Comment on Anon enjoys videogame music
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 hours ago
Ok uh, barely related, but:
Is there an actual name for the genre of music of Half Life 2, Ep1/2, Alyx?
Its like… progressive rock but sometimes also hardrock guitar riffs, but also with … basically ‘experimental’ industrial/techno usually mixed in quite well, and then also very often with essentially breakbeat drumming, and a lot of it also uses some pretty uncommon time signatures and switchups.
And then sometimes there is either classical instrumentation, or, essentially some kind of filtered or synth version of it.
… I literally fail to describe it succinctly, I don’t know how, I’m not aware of anything else that really sounds consistently like it.
AlexLost@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
So, like Nine Inch Nails then. That’s called just industrial.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
I mean, NiN and industrial in general has many elements in common with it…
I dunno, its less … orthodox, in time signatures, than basically all NiN I can remember listening to, with the exception of Ghosts.
Ghosts has a lot more just… weird timings, but they’re also paired with melodies and chords that are dissonant or off in some way…
Not much of Ghosts is high tempo, ‘action-y’, and HL2’s melodies are actually not as odd and dissonant, they’re more conventional, just often played with unconventional instruments/synths.
And, NiN’s drumming, cymbals and such is usually nowhere near as frantic.
… Maybe I just don’t have a wide enough industrial palette, and I guess maybe yeah, ‘HL2 style’ is best described as a subgenre of industrial?
FE80@lemmy.world 38 minutes ago
NiN did the soundtrack to Quake.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 28 minutes ago
Yeah, there is no denying that NiN and industrial in general was… running through the blood of the late 90s / early 00s FPS pioneers.
Heck, not even just FPS:
Frank ‘Motherfucking’ Klepacki.
… who the fuck comes up with both Hell March… and IndustroFunk?
He just like invented a subgenre, as a song.
MIDItheKID@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
So like… MDFMK maybe?
motruck@lemmy.zip 55 minutes ago
KMFDM, better than the best.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
You’re good at this.
Yeah, actually, this is pretty close, if you had these guys make ‘instrumentals’, no lyrics songs.
Like if you took all of the differing elements, and patterns of maybe 3 of their songs, and essentially remixed them into one song, stripped out the vocals… that would approximately be pretty close to a good deal of HL2 songs.
Maybe increase the range of effects and synths used a bit, but yeah, this is pretty close.
I guess the main difference left that I can think of is that… a lot of this kind of 90s/00s industrial, it will be built kind of around a guitar riff, like the distored/noise guitar is kind of the foundation, the thing that is basically always there, keeping the tempo, driving the song.
But a lot of HL2 songs will… kind of swap this idea: The driving melody is synthetic, the guitar is used for the occasional/repeated kind of bits of flavor.
… I feel like I don’t music theory to know the right words, lol.