Found you through your political videos and clicked on this randomly because I needed some background noise. Very pleasantly surprised and halfway through the album! Warrior is a gorgeous track.
you mentioned wanting to do a record that evokes the feelings of retro games without using chipsounds - while the lack of chipsounds is debatable here (a bunch of this could easily fit within the SNES spec or be closely replicated on the Mega Drive, so your idea of chipsounds seems to be limited to "pulse waves"), it does evoke a sense of nostalgia for that style - but i feel that's at least in good part due to the resemblance to chipsounds combined with the speaker-style EQ and room reverb. the nostalgia it evokes is the same that many modern indie games do, in the sense that it's "almost but not quite" something old due to a selective choice of limitations. there are some great compositions on here - the main progression in Tall Grass is especially fun and memorable, though the noodling lead distracts from its sense of direction a bit. Warrior is also delightful. i mean, they're are solid, those are stand-outs, though. it does seem like you fall prey to your own critiques of game music a bit (i say game music because your Undertale music critiques were very much applicable to a majority of game music in general), namely the idea that each (melodically-driven) song feels like blocked off sections stuck together. personally though i don't find that to be an issue when timbres and rhythms are shared between those sections, so it's not something i'd deride it for at all. it's interesting to try to build scenes of this fictional RPG based on the track titles. Warrior and High Places in particular really succeed at evoking concepts easily, while others are a bit slow to the punch. Tall Grass in particular just kind of elicits the mental image of "eurogame kirby" without much more context. City Lights seems to paint an image of some kind of quirky "tough guy" rival character rather than a city; although he could appear in a city, i can see it being queued up any number of places because of how funky and funny the tune is. Waterfall is a little lost on me - it's a really nice tune, but i get more of a "player's house" vibe from it than i do "Home". i could maybe imagine a hidden chapel behind a waterfall, but that's also me taking the first thing it reminds me of (a chapel) and dropping a waterfall on top. that's not to say i don't like the mental image, just that it may be a stretch. Cavern and Dance may be the weakest for me in terms of the general impression they leave me with. again, nice tunes, but i can't really place them anywhere, nor do they evoke much in terms of imagery or general feel. good stuff! i hope you can get even gooder,
I'm not borrowing NOTHING from old video game soundtracks, I'm specifically borrowing everything I can without going so far as to use pulse waves. Its an homage more than anything.
fair enough, i'm just going by what i've heard in the UT vid regarding your feelings and your tweet some time ago about an EP "without using chiptunes"; beyond that there is critique to be had, i think!
man, i just subscribed becasue i liked ur video essays, but holy moly , i like ur music a lot fuck. like i was huh i should just check this out becasye why not and now im blown away , u seem like a humble guy maybe so i hope that this affirmation of ur ability makes ur feel good :)
idk but I'm sure it'd be balls off the walls, weather it was a video about video game stuff, or a music collab, you both have really cool personalities, and pretty similar seeming interests. But honestly, I'm just some rando musing about the possibility of two content creators I think are really cool doing something, anything together, which is definitely a grain of salt, I'm sure. For all I know you both already had run ins, and just don't mesh, and that's okay too, that's just how life can be sometimes.
I like this one a lot better than The Killer but they're both really solid efforts. Not sure how you manage to consistently churn out such quality in such a short amount of time. How do you balance creative endeavors and everything else?
I wish I didn't have to work tomorrow then I could write all night. Thanks again for your music it's amazing. I feel so lucky I thought to check hbomberguy's video description otherwise I would have missed it.
Hey Eric, would it be possible for me to use songs from this album as background music for an upcoming video essay I'm making about Nostalgia? Listening to this when it first came out helped me get through some of the tougher writing segments.
