As musical old-timers repeatedly sing the sad song of the supposed demise of the full-length album, a funny thing has happened. Lovers of games have taken up a growing passion for game music, and in particular the indie score for indie games. Independent game publishing and independent music composition – from truly unsigned, unknown artists – go hand in hand. Indeed, the download and purchase charts on Bandcamp are often dominated by game scores. Fueled by word-of-mouth, these go viral in enthusiast communities largely ignored by either music or game reportage.

Far from the big-budget blockbuster war game, these scores – like the games for which they’re composed – are quirky and eccentric. They reject the usual expectations of what game music might be, sometimes tending to the cinematic, sometimes to the retro, sometimes unapologetically embracing magical, sentimental, childlike worlds.

And now, defying music’s typical business models as well as its genre expectations, you can get a whole big bundle of games for almost no money. Pay what you want, and get hours of music. Pay more than $10, and get loads more. You just have to do it before the deal ends (five days from this posting), at which point the bundle is gone forever. In a sign of just how much love listeners of these records feel, there’s a competition to get into the top 20, top 10, and top-paying spots, which with days left in the contest is already pushing well into the hundreds of dollars. But for that rate or just the few-dollar rate, these are the true fans. You’ve heard about them in theory in trendy music business blogs and conferences, in theory. But here, someone’s doing something about it, and it’s not a fluke or a one-time novelty: it’s a real formula.

http://www.gamemusicbundle.com/

Game music itself is, of course, a funny thing. Game play itself tends to repetition, meaning you hear this music a lot. So it says something really extraordinary about the affection for these scores that gamers want to hear the music again and again. This gets the musical content well beyond the level of annoying wallpaper into something that, even more than a film score you hear just once or a few times, you want to make part of your life. That endless play gets us back to what inspired ownership in the first place, to buying stacks of records rather than just waiting for them on the radio. And in that sense, perhaps what motivates owning music versus treating it like a utility or water faucet hasn’t changed in the digital age at all. Maybe it’s gotten even stronger.

We’ve already sung the praises of Sword and Sworcery on this site; it’s notably in the bundle. But I want to highlight in particular one other score, the inventive and dream-like Machinarium. Impeccably recorded, boldly original, the work of Prague-based Tomáš Dvořák, Machinarium mirrors the whimsical constructed machines of the games. There’s a careful attention to timbre, and music that moves from film-like moments to song to beautiful washes of ambience, glitch set against warm rushes of landscape. For his part, Dvořák is a clarinetist, and his musical senstitivity never ceases to translate into the score. It’s just good music, even if you never play the game, and easily worth the price of admission for the bundle if you never listened to anything else (though you would truly be missing out). It’s simply one of the best game music scores in recent years.

And another look at Jim Guthrie’s score to Sword & Sworcery:

Game Meets Album: Behind the Music and Design of the iPad Indie Blockbuster Swords & Sworcery[Create Digital Music]

Game Meets Album: Behind the Music and Design of the iPad Indie Blockbuster Swords & Sworcery [Create Digital Motion]

Also in this collection: Aquaria, To the Moon, Jamestown, and a mash-up, plus a whole bunch of bonus games when you spend a bit more that feel heavily influenced by Japanese game music and chip music.

And some of the best gems are in the repeat of the last bundle, which you can (and should) add on for US$5 more:
Minecraft: Volume Alpha, Super Meat Boy: Digital Soundtrack, PPPPPP (soundtrack to VVVVVV), Impostor Nostalgia, Cobalt, Ravenmark: Scourge of Estellion, A.R.E.S. Extinction Agenda, Return All Robots!, Mighty Milky, Way / Mighty Flip Champs, Tree of Knowledge

I’ve sat at game conferences as composers working for so-called AAA titles lamented the limitations of the game music production pipeline. Quietly, indie game developers have shown that anything is possible, that the quality of a game score is limited only by a composer’s imagination.

More music to hear (and some behind-the-scenes footage), including a really promising Kickstarter-funded iPad music project from regular CDM reader Wiley Wiggins:

Against Detroit’s “industrial exoskeleton,” Resident Advisor has a new documentary short film examining Detroit’s musical revival, an electronic cultural phenomenon that brought healing and new life to a city whose economic livelihood had imploded.

The film is beautifully shot, and wisely starts with Motown and its connections to the auto industry, not simply with an out-of-context look at electronics alone. From those roots come the rich musicianship Detroit offers, a level of musicianship perhaps not generally associated with electronica. The film logically turns to the electronic revolution – and some reminders of just how fresh and modern the tracks sound, even if the, erm, fashions haven’t dated as well. This cultural invention against economic collapse seems about the most fitting picture of America in general one could find – at once cautionary tale and promising parable.

The dead husks of architecture and civic scene prove a silent, empty backdrop. And there’s a tragic side – the week in which England’s police and youths clash to destructive effect, there’s an ongoing inability to reconcile the warehouse music scene with police seeking to shut down raves, a pervasive sense of the city as failed even as the rest of the world might imagine its culture as vibrant. (Yes, I’m certain some Detroit residents are tired of being portrayed as some sort of wrecked quasi-war zone. Let me say this, instead: every major metro area in the US, and many smaller ones, has an area ravaged by economic change, just as America in general has serious challenges facing its poor and unemployed. The most dramatic images aren’t simply emblems of Detroit, but of those crises everywhere.)

