Kou Hayashi, Daisuke Nagata, and Transgressive VGM

It's always validating to see one's opinion on a rarely-discussed subject shared with someone else, and I felt that majorly from this interview.

To be a video game composer who started in the era of home computers and physical production equipment automatically placed someone in a position few would be able to relate to today. Just read their stories of how they got into the industry and tell me a single time that's happened in the last 15 years.

While it may be far easier now to create what composers of this background did, no companies in the industry would condone it, let alone encourage it. If you're assigned to work on a commercial game in this day and age, you better have an unnecessarily large orchestra, a mixing engineer with a gun to his back, and a large stock of that sound budget going to performers so you can squish as many names onto resumes as you can. A consumer might have the luck of seeing someone like Yoko Shimomura or Masashi Hamauzu as the musical figurehead, but not so pleased when seeing them reduced to shadows of their former selves by the other staff, their compositional skills insulted by the use of instruments that outstayed their welcome centuries ago and recording techniques that should also be reserved for music of that era. Indie games are a ray of hope in their exception to all of this, especially in cases where the main developer is also the main composer. Companies like Game Freak and Gust have also demonstrated a desire to keep the values alive that made their music so memorable, and they have all my respect for it.

Regarding the indie scene, Undertale offers a modern expression of the ideals of both transgressive VGM and Gesamtkunstwerk. For the sake of focusing on how the past relates to it rather than a possible future, I won't expand on that in this post, but it ties in. (In short, soundtracks are better when written by the developers themselves. No George Lucas effect.)

One of the ways my music "transgresses" VGM is by not actually being for video games. But aside from that, there is other stuff out there that fits the manifesto if I were to write one. The Undertale soundtrack is once again the most salient example, even if most of it isn't to my taste.

In Nagata's (translated) words, "game music isn't as underground or maniac-ie as it used to be." Who's to blame? The economy, if you want to go there, but as Hayashi put it, the "Japanese (and uninteresting) game media." Let's get back to those two now.

Does the work of Hayashi and Nagata truly sound "transgressive"? Is it more "underground and maniac-ie" than other VGM from that era? If I'm being honest, I'm going to have to say no outside of Karous. I've given the ChaosField and Radirgy soundtracks multiple listens and enjoyed them enough to continue doing so, but still find them to be toeing the wrong kind of line with their simplicity. Karous has an excellent blend of various styles of jungle (that's the most specific I know how to be) with plenty of space for "dark chillout" sections, memorable melodies, and aggression (just look at the subtly titled "Sex pervert of a silence", a favorite of Shinji Hosoe!). I have no clue why they both seemed to write it off like nothing, but if I had to guess, it would be because the content was too much for the creators themselves to handle! Hayashi's comments on Waku Puyo Dungeon definitely draw me toward it, but without knowing which parts he did it's tough to say where and if the philosophy he espoused overlaps with it. The main point of this isn't so much that I consider their music to be an embodiment of what they said so much as how deeply I agree with it.

I look forward to the time when I'm surfing the web to discover new music and give attention to soundtracks from after 2010. The indie scene suggests it could come. I wonder if there's still more in store from these two that could stand alongside it.

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