Quick Beats: Celeste Composer Lena Raine On Her Love For Ghibli, Hurdy-Gurdies, And Her Cat

I think Lena wins the cat competition. Now that’s a cutie.

She's got nice fashion sense! And that cat is very photogenic, I'm sure it's a cutie in daily life.

CAT NINJA APPROVED

"Which decade had the best music?

I think dividing up music by decades is silly."

GOD YES. It's so exhausting talking to people pigeonholing music, by saying "music stopped being good after X decade!" No it didn't. There's been A LOT of good music every decade. Yes, even this one.

I listened to Nausicaa just the other day too, Joe Hisaishi is such a great composer.

@CharlieGirl I like very little music made since around 2015. I think music took a big nosedive since then.

80s and 90s are the best decades for me, plus 00s wasn't bad.

@CharlieGirl And I disagree that it's silly to categorise music by decades when each decade has it's own distinctive sounds and trends.

I know it makes sense that the composer for Celeste is making the music for Earthblade but actually reading it made me happy. Lena Raine made such great music for Celeste to fit the game and I'm really looking forward to Earthblade.

@CharlieGirl You know why people "pigeonhole" music into decades, right? Because music is written to it's time period, based on the culmination of experiences the composer had to that exact moment of conception. The 70's had a sound. The 80's had a sound, as did the 90's, and so-on. More importantly, the music of the past adds to the sound of the present. The reason you can't replicate those sounds perfectly, is because those time periods were already experienced, and can never again be experienced exactly as they were. All music can really do, is be written for the moment, since music can't be "future proofed." Otherwise, people would write music that sounds like it came from 2040, but because nobody has experienced what culture would be like from that time period yet, it would be a false experience.

Whenever you hear someone talk about a "new" sound in music, it's because someone performed a breakthrough by doing something differently than past musical experiences. As soon as that happens, the year is of utmost importance, because you have to look at what sort of cultural happenings are going on around the music, as that is often what helps form it. To ignore that, would be foolishness.

13 Sentinels is so good. Picked it up from the PlayStation Summer Sale and it's presented really well both as an RTS and as a sort of adventure game mixed with VN elements. Nice to see it's getting more appreciation in terms of its music

Hurdy-gurdy's are the bestest.

@BulkSlash Love the Celeste soundtrack and now I wonder about the influence from Joe Hisaishi on Lena. If you have not seen Joe Hisaishi's live performance concert of the Ghibli movies it is worth seeking out, btw.

When I was younger I thought the Nausicaa soundtrack was so odd and at times "soapy" sounding, though the finale with the young choir was immediately hauntingly beautiful. Embarrassingly I even did some VHS editing to layer in different background music to see if I could make it better — no. haha.

@CharlieGirl There are entire mainstream music genres that died out with their respective era.
People divide music into distinctive eras because they all have a unique approach, style and sound across all genres.

Zeitgeist, available technology, societal momentum. It all plays into the musical fingerprint these eras left behind.

Music is incredibly subjective.
When people say that, for them, music stopped being good after the XX's, then it is just that, their subjective view.
Saying "No, they're wrong, it's still good" is rather ignorant if you ask me.

@TheFrenchiestFry IKR, I got that game a few months ago, and it is outstanding!

@Einherjar Implying that mainstream status is what makes music meaningful is - to put it politely - a bad take.

I could really go for a York Peppermint Patty right about now

@CharlieGirl Excuse me, what?
Where did you get that from? O.o

I would describe 80s music as Metroidvania. 90s is Zelda-like and it's all Souls-like and Shovel Knight clones from there.

The best music was made during the 46th year of the sexagenary cycle under the light of a waning moon when Pisces was in recline and Jupiter in the sespiquisional phase of its orbit.

Just thinking about Jupiter’s sespiquisional phase gets me toasty. 🤤😍

Great interview of a great composer! I bought the soundtrack after playing Celeste because the music, game and story wove together so well. She is a great artist!

