In the beginning, there was a void.
Then there was Serge. Being but a too-young-to-think-yet human larva, little Serge had absolutely no experience with music and, as such, music taste whatsoever. In the times that feel like a blur, a blur of meaningless sounds was the soundscape of his life.
Some years later, little Serge slowly started gaining consciousness and growing self-aware. With that came the joyous privilege of being able to listen to the radio, watch TV and play videogames. And there was music. Too much different music to remember it all, but there were some gems that, I suppose, had become the foundation of my taste.
Being a 90's kid meant that I had the opportunity to enjoy the great works of art that are late-80's to late-90's cartoons and videogames. Many of them featured great soundtracks and were the main reason I learned to appreciate good music. Among many, the most influential examples in my case were the ones you're about to see (and hear) below.
The glorious cartoons of 90's had access to the best of both worlds: future technology that gave the artists the possibility to acheive what wasn't possible before, and unrestricted creative freedom that gave the authors a way to speak about things that were considered taboo just a couple of years ago. Because of this, many cartoons of the era looked awesome and had an important message to deliver.
First off, “Spider-Man”. This was the first cartoon I fell in love with, found (bought or copied) all VHS tapes of, and would spend entire weeks watching and re-watching it back-to-back. It taught me about importance of many things that had great influence over my life: responsibility, humour, science and perseverance.
Then, “Phantom 2040”. A story about an elusive hero, The Phantom, living to fight the injustice in the distant (not so distant now) future of the year 2040. The world is left a mess after decades of irresponsible nature abuse that resulted in an ecological disaster and rendered most of the planet inhabitable. All that is left is a bunch of independent city-states run by powerful mega-corporations with private armies that fight for resources and opress ordinary people for profit. This cartoon taught me to cherish nature, love history, be wary of big corporations and cyberpunk-like future, and to record live TV onto VHS.
And last, but not least: “Beast Wars”. A spin-off of the Transformers saga that tells a story about two clans of robots who crash-landed onto an unknown planet (later revealed to be the pre-historic Earth) and now have to adapt to the new environment and find a way to fly back home.
Since my family wasn't as well off as it could be, I only got to enjoy videogames on the cheapest console in the whole of 90s existence, which was a Chinese bootleg clone of Nintendo Entertainment System (also known as “Dendy” in Russia), complete with famous “9999-in-1” game collection cartridges. Most of these games didn't have any complex or sophisticated music in them, but sometimes the developers would go out of their way and create real works of audio art and fit them into those tiny 40-kilobyte carts. Here are some of my favourite game soundtracks at the time.
“Little Nemo: The Dream Master” is a platformer game about a little boy Nemo who travels through his own dreams on his way to kingdom of dreams called Slumberland. He can ride (and turn into) many different animals in order to overcome various obstacles. Overall it's a cute, simple and fun game.
Beat-em-up games are a staple of 8-bit and 16-bit gaming era, and NES had its fair share of beat-em-ups, like “Double Dragon”, infamous “Battletoads” and more. Unfortunately, I didn't have these specific games as a kid, but instead I had “Mighty Final Fight” — not the most known, but still one of the best beat-em-ups on the NES. Lots of action, three playable characters and a great soundtrack to top it all up. It is still one of my favourite games, even today.
RoboCop and The Terminator were all the rage in mid-90's Russia, and videogames are no exception. Personally, I had “RoboCop” 2 and 3. Both games are great (and difficult!!), but “RoboCop 3” also has a great soundtrack. The main theme is often regarded as one of the best examples of 8-bit music, composed by widely known (in close circles) videogame composer from the Netherlands, Jeroen Tel.
Japanese anime (short from “Animation”) is just like Western cartoons, but completely different. Visual style, drawing techniques, storytelling canons — everything is different. Because of this it might seem alien at first, but if you let it grow on you, it opens a whole world of fascinating stories, full of action, romance, humour, cultural references and more for you to discover.
First, the most manly-man-esque anime there is — “Sailor
Moon”. This anime was my “gateway drug” into the world of
pretty magical girls ahem, Japanese animation and all the music that
accompanies it.
The “Dog Soldier” anime is an example of that rare and obscure movie or cartoon that just appears in your house out of nowhere. You don't know where it came from, nobody has heard about it, but it's somewhat decent and you like it. It's a tragic story about 3 orphan kids who got separated and suddenly met each other 12 years later under mysterious (and later tragic) circumstances.
This song from the credits scene gave birth to the episodic series that I'm going to call “Sad Boi Departure” here, where I occasionnaly start listening to something sad/depressing and otherwise uncharacteristic of what I usually listen to.
Now, if you thought that having something called “Dog Soldier” as one of the favourite animes at this age was... unusual, to say the least, then boy, do I have a surprise for you! Just like the 'Soldier, this one is a weird and unexpected gem of an anime that seemingly appeared from thin air, just to give the little Serge a life-changing experience by exposing him to a staple of late-80's anime known in the West as “body horror”.
I present to you “The Guyver: Bio-Booster Armor”. A sad and disturbing story about an Ordinary Japanese High School Student™ (which is an anime staple and inside joke in itself) who stumbles upon a strange object which grants him ability to use an alien-looking living armor suit and gets him in the middle of an “Alien Reptiloids Secretly Controlling the World”-style conspiracy.
