If her name sounds vaguely familiar to you but you can’t quite scratch the itch, it might be because she composed the music to some of your childhood memories, particularly if you’re a fan of the very first Mega Man game, among others (including modern-day indie darling Shovel Knight). So she came into her very first standalone non-VGM album with a queenly pedigree.
I say this is a non-VGM (Video Game Music) album, but game-music history surrounds this work. I’d even go so far as to say that game music through the ages informs the album’s theme in a way that downright defines it.
The title, Three Movements, refers to the album’s fascinating and genuinely unique structure: the first movement is performed entirely in ‘chiptune’, or you might know it better as the kind of music the NES sound chip was capable of creating. Chiptune has a reputation of using its limited array of potential sounds to make each note vibrant and resonant in their simplicity, and that’s very much the case in these three tracks.
The second movement (with each movement separated from the next by a piano interlude) presents four tracks performed via sound technology you’ll recognize as the level of music the SNES sound chip was capable of creating. If I can get personal, this was the kind of music playing in many of the games of my childhood: I listen to the industrial-sounding percussion that opens Fabrik, and I think of that Mining Melancholy track from Donkey Kong Country 2; the throbbing rhythm that carries us into Neverland might bring you to a retrofuturistic city rendered in glorious 16-bit.
These compositions don’t lean on the limitations of the chosen format at all. Doing so would be a simple appeal to the kind of nostalgia I was just talking about, but Matsumae is disinterested in doing that. Instead, these songs work within their formats to present music that just wouldn’t feel the same had it been rendered with more ‘options’ available to it. Aerial Clash evokes the uptempo feel of a Mega Man X level (surely no coincidence, given the composer’s history with the series), such that the stirring melodies bring forth images of a colourful 16-bit reploid chase, perhaps, itself working within the limitations of its technology to provide a splash of energy and excitement.
By now, you’ve a few proper guesses as to what the album’s theme, or concept is: this is a hands-free tour of the evolution of video game music, from the chiptune of the NES era, to the more advanced sounds of the SNES era and beyond.
And that brings us to the final batch of songs, which catch us up to the modern day as fully-realized orchestral pieces. If Thera sounds like the valourous soundscape to an epic RPG, that’s because it was: as Matsumae explains in her detailed song-by-song liner notes, it was composed for an indie RPG that was ultimately cancelled. The song lives on here, the only one of these songs to actually be written for a game rather than ‘just’ evoking the feel of one.
The next two songs, Elegy and Earth, couldn’t be farther apart. The liner notes explain the Game Of Thrones influence, calling out the series by name, and it shows in the music. This is music fit for a grand fantasy battle, or an epic sweeping establishing shot. This song really feels like it should be for something, because the melodies have a flourishing, distinct character of their own in the spirit of the works of Ramon Djawadi or Murray Gold.
Meanwhile, Earth is a short, but beautiful number driven by violin and piano. Is it melancholy or serene? Sad or contemplative? Happy or reflective? That will have to be up to you. All I can tell you is that this two-minute composition fills my mind with bright, deep imagery, and it takes me places where I want to stay.
And that’s Three Movements, and all of them are worth lending your ear. There are in fact two bonus tracks: one sees Takahiro Izutani remixing one of the chiptune pieces, replacing the chiptune with atmospheric electronic elements, but retaining the melodies. It’s a nice way for the album to come full circle.
And the final track is a bright, lively remix of Fabrik, done up by none other than Stemage of Metroid Metal acclaim. As I mentioned in my review of that project’s collected works, I’ve followed his work since he was doing Quicktime uploads in the pre-Youtube age, so to see him now appearing on an album by a dyed-in-the-wool veteran VGM composer gives me such energy by proxy. Good on ya.
If what I’ve been talking about sounds good to you, give it a listen. Any way you take it, but the physical edition does come with those juicy liner notes, written in the original Japanese and then translated into English.