?
melos asked:
I didn’t know who else to ask this to, but I wonder if you have any thoughts on what kinds of influences the Opoona composers were drawing on with some of the more poppy tracks on the OST, e.g. Garden of Arts, At Tokione, Concert Hall https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq1tfgIlEfk.
My thought is that a lot of the OST is one of those nice creative moments where a team was able to exercise creative freedom and the game was able to contain those songs in a very natural way, and thus the music ends up feeling like it was meant to exist only via Opoona’s setting. But at the same time I also want to know what the composers were enjoying listening to or drawing on at the time…
I’m not sure I know enough about the pop music that would be an influence here, but more importantly, in a glaring life deficiency, I’ve never actually listened to more than a handful of tracks from opoona somehow (it’s really good, I know!). BUT, one of the tracks you listed caught my ear and I can definitely talk about that one: “Garden of Arts,” arranged by Masaharu Iwata.
Iwata is a composer who, when left to his own devices, wears a love of ’70s-’80s electronic music by like Tangerine Dream and Vangelis on his sleeve. I feel like this is pretty obvious just from “Garden of Arts” alone, but I skimmed through some of his other tracks and they all have an older-style synth design that stands apart from all the other music I’ve heard from the game. So for him, I would for sure be looking at synthpop from that era by YMO or whomever as an inspiration (he’s also talked in the past about being big on UK new wave growing up).
opoona was an interesting work in the way Basiscape approached it. Masaaki Kaneko talked about the process in the liner notes of the soundtrack album: the goal was to bring out the “various colors” of the composers as much as possible, so they were left free to express their own interpretations of the “sci-fi but cute” setting of the game, and then afterward they all iterated on tracks written by someone else. So you’re correct that the composers did have a lot of individual creative freedom, and I wouldn’t be surprised if every single one each had his own specific pop influences. But since it was so collaborative, I wouldn’t be surprised if influences on one composer filtered through into the others through them reworking each other’s tracks.
I did a little searching through the soundtrack booklet and interviews and unfortunately couldn’t find any of the composers directly talking about other artists they may have referenced for the soundtrack. The closest they got is when Noriyuki Kamikura said he tried to create memorable songs by making the core an easy-to-remember, familiar melody, which is a cliche line that almost everyone says about their game music, but it’s also the kind of thing you’d say if your music had an intentional or subconscious pop influence on it.
Leave a Reply