Crystalline Chaotic Caves

Crystalline Chaotic Caves: textural exploration, F.Sor etouffez, perhaps a dungeon synth parody or a game cave theme.

The motif for 'Crystalline Chaotic Caves' in musical notation.

Figure 1: Motif for Crystalline Chaotic Caves

The pop world calls the opening chord 9no3, or maybe less correctly sus2, but I’d call it a 424 interval pile or something similar. Anyway, I hear the opening chord as rather neutral, or not stating an obvious affect in baroque speak, befitting the possibilities of mystery awaiting in a cave, if you allow a little dungeon synth parody humour. This piece utilizes mostly a root pedal point; or drone if you will. In the 0:10 mark (see player below for playback), we hear Ferdinando Sor’s etouffez -technique, which this piece makes heavy use of as a device for timbral variety (Sor, 1830, p. 23). Etouffez isn’t the only technique instantiated here: save for the timbral change, this is an echo-like repetition of the arpeggio chord just heard. According to my intuitive knowledge, many game soundtrack cave themes utilizes echo-like compositional devices, but to prove this I will have to go through corpus and lay out the evidence. If I say I might be back, will we hear an echo back?

For playback (& if you like this album, consider buying it in BandCamp to support my art):

Here’s the recording session video of the piece:

References

Sor, F. (1830). Méthode pour la Guitare. Paris: L’auteur. Retrieved from https://imslp.org/wiki/M%C3%A9thode_Compl%C3%A8te_pour_la_Guitare_(Sor,_Fernando)