Tag: special-issues

This mini documentary about the coldest town on Earth is stunning

Posted on by faz_business


Kiun B’s YouTube videos are mini documentaries about her life and the lives of the 800 people who live in her hometown of Yakutia, Siberia, aka the coldest town on Earth. The creator, who narrates the videos, says she and her community are native to the region. The enchanting mini docs showcase their customs, culture, and day-to-day life — which looks quite different when it’s 95 degrees Fahrenheit below zero outside.

This installment follows a family through their day, including waking up before the sun to feed the furnace fire and melt ice for drinking water. They don layers and layers of insulated clothing just to walk short distances outside — or long distances, in the case of the schoolkids who bundle up each day to commute to class. The stories are humbling, especially as you sit in your cozy home and watch the Yakutians do such hard, backbreaking work just to keep their homes running through the winter. (Don’t worry, it gets warm in the summer — and there’s a video about that, too!)

This documentary has that easy, informative Nat Geo vibe that makes it an unchallenging watch with family over the holidays, for instance. But the creator and narrator being from Yakutia herself gives it a more grounded tone and, of course, better insight about life in the town.

While it’s never a good idea to chalk an entire culture up to one YouTube channel, I didn’t know anything about Yakutia or the contemporary lives of the Indigenous people of Siberia before watching these videos, and they exposed me to something I might’ve never learned about otherwise. And who hasn’t wondered how the people who live in the harsh climate of Siberia make it all work? To have that question answered — and to learn how those people thrive in a cold I can’t even conceive of — is a great way to spend 20 minutes.

Pitch Perfect 237 takes a Kubrick-level microscope to the a cappella film

Posted on by faz_business


Room 237 is a documentary that plumbs the depths of The Shining, using various people’s voice-overs to guide the viewer through interpretations of Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 1980 horror film. I have no real thoughts on it; I love The Shining, but have avoided Room 237 mostly by nature of having heard about so much of it secondhand. But Pitch Perfect 237 is the sweet nexus of truth that we should all succumb to this holiday season, letting its light guide our way to 2025 and perfect goofs.

I won’t spoil it for you; it’s right there embedded at the top of the post, and I believe you came here not in search of some YouTube video to abate some holiday season slump, but rather, to really engage with something. And what better than a movie that pulls back the layers on acclaimed cultural juggernaut Pitch Perfect?

There’s a side of this that you can pull on further. You can push past the gentle ribbing of Pitch Perfect 237 and onto its larger reflection of us, the way in which humankind likes to pull at something and find patterns so obsessively we don’t know which way is up. Many have made the case that Room 237 goes too far as it fanatically drills down and down and down into a stone-cold masterpiece in an effort to find something more revealing than the engrossing madness already on the screen. The way brains can make connections so easily that you stop noticing when a hop and a skip becomes a jump and a leap. The way, if you follow a trail long enough, it all goes back to 9/11 conspiracy theories —

But no! We don’t have to. That’s the beauty of Pitch Perfect 237, a film that gives itself over so cleanly to parody that we can give into our bursts of giggles. Whether you’re familiar with Room 237’s game or not, Pitch Perfect 237 is the six-minute, 48-second masterpiece to unwind with.

Payday composer Simon Viklund on his tough ‘try and fail’ process

Posted on by faz_business


Whether you know Simon Viklund as the composer of the Payday franchise’s emblematic dubstep/EDM/techno soundtracks or as the voice of Bain in the same series, his name is always associated with heavy-hitter action games. He’s known for his work on Bandits: Phoenix Rising, Bionic Commando, Dead by Daylight, and of course, Payday: The Heist and Payday 2.

For Polygon FM — our weeklong look at the way music and gaming interweave with each other — Viklund discusses his early inspirations and why wonky rhythms make good video game music.

Polygon: Was there a game soundtrack or song that inspired you to pursue creating game music? Can you set the scene of what that felt like for you, and why the music was so effective?

Simon Viklund: I was somewhat obsessed with NES music when I was a kid, to the point where I recorded Megaman 1-3 music off the TV to cassette tape so that I could listen to it when I wasn’t playing. The music on the NES was extremely effective because the primitive sound chip forced the composers to arrange economically and rely on great harmonies and melodies. My hot take is that the music in the 16-bit era wasn’t as good because the tech sounded more like actual instruments but not quite — it was like the uncanny valley of sampled instruments — and composers started to over-rely on the tools.

Can you break down one of your own songs and its influences? Was it inspired by game soundtracks, other music, or something else?

I made a track called “Inject” that was written specifically for the name reveal trailer for Den of Wolves, a techno thriller heist co-op game we’re working on at 10 Chambers. We wanted the trailer to leave the viewer with a sense of “oh hell yeah, that’s bad-ass,” and I listened to half-tempo bass music for inspiration.

There’s this track called “Arbiter” by Draeden, which has what I would call a trap-inspired beat, and I’m not really into trap but I loved what Draeden did and drew heavily from that particular track. “Inject” is basically drums and one synth melody, with most of the bass coming from an 808 that goes with the kick drum. In other words, there’s not a lot [of] layers to it, and so each component really has to shine. I spent a lot of time making the kick very punchy, the snare snappy, etc.

