the action at least once, even ones who rarely or seemingly never have used it outside of the series. I’d love to know if this was an intentional bit of music direction or something the composers just kind of informally settled on; I’ve looked through various developer remarks but haven’t seen anything about it.

The soundtrack was written by nine different composers, which is a hefty amount though not super unusual for a Namco production. As the scope for music expanded during development (every single stage and boss and most cutscenes have unique music, which is pretty luxurious for a game of this time), more and more composers were brought in to chip in a few tracks. You can definitely tell multiple composers were involved, especially if you’re already familiar with some of their styles: Eriko Imura wrote the keyboard-led tracks with pretty chord changes, Tetsukazu Nakanishi wrote the synth & breakbeat tracks that sound like racing games or Ace Combat 2, etc. But the soundtrack is still reasonably cohesive despite this; even though some of the composers have never written music in this style for any other game, they all feel like they were broadly on the same page. I’ve always thought of this soundtrack as a good example of what having a consistent vision and steady directorial hand can do to get a bunch of different folks to gel together.

A few stage themes and one boss theme have variations that switch depending on whether you’re indoors or outdoors or alternate on a timed cycle, and on the original CD release each musical pair was joined into a single track. There was a later digital release which has all of these variations separated into individual tracks, but it’s also missing a few bonus tracks from the CD.

Recommended tracks:

• “MINE OF LIGHTS” (Junko Ozawa) is a beautiful track that pits a 7/8 figure against itself with a couple different displacements

• “RED HEAT CORONIA” (Kanako Kakino) I’ve always found really rhythmically catchy, something about all the different layers piling together swing rhythms and then the stabs marking the end of the chorus at 1:15

• “UNTAMED HEART” (Eriko Imura) is warm, enveloping, and kind, even as some of the background sounds have a bit of an edge to them (which is thematically appropriate for the narrative of the stage)

• “WHEEL OF WOE” (Hiromi Shibano) is tense and slippery in both its sound design and rhythmic writing

• “NIGHTMARE’S ON” (Tetsukazu Nakanishi) is some incredibly cool, dissonant prog that is one of the pieces that feels the least to me like it’s from this game

• “THE RING” (Hiroshi Okubo) is some rad synth fusion with Klonoa instrumentation spread over the top, a cool mix