Composer Kyle Merckx lends "Sovietwave" sounds to trans tale indie game "Ascension: Transition And Silver" — Tone Madison - tonemadison.com

Composer Kyle Merckx lends
By: Escorts Posted On: August 16, 2021 View: 949

Composer Kyle Merckx lends "Sovietwave" sounds to trans tale indie game "Ascension: Transition And Silver" — Tone Madison - tonemadison.com

Stripping Merckx's tunes from their context, at first blush, there's a bit of Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts series (particularly I-IV) in them, as well as John Carpenter and Alan Howarth's progressive electronic score to Escape From New York (1981). "I was definitely drawing on Trent Reznor kind of stuff, absolutely. And Vangelis' Blade Runner (1982) soundtrack a little bit—that moody '80s dystopic sound. Nobuo Uematsu [of the Final Fantasy franchise] is always in anything I write, whether it's the sounds I try to pick or the ways I try to organize the orchestration. And my melodic sense comes a lot from him, too. It's somewhat inescapable," Merckx says, alluding to the subconscious connection of "Mako Reactor" from Final Fantasy VII (1997) to "Osmosis" in Ascension. Merckx's music on this track also features a synthesized vocal sample triggered through the drum machine that comes in on the "up" beat.

However, not everything stemmed from those sinister-sounding synth patches. The title card and main menu piece, "At The Threshold," include the echoing sounds of a shamisen that Merckx bought in Japan. "It's like a three-stringed banjo that's fretless, and the pick [called a 'bachi' resembles an] ice scraper," he says. The initial inspiration for the song came from the 1979 Stalker theme by Edward Artemiev, which meshes synths with string instrumentation for a sort of New Age aesthetic. Analogously, Merckx felt like the initial music heard in Ascension should evoke the natural world and law of "The Zone," but also allude to its disorienting effects, which he chose to augment by adding delay to the shamisen to distort its tonality.

"Oxidized Dreams," the first piece he composed for the game and one of its most haunting pieces, borrows from lo-fi drone and progressive electronic templates. "Production-wise, I got to use a lot of fun techniques on that one that I'd never really tried before. I tried to make it sound like it's coming out of broken-down technology," Merckx says of the track. And "Symbiosis," the game's darkest extended closing theme, which Merckx has humorously dubbed "the sex scene song" (because it sounds like the antithesis to what we'd consider to be sensual or funky), creatively pushed him even further. "I usually compose strictly by inputting and moving MIDI notes around in a sequencer. In this piece, an arpeggiated part comes in about a third of the way through and goes through the rest of the piece," he elaborates. "All of the changes are controlled by automation cues that I programmed in, so instead of inputting different notes to create chord changes, I automated a pitch bend parameter to do it instead."

Although Merckx is a trained guitarist (who plays in local band Bron Sage), the game was his first chance to use and get more comfortable with the synthesizer. "I do love writing on it even if I'm not technically a performer on any sort of keyboard instrument," he says. Merckx was kind enough to share two versions of the Ascension sound palette demos he worked with before the final mixes as well as Cawley's additional input and approval as game director. While they both certainly sound of the same universe, they do have a starker driving rhythm that's almost adjacent to instrumental hip-hop, and they're even more melodically sticky than the oppressive textural and simple melodic washes heard in the final release of the game.

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