@BloodNinja So, between ABBA, Black Sabbath, Gato Barbieri, the Sex Pistols, John Williams, Jethro Tull, Kraftwerk, Bob Marley, Willie Nelson, Philip Glass, Donna Summer, Joni Mitchell, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Eagles, KISS and Afrika Bambaataa, which one would you say is the real, official sound of the Seventies?

They were all working in that decade, but for the most part you couldn't even get any two of them to share a venue. Their fans would have rioted if you did, because these people were making very different music based on different traditions and experiences.

And this happened in every decade. Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, Pete Seeger, Frank Sinatra and Umm Kulthum all released albums in the late Fifties, but those albums don't sound anything alike. For the most part, they have more in common with other works from decades before and after than with each other.

It's a self-evident fact that music is a product of its time -all art is - but @CharlieGirl is right, it's silly to act as if decades are a meaningful way to categorize music. Record stores, when they existed, never divided music by decades. They divided it by genre, because decades don't tell you anything useful. And at least two of the actual musicians in this series have already said the same thing.

(Yeah, this was long, I'm sorry.)

So happy to see I share a love of Jo Hisaishi soundtracks with Lena. Mononoke-hime, Kiki’s, Nausicaa, Sen to Chihiru, Laputa, Porco Rosso, Howl’s... they’re all SO GOOD!
Some of my most-played CDs.

I’ll have to look up a hurdy-gurdy??

And 13 Sentinals is one of those games that makes me wish I had a PS4. Just with Switch alone there’s too much for me to play, though.

Thanking Kate for this quick peek into Lena’s everyday life!

@JasmineDragon I see what you mean. I would say that no single artist of a decade dominated so much that they became the official sound of the decade. I would wager that they make up the sound as a collective. All the groups and performers you mentioned are great examples of break through musical ideas. The ones that performed long enough, would come to evolve with time as well. And with each breakthrough, come the thousands of people to emulate them, each with a small spin on the idea. As I’m sure you are aware, that’s simply how music evolves.

Heck, even a group like Dimmu Borgir (bless them) sound wildly different today than their first album nearly 30 years ago.

We cannot be anything more than a product of our collective experiences. Musicians and performers are no exception. The collective sound of each decade is actually pretty uncanny, and the reason for that is due to how each performer influenced each other during their respective time periods. If it’s silly to categorize music by its decade, why is it that you can put similar genres from similar time periods together and actually hear distinct similarities in their stylistic choices? Why do terms like “80’s hair band,” “90’s synthwave,” “1950’s bebop,” “modern hip hop,” exist if it’s not possible to group music by decade? I think it helps create a background for music history, and is essential to learning the importance of each new genre breakthrough for each respective time period.

@BloodNinja Bless you for responding. I will continue to continue...

It's not that the time period isn't meaningful. As a proud geek I LOVE to study when things were released, what else was happening in music then and what the whole cultural context was. It does, as you say, help ground my understanding of the music, and often helps me appreciate it more. I'm a student of history, and context is important.

But! Music has multiple dimensions, and when it was released is far from the most important one. Just look at the examples you yourself used. They all refer to a time AND a genre or even a subgenre. Without the genre they are totally nondescript. "Modern hip-hop" is a thing, "modern music" is literally meaningless because it emcompasses legions of music made in the last few years that is very, very different from everything else made at the same time.

Whereas "hip-hop" is definitely a thing all by itself. Hip-hop has an overarching identity, culture and sound, whether it's made in 1980 or 2021 and whether it comes from New York, LA, Tel Aviv or Cape Town.

@JasmineDragon
Just a question, since you mentioned geekery and we're on a gaming site:

Would you also say it's silly to use groupings like "NES Era games"? Because no matter how "retraux" a game like Shovel Knight is, games made in that era will always feel different due to being bound to their times limitations.

