Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: soundtrack album (w/music info), extracted audio
Credits
BGM: Kuniaki Haishima
Vocal composition: Kuniaki Haishima, Eriko Azuma, Keiichi Kitahara, Ichifujinitaka
Vocal arrangement: Kazuo Kuwabara
Info
I got a recommendation from my friend Chimeratio to check out Kuniaki Haishima, a relatively famous Japanese media composer of mostly anime/film whom I’ve never really checked out despite him having a Metroid soundtrack under his belt (more on that in a future post!). I was under the impression that he was a traditional orchestra composer, and it’s true that he does have some orchestral music in his catalog, but that’s not what he’s famous for. His reputation is for writing wack-ass horror music with spooky synths and dissonance in it, so much so that this 2018 interview leans into it with the top photo having horror lighting from below. So he was a pretty natural fit for Sony to hire to do the music for the second Siren game, part of a series of moody stealth horror games that take place in cursed areas where the boundaries between times and realities merge.
The soundtrack album is two discs, and the music seems to have been split across them more thematically than chronologically. The first disc’s tracks all have somewhat terse titles that are just nouns, and the music here is almost entirely very dark ambient with barely a melody in sight, instead packed with a lot of drones and deep pads, strange sounds, warpy bending, and noisy effects and production. It’s not just cool sounds though; compositionally a number of tracks slip in a nice clustery chord stack or some other weird nonsense that at times gave me a hint of Shadow Hearts berserk themes, or Metroid, or Planet Laika. It kicks ass! It overall feels to me like an Espio the Chameleon soundtrack, to a really ridiculous degree.
Disc 2’s tracks bring in verbs and phrases into the titles and it’s also more musically varied to match; rather than being 99% synthy dark ambient, a number of pieces get much louder or more chaotic, or incorporate orchestra or vocals, or even, in a shocking twist, have a melody composed of multiple pitches arranged in a linear sequence! So this side of the soundtrack is much more in-your-face about being from a horror game, whether it’s blasting you with spooky choir or Drakengard-ish orchestral cacophony or uneasy string melodies, though there’s still a lot of the sound design and electronic effects from the ambient side so most of it doesn’t sound wildly out of place. There are also a few nicer, melodic tracks that aren’t scary, though most of them tend to eventually get scary. This part of the soundtrack kicks ass too! Of these tracks I generally preferred the more aggressive ones that threaten to kill you, but there is some pretty nice subtle music on this disc as well.
The soundtrack album ends with four vocals. One of them, “Kounagihishouka,” was composed by Haishima and is very much in the vein of the rest of the soundtrack, except if it was also a Japanese folk song at the same time. The other three were written by other people and are completely out of place stylistically with everything else; I believe these are all diegetic or otherwise related to characters in the game and not just, like, a random pop song that plays during the credits.
Recommended tracks:
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“Unease” sounds like a more ambient version of “Crack Your Mind” from Shadow Hearts: Covenant
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“Understudy” has some nice background chimes doing weird things
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“Wandering” is one of the loudest and most distorted of the disc 1 ambient tracks
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“Crazy Laugh” has a short synth line at 1:06 that sounds pretty Metroid
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“Red Tsunami” was the most Drakengard-esque “fucked up orchestra manipulation” track in the game
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“Takeaki Misawa’s Theme” has a really nice, deeply distorted yowl playing the melody
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“Beyond the Mirror” gave me vibes of the mysterious-sounding orchestral sci-fi soundtrack of The Dig, which I just replayed recently, though there’s much more of a dissonant edge here
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“Ichiko Yagura’s Theme” is one of the extremely rare pieces that doesn’t ever sound evil, though occasionally there are two extra beats in the accompaniment so it keeps getting desynced and resynced with the melody
(track titles are unofficial translations from VGMdb)
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