Game info: website
Listening: Bandcamp, iTunes/Apple Music, Amazon
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I originally planned to listen to this at the end of 2024, while I was at a hotel with my family for New Year’s, but the wifi was completely out at the resort the whole stay and my tethering speed was kinda ass, so I ended up not being able to squeeze in anything. Then AGDQ ate up most of my idle time last week, of course. But now we can fit in some Eli Rainsberry!
Rainsberry is a UK composer I was introduced to a few years ago through Sure Footing, a soundtrack I’d describe as “IDM Dustforce”: similar fuzzy synthy sound design but with breakbeats and time signatures out the butt. Their soundtracks I’ve listened to since then haven’t been quite like that, generally being either a little more ambient or a lot more ambient, sometimes with similar, fully electronic audio design and sometimes incorporating more acoustic instrumentation. I’d love to see a return to that older style some day, but the new music is nice too!
Flock is a chill game about herding animals with friends through pretty, colorful environments, so as you might expect, this soundtrack mostly falls into the “a lot more ambient category,” though there are a few more active electronic tracks here and there. This one’s on the more acoustic instrumentation side of things, particularly winds and mallet percussion, but there’s plenty of keyboards and synths to keep things within their usual sound style. Compositionally, while at lot of the time it’s not super complex in terms of many things happening at once, there are plenty of big, enigmatic chords and subtle odd time/mixed meter/weird phrasing to keep things spicy throughout.
I really like this one! One of my fave Rainsberry soundtracks now. It’s similar to Surmount in terms of atmosphere, sound design, and composition, except a bit more ambient, so if you liked that one, I’d strongly recommend this one too.
Recommended tracks:
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“Gather Your Friends” has a mixed (5+4)-(5+4)-(5+5)-(5+4) rhythm pattern that feels pretty smooth
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“To The Hilltop” switches between two- and three-bar phrasing
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“The Water Towers” has some multilayer rhythmic interplay I like in the first couple of minutes before getting big ambient in the second half
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“Those Burglin’ Bewls!!” is pretty comical
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“The Western Plaza” is one of a few tracks that remind me of Joel Schoch’s work on the FAR series: lonesome, ambient synthjazz
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“Painted Bowls” has a nice, erratically-phrase figure in the background brass at 0:24 and then repeated in the foreground at 1:48
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“The Wetlands” has some of my favorite chords at 0:37
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