Or, for the first bit anyway: What I Did On My Holiday.
It was February 2001 and I was in Japan, hiding from my 30th Birthday. Not hiding well enough as it turns out, as it found me in Tokyo in an all-you-can-drink-for-1250-yen bar that was open from 7pm to 5am (Sugar High in Shibuya, can’t recommend it highly enough). While I was over there, I was under instructions from a friend of mine who had an imported Playstation 2 to get hold of a couple of games for him. The main one in question was an interesting but odd game titled Shadow of Memories (which I bought in either Hiroshima or Kyoto. I forget. Could have been Osaka…), but the main draw of this was a short movie demo of Silent Hill 2 that came with it.
Fast-forwarding slightly to getting back home, we fired up the PS2 and sat down to watch this demo of a game that we had been highly anticipating, given that the first one was such otherworldly brilliance/nicked from David Lynch films (take your pick, it’s all good stuff). And we watched it over and over and over again. Not just for the glimpse of a game that showed such promise (and indeed when it came out, it delivered in spades), but for the piece of music that piped up about halfway through. In short, it was nothing that either of us had ever heard in a game before.
The tune was entitled Theme of Laura and it’s one of those tracks that I simply fell in love with from the first listen. It’s a darkly-romantic guitar led piece that just ticks every emotional box, as well as sounding very Western in its outlook, which was very odd at a time when a lot of Japanese videogame music design was still based around Yellow Magic Orchestra (and there’s nothing wrong with that sort of thing).
So it was a no-brainer to import the soundtrack CD as soon as it came out, which arrived around the same time as the game. The in-game music and sound is the work of Konami staff member Akira Yamaoka, and such was the impact of his work on this and its predecessor that I’m fairly sure that this series is the first time that anyone writing music for the company was ever credited with doing so (Konami were so uber-paranoid about staff being poached by other developers, they all used to work anonymously as part of a team or under pseudonyms). Yamaoka’s previous stock-in-trade was solely in sound design so it came as no surprise that the resulting soundtrack album ends up being part music, part soundscape.
It’s an odd mix throughout, as the music is very definitely split into two camps: there are tracks where guitars, bass and drums (and what a drum sound, it has to be said) perform in almost completely raw state, and there are others where instrumentation and other sounds (usually animal snarls/roars, sirens and other assorted ‘found’ sounds) are processed and twisted into an almost unrecognisable form.
Another strange thing is the use of silence. The album is rarely still, as most of the 30 available tracks all bleed into each other without pause – and this makes the times when no sound is present (such as the ultra-minimal Magdalene, which is four notes and one chord on a piano repeated for two minutes) just as disturbing as when a quiet track is suddenly disturbed by an appearance of tribal drumming. It’s definitely a ‘Headphones in the Dark’ album, with its ability to switch between benign and nighmarish dreamstates at the drop of a hat.
It’s truly one of those albums that can definitely stand up away from its origin and be appreciated for a piece of music rather than something from a game. It’s an accomplished Ambient work in parts, it’s a great Lynch/Badalamenti tribute in others, and an interesting indie/trip-hop experience elsewhere. Just don’t listen to it when you’re trying to go to sleep…
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