Few notes on: Videogame music 2023

Third year surviving the Russian genocidal invasion of Ukraine while writing about good video game music. 2023 turned out to be quite great as far as music in new releases goes, but of course a lot of the list is still made up of classics I’ve revisited since the last time I did this write up.

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Few notes on: Videogame music 2021

This time my yearly look at the game soundtracks was even later than I originally planned. But what can you do, when Russia invades your country your priorities change.

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Few notes on: Videogame music 2020

I had relatively high hopes for the music in games of last year, but it ended up being a bit disappointing. Which, I suppose, is par for the course for 2020. But some remasters and re-releases have sweetened the deal, while the rest of the games that I have played since the last time I did this sort of post have improved the situation even further. As a result, I did get to enjoy some nice memorable videogame tunes during this past year.

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Few notes on: Videogame music 2019

It’s a bit of a shame, but 2019 didn’t seem to be as standout in terms of videogame music to me as I was hoping it would be. Still, there were some amazing tunes that need to be mentioned and given their due. As usual, I’m not covering the music to the titles I’ve not played and don’t know much about, but will mention several soundtracks to games that I’ve not yet played but plan to when I have more time. I know, you know, everybody everyone let’s go.

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Few notes on: Videogame music 2018

As usual, my post about the videogame music of the previous year is late due to me wanting to play some leftovers from 2018. Though, turned out, they didn’t make the list anyway. 2018 turned out to be quite surprising for the videogame music as quite a lot of the things that I want to list is here on a technicality. Though, not like we didn’t have some amazing tunes from last year. Let’s dive in.

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Few notes on: Tequilajazzz

This musical post will be quite a bit more personal than usual. For a rather simple reason, really – there are a lot of bands and artists that had profound impact on my life and appreciation of variety of music, but Tequilajazzz might have affected me most. They’re not a band I can call “my favorite”, hell I wasn’t even listening to it when the impact was made and many years since than. But… Well, I’ll explain later.

It’s one of the earliest bands in post-soviet countries that I know of that had a very distinct post-hardcore, post-punk, experimental rock sound during their early days, yet were very well and not some underground band that only got to be appreciated years later *cough* Дубовый Гаайъ *cough*. But even more interesting is how they changed and evolved with time, slowly going from aggressive and harsh hardcore sound to more melodic alternative rock, which at times incorporates influences from jazz, funk or other more “easy listening” genres, while still sticking to the high energy performance. They’re a blast live. Speaking of which…

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Few notes on: Videogame music 2017

Last time I decided to do a “look back at” videogame music of a previous year was mostly due to how big the wave of 80s inspired synthwave and like was and mostly to check just how prevalent it was in videogames. This time, I’m doing it because I feel like last year just had several truly amazing soundtracks that became an integral part of my main music playlist.

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Few notes on: Silence Kit

Silence Kit is a band from Moscow you might’ve never heard of. While it’s more or less clear on how the project came to be, how they self-published and gave away their first record for free, how they transitioned from a more neo-psychodelia and shoegaze influences with vocals to pure instrumental post-rock in later releases, it’s still not entirely clear if they have disbanded or not, for example. They have a Facebook group that got revived by one of the band founding members last year, but it’s mostly mentioning the new projects the people are involved in. They have a bancamp account that had all of their pre-2012 records set to the pay-what-you-want price, but it’s now changed to a set price instead. And I don’t know when it was changed or why. I do know, however, that they are a band you need to check out and buy the stuff that you like.

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Few notes on: Anthesteria

It’s been quite a while since I wrote anything about the bands and music I wish more people were aware of. Last time I wrote anything about music was when I wrote about 2015 videogame soundtracks last year, but, apart from that, it’s been 5 years since I wrote about 2 really interesting bands – Floater and Soul Coughing. This time I want to write a couple of words about a Saint Petersburg-based project, which is, sadly, technically not existing anymore. The masters of haunting, dark and yet hopeful melancholic ambient – Anthesteria.

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