the hunt

This piece is what most resembles anything out of Metroid. I deliberately made a melody that would evoke a similar, but darker, feeling to the opening of that game. My bass guitar plays a simple 7/8 ostinato on the bottom end, while I employed its higher register for the melody, putting on a high pass filter and some very heavy 8-bit distortion, to make it sound as if an NES were the amplifier.

Here’s where we diverge far from the original soundtrack. No hope for a fun adventure; Zebes has been ravaged, the Chozo have been wiped out, and Samus is all alone, hoping to find some remnant of the people who took her in as an orphan.
I was fascinated with flutes in rock music, having been listening to Jethro Tull and early Genesis in the years leading up to when I wrote this album, and I’ve often associated flute solos with eagles and displaced indigenous peoples. Being that the Chozo, a race wiped out in the Metroid timeline, were humanoids with the heads of eagles, the idea of using a (synthesized) flute solo to represent their memory and loss came pretty quickly to me.
This song was informed by a lot of the music I heard during my years in Colombia, where much of the local music, both original folk and folk rock, was this really cool synthesis of Native instrumentation, African rhythms, and European music theory.

Here and only here does Samus find her voice, singing a doom-laden dirge for the people who adopted her.

“What have you done? This place was once my home | Where once a noble race held sway
Now all is gone | Creatures of carrion | Roam through these blank halls of decay

This place was civilized | I barely recognize | My childhood refuge any more
A race nobler than thou | Now just their statues’ eyes | Stare, lifeless, at me ever more”

In this song I put a bit more effort into telegraphing what happened onscreen, hence the descending, atonal synthesizer effect at the beginning. Being that Norfair, the level in Metroid that this song represents, is deep underground, the bass line never really stops moving, like the molten elements pushing their way through a terrestrial planet’s crust. The bright, oscillating synth pads and delay-laden lead guitar bring shimmering heat waves and searing burns to the sonic picture, all bouncing off the walls of these caves.

Of the songs on this album, this is the first that I wrote, and it predates the album’s conceptualization by about a year.
I had these recurring dreams throughout my childhood and into my twenties where I was sort of playing Metroid, but really just watching a pixelated Samus from a profile perspective. In such dreams there was always this sense of dark foreboding that went way beyond the atmosphere of the games.
Some time in October, 2013, I had one such dream, and the opening motif was on repeat in the background of that dream, gathering in intensity as Samus struggled and fought to get back out of that deep pocket in whatever planet she was on.
When I woke up, I immediately grabbed some staff paper and scrawled down the music, and within a few days, the finished product sounded almost exactly like this song.

The original music for Kraid’s Lair in Metroid is probably where I got the atmosphere in my recurring dreams from. It has peril and desperation woven through it, and eight-year-old me both loved it and wanted to get away from it when I first played that level, vivid as my imagination was. In this song I try to capture that same atmosphere, which in “The Dragon’s Lair” exists more in my own heart than in the music my brain came up with for that dream.
I use some wide tonal intervals for the most important parts of the melody, changing the character from one pair of notes to the next, almost like someone desperately bargaining with a captor. Or grief; perhaps “bargaining” is the stage of grief that Samus is touching for the first time, here.

With the Mother Brain’s chief lieutenants now dead, Samus can finally assault her lair.
This song is a duel between cold, computerized logic, as represented by the 12 tone sequence that repeats throughout almost the entire piece, and human resolve and determination, represented by the high, pure chords that shine through, fade, and come back to fight the dissonance in the end, creating a more fantastic harmony than previously anticipated.

Nonetheless, the Mother Brain must be destroyed.

Here is chronicled the quick, frantic escape from Zebes, as the Mother Brain’s facility’s last self-defense mechanism attempts to purge the system of foreign intrusion.

The job is done; the bounty hunter can collect her bounty. She can also seek some solitude and process her grief. Nothing will replace what she’s lost, but she faced her demons head-on, and she prevailed.

The title of “Overture” would have been more fitting for this song, being that it ties together most of the album’s musical themes, but it comes at the end, rather than the beginning. I’ve never been a fan of overtures that introduce all of a work’s thematic material, one theme after another, anyway. That, in my mind, treats the main parts of the work as if they were just developments of the overture, rather than entities perfectly capable of introducing themselves in a memorable way. Just sayin’: traditional overtures are kind of redundant. You are perfectly welcome to disagree, and probably right.
For my part, I prefer an overture that sets the overall mood of the work, much in the fashion of late 19th century opera and onwards. If there’s going to be a piece that ties together all of the thematic material, I’d much rather have it at the end, revisiting the thematic material and tying it together in a final, majestic way. I think I achieved that here.