Another aspect was my idea to make the music sound sort of “wonky” and not pitch perfect or quantized (i.e. not rhythmically perfect). My idea was that it would help the music become a bit more ear-wormy beacuse it would sort of feel “off.” I spent a lot of time making the groove sloppy timing-wise, and the synths screech and wobble a bit like it wasn’t intentional even though it was. I had a lot of fun exploring new ideas, pushing out of my comfort zone and learning new tricks while making “Inject”!

What are the main instruments used to record the soundtrack for the Payday series? How did you choose those instruments?

Payday has a lot of drum loops and distorted synths, but every once in awhile there’s some real electric guitar and bass in there. When we were creating Payday: The Heist back in 2010-2011, my gut feeling said the choice for the music was between leaning into the game’s Hollywood movie inspiration with cinematic music, or leaning into the “outlaw power fantasy” with something more rock ‘n’ roll. I went with the latter.

Is there anything else we should know about your approach to composing video game music?

It doesn’t come easy for me. It’s hard. I don’t use project templates, although probably I should. Every time I sit down to make another track, it’s a clean slate, and I go “How do you do this again?” There are so many directions a soundtrack or an individual track can go, it’s easy to get choice paralysis. I need time, I need to try and fail, and I need other people on the project to help me through the process — with direction and support through patience. So the process is hard, but I love doing it!

Why Malcolm X’s voice plays in a Sonic game

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I think video game history will remember Hideki Naganuma for many reasons. Fans might lovingly bestow upon him the title of “Twitter weirdo.” Others — especially modern music producers — might cite him as an important influence in video game composition. That’s more than fair; the man is responsible for his fair share of video game bangers. Tracks like Jet Set Radio Future’s “The Concept of Love” — which stuffs warped vocal samples, bright electric guitar riffs, and rushing synthy drums — still turn heads when they come on the playlist.

Check out our special issue Polygon FM, a week of stories about all the places where music and games connect — retrospectives, interviews, and much more.

But for me, I’ll always remember him as the video game composer who put a sample of a Malcolm X speech in a Sonic the Hedgehog game.

The song appears on the soundtrack for Sonic Rush, a 2D Sonic game Sega released in 2005 for the OG Nintendo DS. It’s called “Wrapped in Black” and it plays during the final boss fight with Doctor Eggman. The track opens up with rushing violins and operatic vocals that convey the evilness of Doctor Eggman, but soon a sharp repeating vocal sample cuts through it all. The sample repeats “Too black, too strong” a few times and then comes back later in the song.

The audio for “Too black, too strong” comes from a 1963 speech given by Malcolm X titled, “Message to the Grassroots.” Naturally, his talk had nothing to do with Sonic, and dealt with far more serious matters. In the talk, the Black revolutionary outlined his idea of a Black nationalist philosophy and criticized the Civil Rights Movement. In the sample quote, Malcolm X used the image of coffee and creamer to explain what happened to the movement. He said:

“It’s just like when you’ve got some coffee that’s too black, which means it’s too strong. What you do? You integrate it with cream; you make it weak. If you pour too much cream in, you won’t even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool.”

That a Sonic game sampled this feels like nothing short of a fever dream. The composer commented on it once back in 2014 when he said, “‘Wrapped in Black’ is a song about coffee. lol.” And while the sample isn’t a joking matter, he is technically correct that the quote is, at least in part, about coffee.

Naganuma’s intensely stylized music fits his history as a composer and work on the Sonic series. Similar to how video games were a form of emerging media at the time, Naganuma experimented freely and didn’t limit himself to an idea of what art should be. He sent his first application to Sega in 1998, after which the first game he ever composed was a handheld toy called Hip Jog Jog. In 2000, he worked as the main composer for Jet Set Radio where he broke out as a composer. His uneven beats and screechy sounds brought influences from hip hop, electronic, dance, funk, jazz, and rock music into the fuzzy speakers of CRT the televisions of the 2000s.

An image of Blaze the cat in Sonic Rush. She’s running through the Carnival-themed stage. The image shows the upper and lower image since the game was for the Nintendo DS.

Image: Dimps, Sonic Team/Sega

Making a splash in the canon of Sonic the Hedgehog music and Sega games in general is no small task. Modern Sonic fans tend to remember the Chemical Plant Zone theme or later songs like the easy breezy rock theme of “Escape From the City” from Sonic Adventure 2. Because of this, I think it’s relatively easy to miss the soundtrack on Sonic Rush. Sega shipped it early in the lifecycle of the nascent handheld, and its roughly 1.62 million copies sold never made it the most popular or well-known game of the Sonic series

But Naganuma went off with the Sonic Rush soundtrack. He samples the British DJ Fatboy Slim’s reggae remix of Tribe Called Quest’s famous track, “I Left My Wallet In El Segundo,” to create a mariachi band-like holler for the theme of a Brazilian Carnival-esque level in “Ska Cha Cha.”

And while the nostalgic charms of the original Green Hill Zone theme will never wear off on me, there’s something uniquely thrilling to starting Sonic Rush off to the blaring horns and cascading twangy guitar of “Right There, Ride On.”

The eccentricities of Naganuma’s work have infected my brain and continue to shape my media tastes as an adult. So maybe that’s why I won’t let myself — or anyone else — forget the time when he put Malcolm X on a Sonic game and into the ears of an impressionable video game-loving child.