Perfection can be improved on occasion. Bearing witness is this inventive mashup of various themes from The Lord of the Rings by Howard Shore and the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Avengers by Alan Silvestri:
The mashup was arranged and orchestrated by Samuel Kim. I don’t have enough formal musical education to tell you why it works—both movie scores certainly are epic enough—I just know it does. 🙂 Kudos!
An occasional feature on music and sound-related notions.
For the pure joy of having our sea container finally arrive with our moving goods, I’ve been re-reading all of Martha Wells’ Murderbot books in the past few weeks. That reminded me of a playlist Meghan Ball made to accompany the Murderbot novelNetwork Effect. I gave it a listen, and found it conveyed a very different idea of Murderbot than my impression.
So, I made my own playlist. It starts with a concert version of Darude’s “Sandstorm”, which I thought appropriate due to the reference of Murderbot visiting the Preservation planet for a cultural festival with concerts and operas in the beginning of the book.
Darude: “Sandstorm”, performed by Synthony and the Auckland Symphony Orchestra
Armin van Buuren: “Blah Blah Blah”
Paul Ruskay featuring Kokia: “Strike Suit Zero Main Theme”
Linkin Park: “Numb”
Darude’s “Sandstorm” and Rammstein’s “Du Hast” mashup by Monsterovich
Clint Mansell: “Lux Aeterna” (soundtrack from Requiem for a Dream, directed by Darren Aronofsky)
The “Blah Blah Blah” and “Numb” lyrics remind me of the doubts some humans (especially Thiago in this story) have about Murderbot, and Murderbot’s attitude towards those kinds of humans. The mashup of “Sandstorm” and “Du Hast” nicely marries action-paced music with the weirdness that comes with Murderbot finally finding targetControlSystem and the thread of targetContact contamination and the crystalline growth / alien hivemind taking over Murderbot. Ending the list with a piano piece brings some calm again.
MayTree is a Korean a cappella group quite popular in Asia. They broke into my consciousness with this amazing short video of Windows sound effects performed by human voices:
Most of the bardcore versions I’ve seen are in plain modern English, some in ye olde faux medievale Englisshe, and some even in Old French. But so far there seems to be only one in Classical Latin: “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.
Game Music Collective is a Finland-based orchestra, band, and studio production company lead by cellist Lukas Stasevskij. As the name implies, they produce and perform game and other soundtracks.
Their latest project is a cover version of Ellie’s song “Through the Valley” from the PlayStation4 game The Last of Us Part II. The music video for the cover was filmed in Helsinki, Finland.
The original song was written by Shawn James; the Game Music Collective version features Mokka Laitinen (vocals and guitar), Sujari Britt (cello), Leonardo Carrillo (oboe), and Eeti Nieminen (drums).
Pretty neat, isn’t it? (Although strictly speaking I would’ve been happier to see outdoor locations, too.) #FinlandNerd 🙂
Sappho, like many ancient poets, wrote her poems not to be read on the page but to be sung. We don’t know specifically what her poems originally sounded like when performed, but we know enough about the notes, rhythms, and structure of ancient music to make some reasonable guesses. Here’s a version of Sappho’s first poem (my translation here) performed on a reconstructed ancient lyre by artist Bettina Joy de Guzman.
As winter takes hold around here, we turn our thoughts to the far north, to lands of snow, reindeer, and northern lights. We’ll leave you with a couple of examples of yoik, a distinctive Sámi musical tradition. Songs featuring yoik have twice made it to the finals of the Eurovision Song Contest. The first was the Norwegian song “Sámiid ædnan” from 1980, performed by Sverre Kjelsberg and Mattis Hætta.
Sámiid ædnan – Norway 1980 – Eurovision songs with live orchestra via escLIVEmusic1
The next one was “Spirit in the Sky,” also from Norway, performed by KEiiNO in 2019.
KEiiNO – Spirit In The Sky – Norway – National Final Performance – Eurovision 2019 via Eurovision Song Contest
We’re vacationing for the rest of the year. See you in 2020. Happy New Year!
An occasional feature on music and sound-related notions.
It’s composed by Michael Giacchino, who has an extensive music department background in genre tv, movies, and games (Jurassic franchise video games and movies, Alias, Zootopia, some rebooted Mission Impossible and Star Trek movies, Rogue One and both of the new Spider-Man MCU movies, for instance).
It’s rare to come across a speculative show theme that uses the piano so unapologetically, let alone a story of an FBI agent investigating weird crimes. I’m in no way an expert, but I seem to have noticed that piano has fallen out of fashion these days, so for me the Fringe theme is valuable on those grounds as well.
An occasional feature on music and sound-related notions.
Recently we rewatched The Hobbit trilogy, which made me—again—root around looking for Dwarf-ish music. This time, though, I went wider and also included cover versions of melodies from all of the six Peter Jackson movie soundtracks.
Co-Geeking 