these first few tracks sound like the instrumental tracks from The Art State. lo-fi, melodic synths, ambient at parts, but still very beat centric. im gonna end up loving this if theyre all like this so allusions(maybe not so much allusion but reflection?) to the Undertale soundtrack are apparent throughout. im trying to imagine a mod that replaces the soundtrack with this album and think back to the events of the game as it goes. Overworld is an infinitely better track than Once Upon A Time or any of its derivatives(but the title track Undertale still remains dear to my heart) with way more shit happening harmonically. i like thinking City Lights as an alternate Papyrus theme. it reminds me of all his japes. oh i guess its obvious what Waterfall is trying to be lol. i know Cavern is like a Quiet Waters counterpart but the melody reminds me of Memory actually. ok going into Warrior and reading that title i expected blazing horns and massive synth arpeggios like a Touhou track, but i guess that wasnt meant to be. this now reminds me of the last 10 minutes of Winter Beats which ive been listening to over and over again for the past couple weeks. also bits of Gallery, maybe Ingvar Cronhammar or Mark Rothko i am finding myself slowly being sucked into The Taxxon Experience oh my god the melody and chords to Home remind me so much of EarthBound music that im tearing up a bit. i thought Overworld was a bit like Mother Earth in its descending chord progression but theres something about this one that hits me. its like, one of those songs that you THINK youve heard before but you cant put a name on it. could call it Nostalgia, even. but more like deja vu since ive never actually heard it before shit, this is actually better than Undertale, i did not expect this. i mean i guess thats a low bar, Undertale music wasnt that good to begin with. i like the parts that arent chiptune or one minute of looping piano, like the title song which stands out in the OST as being like, an actual song, with a beginning middle and an end. i have a deep emotional connection to it all, since it was one of the beginning motivators for my own personal journey at composition. and i always had thought it still suited the game perfectly despite watching your video about it. it conveyed all the emotions right, despite being lazy at times. and clearly a lot of people thought the same since people tell me His Theme makes them cry(i cant relate cause True Pacifist made me feel nothing. not like nothing, just nothing at all) this album is a strong argument against that and a better criticism for the soundtrack than anything else. it simply demonstrates itself well i think, its purpose, by presenting an alternative this ended up pretty long cause i got thinking about Undertale, which i swore never to do ever again last September when i re-played it. god fucking damnit i think the album's first half is really strong, then the latter half takes your usual ambient approach(barring Warrior), which i dont dig all that much, but is perfect for that um, Minecraft atmosphere you were going for. light 8, definitely am going to find myself returning to this just kidding, it has no leitmotifs, what a hack, so go fuck yourself Eric "Taxxon" Joseph Watson
I mostly agree with this, except that I think this is Eric's most balanced realease. I usually find myself kinda bored around the end, this one is an exception, and it even has the second best closer (Real Boy is still better for me). Also, do you play Touhou, John? :0
oh yeah Home is an amazing closer. im still cry when i get to it. but i just cant find myself to care much about Eric's usual, abstract ambient stuff, like Waterfall, High Places and Dance. i think Gallery was able to retain my attention cause of its interesting synths, but Nostalgia has none of that i uh, dabble in The Touhous. i havent beaten a single game, theyre too hard, but ZUN's music is very interestingly made in all aspects, mostly the weird scales he uses. and i like to pretend i know about the characters because of the doujins, which you really cant avoid cause there are billions of them out there
Honestly, I also feel a bit underwhelmed by Eric's ambient work. It's hard for me to like ambient music since I'm sometimes uncomfortable or stressed, so it gets boring and annoying, but I tend to like ambiental landscapes when I'm feeling good.
you mean like DAW? Probably Ableton, and if you want to get into music production on DAW too just download lmms, it's free and neat Also necroposting I know
That was so... Comfortable. After being thrashed and having my ears mutilated (positively) in other albums, that's such a change. I still prefer harsher sounds tho
Where did you find the cover art? I saw the ship and immediately started looking, but hit a brick wall at Walnut Creek CD ROM: Gif Images 2. The only other paths lead back here.
@@nilli111 or I guess an Alpha Fighter for the Robotechies. Hmmm there's a property that Patricia might find interesting since it's basically an Asset Flip Anime; where someone took 3 completely unrelated anime (4 at the time) and mashed them together into one story. How well that worked is in the eye of the beholder but that they even did it is pretty interesting. Now imagine if another country took 3 random sci-fi shows & mashed them together? Imagine Star Wars, Firefly and I dunno Battlestar Galactica being mushed together 😂
@@nilli111 Really the biggest issue is with Harmony Gold itself. It's highly probable that they use Robotech, among other things, to launder massive amounts of money. So they don't have much of an incentive to ever rest push for new media. Just every once in a while to keep up trademarks
The appreciation and enjoyment of all art including music is largely subjective, so when I say "Undertale levels of awesome", I'm talking about my own subjective enjoyment, i.e. that I enjoyed, and continue to enjoy the Undertale soundtrack and associated fan remixes very much more than this album. Whether or not you find the public acclaim exaggerated is irrelevant to that point, and in general pretty pointless to bring up. =8P-DX
I mean, I've had a lot of time to stew over what I think about the Undertale soundtrack, and while I don't think it's Toby Fox's best work I certainly think it's still pretty sick. Definitely worth a listen, I really like it.
no one cares Cryptanark, go home ok im joking undertale is Good. i like this album better just cause of the music but its actually mostly cause Undertale was never going to be my kinda music anyways, except for a few tracks that still remain deep within my heart (like Dogsong for example)
Sorry I wasn’t clear, it’s still fun, it’s just I’ve seen a lot of people hailing it as some great achievement of video game music, which I sincerely disagree with.
@@Patricia_Taxxon no, but it just sounds like the same chord, in the same key, as the stranger things theme. And i just know the beginning to stranger things too well, which is why that exact chord, in that exact key, will remind me of that theme.
@@Patricia_Taxxon no, but...................i guess i'm just not familiar with very many songs, that begins with this chord. (Probably only the stranger things theme, and this track.)
It's so sad that your actual creative work is overshadowed by your insanely ramblings to a point where I can't separate art from artist anymore, no matter how hard I try. What a shame. What an ABSOLUTE shame.
![Patricia Taxxon - Nostalgia [Full Album]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
