Hack info: Battle of the Bits (requires login), playthrough video
Listening: SoundCloud
Info
Here’s I think the first ROM hack or mod soundtrack I’m ever posting about here? Like I could theoretically check my post spreadsheet or do a blog search for the word “hack” or “mod,” but that’s way more effort than I want to spend on this opening paragraph, so we’ll just say this is the first time I’m ever posting about a ROM hack or mod soundtrack, and if you fact check me on this I’ll swallow you whole.
prelude.smc is an eight-level Super Mario World hack by alexa sophia and Heraga that’s inspired by Nikolai Kapustin’s 24 Preludes in Jazz Style. I’ve namedropped Kapustin once here before, but it’s probably worth talking about him a little because he’s still a bit of an obscure composer except to a somewhat specific group of musicians, and also because his current Wikipedia article was absolutely without a doubt written by AI. He was a Russian pianist and composer of classical works, mostly for solo piano but he does have some concertos in the pile too; his compositions date back to the ’60s, but he only really started getting an audience outside of Russia in the last couple of decades (I only learned about him from STAFFcirc’s 2017 arrange album of some of his works). His work fused classical music forms with bebop jazz idioms, which of course wasn’t novel—classical composers have been incorporating folk and popular music styles for centuries and people were doing it with jazz well before Kapustin—but he really ran with the harmonic and virtuosic complexity of the great jazzists like Oscar Peterson (an avowed influence), and the result is pretty neato if I do say so myself. It’s not really a gigantic mystery why he was adopted as one of the patron saints of digital fusion.
So the hack and therefore the soundtrack was inspired by Kapustin’s 24 Preludes, a set of solo piano preludes in each key that’s probably his best-known work, as well as some earlier jazz-influenced classical composers like Ravel and Poulenc. It consists of eleven pieces written by alexa sophia with original Super Mario World instruments, all preludes themselves titled with feelings or concepts like “playful” or “mystery” or “urgent.” Most of them aren’t strictly solo keyboard pieces but are written for two to four different instruments, though it’s not too hard to imagine solo piano reductions for them. They’re all pretty short, with all the pieces but one having like 30-45 second loops, but they pack in a bunch of harmonic movement and rhythm changes even in the slower, less frenetic ones, so they all feel like they go places. The overall mood isn’t excessively cute, but it’s definitely more on the cuter, jauntier side of things than not, which is probably in a way a little unavoidable because of the combination of the jazz style and the instrumentation.
Fun music! I do always love me some tunes in the chordspam genre and this is a nice, bite-sized package of that. Generally I liked the more chaotic themes a little more, because of course, but the more reserved ones are nice too.
Recommended tracks:
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“exploratory theme – prelude in Gb major” has a bit of that Gershwin vibe to it
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“adventurous theme – prelude in C major” has a slightly clumsy trill blap at the end of the loop that I really like for some reason
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“urgent theme – prelude in D minor” is definitely urgent, it has a bunch of fast lines going at it and that’s always fun
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