I was driving a few weeks ago, enjoying some music freshly loaded on my phone through the car stereo, when my girlfriend who was in the car with me asks a simple question: “Why do you like this music?” But is that question really all that simple?
I’ll be honest here, I was listening to 8-bit Christmas, and it wasn’t just freshly loaded to my phone (I’ve had it on there since October). We’re beyond the Christmas season I know, but here’s “Oh Christmas Tree” so you can get the full tableaux of what’s going on here.
The question took me immediately aback. As a musician, I want to be able to articulate what I like about music; learning how to write about music was one of the most important topics we covered. Meditating on it, I came up with a list of reasons she may not have fully understood at the time. The appeal of 8-Bit Christmas is its ability to all at once cause both a sense of nostalgia for gaming days of yore and Christmases. It delivers on those two platforms through the use of source from both subjects; “Oh Christmas Tree” is a play on the fact that the source for the intro and SFX are from Megaman 2 ‘s “Wood Man Stage.” So in a sense I appreciate this whole album because it broadly appeals to my sense of nostalgia. It does this quite intelligently, interweaving new subjects with the old artifacts.
Nostalgia sense drives a lot of what we do with Hideo – we present a lot of musical artifacts on stage. But just as Rush Coil’s 8-Bit Christmas, we’re constantly weaving in new materials, be that with new orchestration, our original theatrical atmosphere, or our cool animations; it keeps the old fresh and interesting.
And that about sums it up. I guess I’ll surrender and take the Christmas music off my phone. I seriously could listen to it year round though…
