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Soundtrack: FEZ — the music that carried 8-bit into the present
The music Rich Vreeland (Disasterpeace) wrote for FEZ keeps the vocabulary of chiptune, yet sands its corners down with reverb and bitcrushing and carries it into the spaciousness of New Age. Dynamic scoring that shifts with altitude and time of day, plus a trick where images are hidden in the spectrogram so that the sound itself becomes a puzzle. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart through a lens you can bring back to your own composing.
Soundtrack: Unpacking — How to place a sound without overplaying it
The music Jeff van Dyck wrote for Unpacking layers acoustic guitar and piano over chiptune with its corners sanded off, and somehow it never overplays. In a puzzle with no failure and no timer, what does the music do, and what does it refuse to do? Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart through a lens you can carry back to your own composing.
Soundtrack: Baba Is You — A small loop that never scolds you for being wrong
The music of Baba Is You is chiptune written in a tracker (OpenMPT) by Arvi 'Hempuli' Teikari, who made the entire game alone. It is a game you retry hundreds of times, yet the music announces neither victory nor defeat — it just keeps spinning a bright little loop. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why this 'music that never scolds' keeps trial-and-error feeling light, through a lens you can take home to your own writing.