But most hopeful, perhaps, is seeing a new young generation embrace accessible computer music technologies, the optimistic tick-tock of an Ableton metronome and a kid’s hands all over a Maschine drum pad controller. The early fathers of Detroit techno were able to produce a musical revolution because machines for the first time became affordable; who knows what musical imaginings these kids are cooking up in hours spent after school, or what greater focus and discipline that can give to their other work. (I can speak for myself: without music to calm me down, to give myself a center, to act as emotional and spiritual outlet, it’s hard to imagine how I ever would have done anything else.)

It’s wonderful documentary making, and a great editorial contribution on Resident Advisor’s part. Now the next question: can we find a way to make this kind of music vibrancy heal our cities and communities, at a time when economies are in freefall, Americans are out of work in absurd numbers, London is setting fire to warehouses of records, and a thousand other invisible crises worldwide threaten to pull neighborhoods apart? Detroit’s music to most might be some vague recollection of now-extinct Motown or music at parties; when music lovers start to tell a richer story, maybe that role for music will be more widely appreciated.

Some of the interviewees: Brendan Gillen (Ectomorph), RJ Watkins and Henry Tyler (The New Dance Show), Jon Dixon and DJ Skurge (Underground Resistance), Josh Glazer (Urb Magazine), Luke Hess and Brian Kage (Reference), and Mike Huckaby, among others. New sounds and new names are mixed in among the older sounds and veterans. (Kudos to the crew – John Fisher was DP; Patrick Nation and Daniel Higginson produced and directed.)

Oh, and Derek Mahone, age 11. Remember that name.

Real Scenes: Detroit [Resident Advisor]

From the other side of the pond, and poignant given ongoing unrest in the UK, here’s Real Scenes: Bristol. It makes a worthy companion to the Detroit piece. As RA puts it:

The eyes of the world have turned to the UK in recent years and have found some of the most exciting, genre-defying young artists to emerge from electronic music. But while London’s scene can be fractious and hard to pin down, there seems to be something in the air in Bristol that unites its participants. Whether they’re creating dubstep, house, techno or something else entirely, the cross-pollination in Bristol is unique. In RA’s first official entry into video, we journey to Bristol to explore how the city has flourished in recent years, discovering why this small metropolis is one of the most influential electronic music outposts in the world today.

(Apologies to Bristol; I should probably wax just as poetic about your town, but happened to miss the release of the earlier film when it came out!)

Real Scenes: Bristol [Resident Advisor, July 5]

Logic has been a big box of sound toys for some time, but I think what decides whether you really build a working relationship with software like Logic is whether you like editing in it. And that makes Logic Studio 9 worth a new look – and a must-upgrade for fans of the tool. Its combination of subtle tweaks to the editing interface, the ability to edit inside takes, the incredible Flex Time for squishing around audio like Play-Doh, and easy conversion to sampler tracks makes it really fun to edit audio in Logic. You can read the full, detailed review I wrote for Macworld:

Logic Studio: Music workstation suite adds flexible audio, improved editing and live performance, simulated amps and effects [Macworld.com]

The amps and such are fun, but to me the other banner feature in Logic 9 is the vastly improved MainStage, which adds backing tracks, ReWire hosting, and other features that could make it more powerful for live performance. Apparently MainStage has crept into some big-name live shows; I’m going to work on getting more reports from the field. (Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out how I can rework my own live set so it requires less software, but that’s me.)

Oh, and one little improvement I didn’t fit in the review: there are some amazing special effect convolution impulses Apple threw in with Space Designer, which should give you more fodder for sound design experimentation.

The record industry may be dying, the planetary economy failing, and music technology elusively complex to most average musicians, yet competition in the DAW space just continues to heat up. I find it amusing that some claim Apple’s aggressive pricing is only possible because they sell hardware. I’d buy that, except for some of Apple’s own competitors. Digidesign will add a pretty powerful version of Pro Tools to a hardware bundle. Cakewalk’s SONAR, once a little more bare-bones in the extras department than Logic, now offers a lot of the same sorts of goodies to Windows users in its own (underrated, I think) DAW. And Reaper is a powerful, cross-platform option that costs just US$60, even for most commercial work (now that they’ve made the individual license more open). In fact, various tools are so good that I think it’s really hard to give people advice. Personal taste is more likely to dictate which you prefer, because the ineffable feeling of using these tools – as similar as they may look on paper – is very different. If I ever work out a good way to describe that in words – which does happen to be my job, whether I’m up to it or not – I’ll let you know.

Any tool you’re using is a tool that matters. And I know we have a number of readers using Logic. Later this week, I’m planning a Logic Q&A to fit some of the technical revelations that didn’t fit in the review, so feel free to ask more questions or comment however you like on the Macworld review.