Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: Bandcamp, iTunes/Apple Music
Info
Part 3 of the GameFAQs Video Game Music Contest B-side guessing game just happened yesterday, and four soundtracks I wanted to write about were included, so that’s unlocked… three posts from the draft box! I never got past the initial listen of the fourth game. It’s a four-disc soundtrack and there are two arrange albums I have to listen to also. It’s fine. We’ll get there eventually.
Humanity is an interesting-looking puzzle game about… flow control? You get a 3D platforming level, into which spawns an endless flow of randomly-generated humans, and you have to place markers like “turn here” and “jump here” in order to direct them to the exit, kinda Lemmings-ish but more existential.
The soundtrack was the first video game done by Japanese artist JEMAPUR, who I’ve never heard of before. He’s an electronic musician and self-described “wave addict” who appears to have a fondness for experimental/glitch IDM, and it seems like he mainly does original albums and music for art installations. I skimmed a bit through some of his other music on Bandcamp and it sounded pretty cool.
His soundtrack for Humanity is warmer and less glitchy than his other stuff I peeked at, though it’s definitely still weird. The primary vibe is minimalism, taking many short samples—vox, acoustic instruments, and synths—and doing different rhythmic things with them at the same time, sometimes polymetric and sometimes phasing. There’s also a healthy dollop of electronic music production on top, lots of effects and some reverb to tie everything together. The developer’s news post about the soundtrack describes it as using “live-coding,” which is vague but suggests to me that the music might be dynamically or randomly generated to some extent, which makes sense to me since the arpeggiation on some instruments can vary between loops.
It’s pretty dang neato! The obvious comparison point would be Oneohtrix Point Never in terms of mixing minimalism + vocal samples + electronic production, although if you’d indulge me with a video game comparison, this is the most Pikmin 2 cave themes OST I’ve ever heard that isn’t Pikmin 2, both in the instrumentation and the compositional approach which, if not actually randomized to some extent by hooking sample pitches and timings to an arpeggiator or some similar process, certainly sounds like it a lot of the time.
Recommended tracks:
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“LEAP” is instrumentally the track that sounds most like it’s from Pikmin 2
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“STREAM” gets polymetric at 1:41
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“DIG” is one of the two tracks without any vocal samples at all anywhere, just a hypnotic song with a couple of sounds getting mashed syncopatedly as the chords change
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“CREATE” is the track that most approaches IDM
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“TRANCE” is the track that most approaches EDM, it’s funny that these two are back to back on the soundtrack
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“OBSERVE” gets into outright spooky territory, also it pierces your ears a bit with a very high frequency beep so maybe watch out for that noise throughout the piece
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