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I had planned to listen to other stuff tonight, but I just found out that Joel Schoch released an original EP last year, so that all got postponed. Schoch is a cool Swiss composer of mostly stage and other performance music who was responsible for the soundtracks of the games FAR: Lone Sails and FAR: Changing Tides. They’re both very pretty, lonely, and ambientish soundtracks featuring acoustic strings and winds mixed with a bit of electronic sounds and effects, with Lone Sails leaning a little more toward jazz and rhythmic ambiguity and Changing Tides leaning a little more toward minimalism. I definitely recommend them both, they’re real nice and evocative.
This new album is inspired by the short stories of German author Michael Ende, who’s primarily known in English for the original book The Neverending Story on which the later movie was somewhat based. In 2016 he wrote music for a radio drama directly adapting short stories from Ende’s Der Spiegel im Spiegel which was also called Or is it a Lamp ? (or really, …oder ist es eine Lampe ? in German), but this album seems to be all new music that’s unrelated to that. Guess he just likes the author and the title!
Or is it a Lamp ? has acoustic instrumentation in line with the FAR soundtracks, but it’s quite a bit more electronic: not only does it more prominently include synths and audio effects, but a number of tracks get quite overtly into a trip-hoppy or EDM style. I might vaguely liken the overall sound to the soundtrack of Off-Peak by Archie Pelago, although there are clear differences in the sound palettes and general compositional approaches. Possibly because the stories that inspired this album are surrealist, the middle of the album gets kinda weird with dissonances and audio effects, which is great for me because I love it when composers get freaky. It’s a fun style, and it was great to hear a side of Schoch that I hadn’t before.
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