Wild Light Decade #10: Domo Arrrrrigato - April2012 (Patreon)

Another Friday, another excavation from the Wild Light dig site. Another dust-covered and tattered sonic skeleton, fossilised in decade-old ones and zeros.

This week it’s something called Domo Arrrrrigato - April2012. It consists of a pretty catchy melody trapped in a coffin of dead-end songwriting. This is the kind of recording that would not usually be shared outside of 65HQ. It is a very rough and somewhat exploratory recording. Although it sounds like we’ve got an outline of a structure in place to play along to, apart from the piano and the noisy synth loop that kicks everything off this is very clearly us trying to find ways to kick the idea up a level, from ‘pretty cool melody’ into ‘maybe this could actually be a song?’ territory.

Sadly, all our kicks just drove it further into the ground and so this never came close to working as a standalone song. We are pretty sure though that the melodies did eventually get picked up and tucked away somewhere inside the No Man’s Sky pathfinder update. (This was the extra material we produced after the initial release. It isn’t on the studio album and only exists as part of the dynamic in-game soundtrack.)

There’s also another version to download below if you’re interested. Can’t remember which version came first, but it was probably this additional programming-and-piano one. This version is curious because, production-wise, it sounds pretty weak. Like it’s got some a plug-in distortion preset dropped on top of it to give it a bit of grit, but otherwise it just kind of… sits there, expecting the repeating melody alone to carry things.

As mentioned in various previous posts, a lot of trying to write Wild Light was us grappling with the idea that old school melodic songwriting wasn’t going to get us to where we wanted to be by itself. Domo… seems to be one of those tracks where we had a really strong melody first and foremost, but were not yet considering sound design and sound production as primary compositional techniques as opposed to finishing touches we could put off thinking about until we hit the recording studio.

A good comparison to this failure-to-launch of a song would be Heat Death Infinity Splitter, the opening track from Wild Light. Both these songs are of a similar tempo, have a similar, errr, granduer (!?) in their intentions, and they share a kind of ‘I Am a Big And Serious Song’ disposition. Melodically, it is four solid chords pretty much doing the same thing over and over again, with some uncomplicated single line melodies splashed on top in primary colours. But the instrumentation and attention to detail in each track couldn’t be more different. With Heat Death..., all of that noise design was integral to the writing of that song from the very beginning. In fact, rather than constructing a song from individual elements, it felt more like sculpting out space from some kind of total sonic gestalt. (Total Sonic Gestalt is a good name for a doom metal band).

So. That’s Domo Arrrrrigato. A weirdly catchy but barely coherent artifact. Enjoy (?)

Here’s a photo of Si programming some kind of cool synth part whilst a beautifully drawn flying unicorn checks out our studio to-do list:

That's all for now. See you next week, friends!

65.x

P.S - if you're not on the ever-friendly 65 Discord server, you might have missed THESE very unofficial, bootleg 65 flashing LED badge things that a lovely discorder named Tom Archer has thoughtfully made. We will of course be unleashing a thousand lawyers against Tom in order to protect our incredibly valuable intellectual property, so if you're interested you'd best grab one quickly before we sue him into oblivion.