Game info: Steam
Listening: Bandcamp, Steam
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So a couple of years ago, Jun Ishikawa, the guy who invented Kirby music, quietly retired from HAL Laboratory after working there for over thirty years. There wasn’t a grand announcement post and he didn’t suddenly go on a spree of social media activity or sign up for a bunch of guest projects; he just went freelance in 2023, and people only noticed a year later when he was casually listed as “ex-HAL Laboratory” in the Kirby and the Forgotten Land soundtrack album released in 2024. Though he did pretty quickly update his bio on the website of the alias he’d been secretly writing original and stage music under for at least as long as he was employed by HAL, but no one knew about that website so no one noticed until later.
See what I did there? I just casually slipped in an insane revelation, paralleling the way that one was casually slipped into the Forgotten Land soundtrack like it was no big deal. It’s clever, right? The way that I—okay, fine, I understand that no one on this planet finds any of the bits I do funny, so let’s just back up and reexamine that last sentence.
It turns out that since at least 1990, and likely even earlier than that (there are a couple of poorly documented ’80s releases where it’s not 100% clear what name he used), Ishikawa has also been writing music under the name Mushio Funazawa. Until recently, none of it was for video games; he notes himself on his website profile as being a composer for theater performances, particularly butoh. He also has an interest in modular synthesizers, and since 2011 he’s been performing live improvisations of ambient drone music on them at an art gallery in Tokyo in a series called Archetype Drone.
I said “until recently” with regard to him not having done any game soundtracks as Funazawa, because that has in fact just changed! MR. ELEVATOR is a first-person puzzle game by GIFT TEN INDUSTRY, a developer run by a former HAL Laboratory planner who also worked on some Kirby games, Takashi Hamada. A lot of their products are hybrid tabletop games played with a smartphone app and a deck of special cards, though they have a few video games too, and MR. ELEVATOR is the first one Ishikawa has worked on. He said in the soundtrack’s liner notes that Hamada specifically requested Mushio Funazawa music after attending one of his Archetype Drone performances; something about the modular synth sound resonated with Hamada, and he wanted that sound for his game.
So if you’re familiar with Ishikawa’s Kirby music, you’ll notice right away that the sound design is a bit different due to the incorporation of synths that he never used there, though several tracks do have stuff like strings, winds, and piano that you can in fact hear elsewhere in his game music. In terms of the writing, I think this is also melodically and harmonically pretty easily recognizable as Ishikawa sad-sounding music (compare like “First Field” to “Beautiful Prison” from Kirby: Triple Deluxe), though several tracks get super into noisy ambient territory, which is definitely more of a Mushio Funazawa thing. The combination of the tone, synths, and ambience is an interesting and unusual-feeling mix—a bit surreal, which I think is what the game is going for as a whole.
Recommended tracks:
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“Title” is the version of the melody of “First Field” that I like more, due to the random ambient noises in it
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“Second Field” is the mixed-est mixed meter Jun Ishikawa track I’ve heard in a minute, though it’s pretty subtle about it by mostly disguising it as variable moments to breathe at the end of melodic phrases
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“Descent” is the most Kirby track of the bunch in both its writing and instrumentation
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