Rynling R&D

はじける光 by Amalume
(on YouTube here)

Because I unironically want my life to have the soundtrack of a PS1 game, I spend a lot of time seeking out lo-fi instrumentals. This one in particular has gotten me through the past few days, when the roads and the grocery stores have been especially intense.

If you celebrate Christmas, I'm sending love and good wishes for your family to behave. If not, I'm sending love and good wishes for tasty Chinese food and a nice movie. ☕

Bellow | Witch Bolt
https://witchbolt1.bandcamp.com/album/bellow

In Witch Bolt's sixth album, Bellow, listeners are enveloped in a shadowy, mystical realm, creating an atmospheric and immersive journey through an enchanted, eerie landscape.

This is wordless dungeon synth with atmospheric Dark Souls vibes that makes great writing music. I edited a playlist to subtract two of the more synth-y tracks, but the whole album is good. I recommended Shadow Knell earlier as high-quality dungeon synth, but I got tired of it fairly quickly. Bellow is much deeper and more polished, and it's so perfect (for me) that I'm kind of hesitant to check out the artist's other work.

Night River
https://shadowknell.bandcamp.com/track/night-river

SHADOW KNELL is a mystical, mournful, and doom-laced synth fantasy that echoes from dungeons deep and forests eternal. SHADOW KNELL’s warped and woozy orchestral arrangements serve as the murky soundtrack to untenable evocations, obscure dreams of grim grandeur, faded memories of the sublime.

I like all those things! Apparently a rising genre on Bandcamp is "dungeon synth," which is meant to recall the soundtracks of PlayStation-era FromSoft games. I really enjoy the Lunacid OST (which I can't link to because I had to extract it from YouTube like a peasant), and a lot of the work in this genre has the same feel. I'm too shitty of a casual gamer to be able to play actual dungeon crawlers, but it's nice to write and draw and edit while listening to weird ambient sewer level music.

Btw it did not escape my notice that the musicians who put together this particular album live in Philadelphia. Of course they do. This is absolutely the bgm that greets me when I step outside to go running in the morning.

Elden Ring but it's lofi beats
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKF2HIjxtNA

We're hyped for Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree – get ready with bits & hits lofi covers of the original soundtrack from the Lands Between. A 1 hour loop for tarnished, maidenless and Elden Lords alike.

I've heard a number of people whose opinions I respect say that they're not fans of the Elden Ring soundtrack, and that's cool. I, however, have been listening to a playlist of the ambient songs just about every day for the past two years. It's excellent music to relax and write to. What I like about this playlist is that it's taken all the over-the-top epic battle music and made everything ambient. Always appreciated.

beyond the edge of the world
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLPM83Tk1M8&t=3s

According to the caption, this ambient fantasy mini-album is "inspired by the earthsea book, the farthest shore."

Man. If there were ever a fantasy novel that deserved to be turned into a big-budget art film directed by Guillermo del Toro, it's The Farthest Shore. This is exactly what I would want the OST to sound like.

There's Nothing To Do In This Town
https://donotrunwithpixels.itch.io/theres-nothing-to-do-in-this-town

There's Nothing To Do In This Town is a nonviolent Game Boy adventure game that takes about ten minutes to play. The story set on a section of high street in a town in Wales and seems to be vaguely contemporary, although it gives me a strong early 2000s vibes. You play as a young man who has no money and nothing to do. Also there are some zombies having an office party.

The game is essentially a trading sequence. You talk to people on the street, and you can go in several of the buildings and talk to people there. Your alcoholic father lives in an apartment under the zombie office, and he’s annoyed by the loud music. You therefore need to convince the town’s secret zombie slayer to take care of them.

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The graphics are quite good for this being a Game Boy game, and the trading sequence fits together nicely. The character interactions have big Scott Pilgrim energy, meaning that your character is kind of a loser but mostly means well, thereby encouraging all sorts of weird people to open to him. The nods to late 1990s grunge culture give the story a stronger sense of nostalgia than the retro graphics, and I really enjoyed the experience of playing a game that’s essentially indie alt comix come to life.

The music is decent, and it totally got stuck in my head. The game creator also makes short albums of Game Boy chiptunes, and the songs from There's Nothing To Do In This Town are the last three tracks of this one: https://donotrunwithpixels.bandcamp.com/album/the-outside

This one isn’t a horror game, by the way. It’s very silly and very chill.

i was feeling down, then i found a nice witch and now we're best friends
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAKy6m83yME&list=PLW6vF0T12eZYjzI43tyE3QI1wuF5UP9mW&index=1

This is a cool twenty-minute illustrated album of chill music that sounds like it came from a fun indie game. It was released in 2017, but what is time anyway.

Most of what I actively listen to these days are video game OSTs, but I passively listen to various genres of lo-fi beats on YouTube. Maybe this is a weird thing to say, but the remixed soundtracks and ambient soundscapes that people have started releasing with fandom zines are surprisingly good as well.

Idk, I just think about that male academic writing that "wordless ambient music is masculinist," and I realize that some people live in an entirely different world than I do. And that's cool. Multiple worlds can overlap, you know? It's just kind of sad that there's an entire cultural industry devoted to saying that my world doesn't exist.

Blasphemous is an ultraviolent 2D Metroidvania with gorgeous 16-bit pixel art and limited but fluid animation. It describes itself as “fast-paced and punishing,” but it’s not really either of those things. The game’s focus is more on strategic combat than platforming or quick reflexes, and your character moves at a fairly sedate speed. To me at least, the pace feels perfect, both from moment to moment and in terms of progression from one area of the map to another. In terms of “punishing,” this is how I’d rate it on a scale of “this game wants you to feel pain.”

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My favorite part of Blasphemous is its OST, which suits the tone and atmosphere of the game perfectly. About a third of the tracks suffer from dramatic moody bitch disorder, and honestly I can’t remember where they play in the actual game, but most of the OST is mellow acoustic Spanish guitar. Que las Campanas me Doblen is a good representative track, and I really like Y Yo Fuego Te Daré, which manages to be both chill and epic at the same time. A track called Arpegios en Ocre plays in an area called “The Desecrated Cistern,” and it really makes you feel like you’re walking around a cavernous underground space with a vaulted ceiling. I think the OST holds up well on its own as lo-fi Flamenco beats to chill to, but it’s also a gorgeous backdrop to the game and its ruined world.

Friends is it okay if I admit that at least 10k views on this video are from me.

There's a bit of a jump scare at the end, but it's very wholesome.

It was easier to explain.