Even though this is merely an opening sequence of an animated TV series for kids, it still includes some disturbing imagery involving rapid body mutations, blood and dismemberment.
DO NOT WATCH IT IF YOU ARE UNSURE YOU CAN HANDLE SUCH CONTENT.
Things went smoothly and somewhat uninterestingly until late 2002, when yours truly got his first PC. A modest 733MHz Celeron machine wasn't the best computer in the world, but it ran a lot of era-appropriate stuff, including videogames. Along with this computer, I got a couple of games to test the capabilities of this silicon powerhouse, and these games had music in them, and the music was good. So good, some of it just got etched into my brain for me to return to and revisit almost 20 years later.
Now, even though this chapter is called “Shift”, it's more like an earthquake — some of my previous preferences were strengthened and reinforced, and at the same time I developed some new long-running ones.
The first game I got for my own PC was a racing game with a funny-sounding title, “Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2”. Not-so-interested (but nonetheless excited), I pop the game disc into the CD-ROM drive and the first thing I see (and hear) when I launch the game leaves me speechless and drooling all over the keyboard.
When I finally come to my senses and pick up my jaw from under the table, I jump into the game and am overwhelmed by forest and mediterranean scenery, beautiful cars and awesome music. Here are some of the gems I like the most from this game:
This soundtrack left a permanent impression on me. Unfortunately, it was never officially released (unlike for other NFS games), so these songs fell out of my playlist for many years, until I decided to revisit the game and later found out a way to extract the music tracks directly from the game disc. The bands “The Buzzhorn” and “Hot Action Cop” also had a hidden surprise for me: when I revisited the game and the soundtrack, I found that these two bands have albums that feature the tracks from the game. And while Buzzhorn's song was added to the game unchanged (apart from slightly louder mix), original songs by 'Cop had completely different lyrics that were rewritten from scratch specially for the game, to make the songs more “family friendly”.
Honorable mention: Even though I haven't played it on PC until later, around this time I also heard and liked this song from a previous Need for Speed game, “High Stakes”, written by Saki Kaskas, and I would revisit it every once in a while ever since.
Apart from Need for Speed games, I also had some interest in real-time strategy games and sci-fi stuff. And there is no better way to have the two mixed together than in the 1998 classic developed by Blizzard Entertainment, “StarCraft”. Regarded by many as one of the best games of all time, StarCraft has become the golden standard of RTS and is still widely played at cybersport events today, now boasting over 25 years of continuous support and balance improvements. To show just how strong this game's cultural impact is — it has since become a national sport in South Korea.
The game is set in remote space during the 25th century CE. Humans have mastered space travel and started expanding their reach to other planets. A group of people exiled from Earth take up the name Terran and create their own empire, called “Confederacy of Man”. They are confronted by Protoss, a race of highly-advanced and religious aliens with psyonic abilities, and Zerg, a race of insect-like mutants controlled by the entity called Overmind.
Since the game features three playable races, each with their own campaign, the developers decided to ask three composers to write music for each of the races. The result is an astounding combo of different themes that hint at all the features of three playable civilizations. Terrans sound like a sci-fi version of wild west, Protoss are full of grace and mysticism, and the Zerg sound rough, raw and biological, just how you would expect a colony of giant space insectoids to be.
Blizzard Entertainment was a powerhouse of a game development studio at the time and brought many great games for us gamers to enjoy. I already covered StarCraft earlier, and now it's time for something more... evil.
“Diablo 2” was released in the year 2000 and had taken the world by storm (or blizzard, if you will). A successor to somewhat-critially-acclaimed Diablo, the game takes place some years after the unnamed hero of the first game solved the mystery of the demon-infested city of Tristram and killed Diablo, the Lord of Terror... or did they? Now an unknown Dark Wanderer roams the world, and hordes of demons appear wherever he sets foot. A new hero is up to catch up to this mysterious man and get rid of the demons once and for all.
If StarCraft is considered a gold standard of RTS games, then Diablo 2 is the gold standard for Action-RPGs (Role-Playing Games). Fit with tons of content, a captivating storyline, vast lore and a soundscape that makes you feel the atmosphere around you, Diablo 2 is a living classic.
At the same time I started collecting some pieces of music I liked, which came from all kinds of sources: remixes and cover songs, “proper” music albums, movies, videogames and even obscure and rare soundtracks for game projects that never made it to release. Some of these songs had been written by artists that were unremarkable to me at the time, but would eventually come back and invade my playlist to stay there forever. Can you spot them?
You can already notice that many of these songs already mention heavy metal in one way or another. I didn't really believe that this is heavy metal, because naturally, heavy metal should be a barely-listenable mess of rabid drums and loud guitars, right? Little did I know, I have never heard proper heavy metal in my life at that time and somehow managed to skip straight to heavier styles of music. But yeah, I didn't know and instead kept assuming that this is just some kind of “Rock” music. This will come back and bite me in my rear end in the future, but that's the story for another day.
I planned this to be a single post with concise descriptions of what I listen to nowadays, but instead it blew up into a series you're reading now. I hope this wall of text didn't give you a headache, and you had fun reading (and listening to) it. In the next part I'll be covering my first major musical obsession, how I got tired of it and embarked on a quest for something bigger.