And many people feel the same about music.
Prog-Rock, as a genre, still exists today.
But t never sounded like it did in its golden age, the 70's ever again.

This does not mean that today's prog is in any way worse. far from it. But you can cut out this decade and it will always sound distinctive, no matter the genre.

And before the lockdown killed everything, i could have shown you at least 4 stores around here, 2 enthusiast vinyl stores, one dedicated more modern music store and an electronics supermarket who divided everything by decade > genre > artist

Most divided the 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's and modern, stopping decade groupings after that simply because there just isn't enough demand (according to one of the enthusiast store owners)

@JasmineDragon Exactly, and thank you for your response. I think that there is a lot to this that a single person can't explain, and I appreciate your added perspective to the conversation. I guess what I've been getting at is that events surrounding culture, such as political and social issues, have an impact on how certain music is crafted. As an example, part of punk rock's anti-establishment theme wouldn't have been made possible without aspects of a corrupt government, and the time that it happened becomes an important detail. I agree with you, though. It in no way confines the music to said decade. To me, it just adds another piece to the puzzle. As another example, you can clearly see that 80's and 90's synth music is easily replicated today, and some of it is so well done it sounds like it came from the time period they are emulating.

Also, GO NERDS LOL

@Einherjar What a sound!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKNOlDtZluU&ab_channel=HDTrueMusic

And agreed. Prog in the 70's has such a different sound to what is played today. Both time periods bring greatness to the genre, man some of this stuff gives me chills!

@Einherjar The situation with video games is a little different because video ganes are such a young medium and the technology they are innately connected with is changing drastically every few years. It makes games from the NES generation very different from games made a decade later. Video games are going through the equivalent of "Bob Dylan going electric" over and over and over. Eventually that's going to slow down, but for now it's a much more useful metric than it is in music.

But even in gaming, I would say the genre counts for much more than the time frame. What's more important to you, the year a game was made or what kind of game it is? Quake and Myst came out within three years of each other, but they are vastly different games. Hades and Stardew Valley are both Switch-era indie games, but they couldn't be more different if they tried.

The layout of the music stores you're describing sounds like nothing I've seen anywhere. I've shopped in record stores across three continents and never seen one that split things up that way. Every single one of them was organized primarily by genre. It kind of defies logic to split things up by decade. So, if I'm looking for albums by the Cure I have to look in three separate rooms? The repertoire of the Rolling Stones is in FIVE totally separate locations? That does not sound logical at all.

@BloodNinja @Einherjar Well, if nothing else I have to thank you guys for leading me to the best thing I've seen all week: "Classical Flutist Reacts to Jethro Tull"

https://youtu.be/gKSrq_qjB_Y

(For background, I've loved Jethro Tull since like 1974, listening to my mom's original LPs. I've been lucky enough to see them in concert three times in their later years, and every time was mindblowing. Watching Ian Anderson shred on a flute right in front of you is a freaking amazing experience. I've seen a lot of good shows, but Jethro Tull killed it every time.)

So, sincere thanks for the nostalgia trip and the discussion, even if I still mostly disagree with you guys.

Also, I think there's a chance we went a little off topic. Don't tell anyone, I don't think they noticed yet. mumble mumble so, video games, amirite?

@JasmineDragon I always enjoy your responses, even when we disagree. We can’t be a room full of head nodders, and it’s great to be able to express differing opinions around here. Posts like yours are what keep me coming back to this site!

Um, F-Zero, Metroid Dread, Mario. Mumble.

@JasmineDragon Well, we agree to disagree, so we did find some consensus
And that's the thing: I have my point of view and opinions and i like to voice them and challenge others.
But i'm no crusader, i'm not here to convert anyone

You think it's silly, i think it's silly to think it's silly...and that's it really ^^
Civil discussions are the shinies of the internet (Look! A videogame segue!)

Also, this discussion got me to pick up Hollow Knight again (It's soundscape is just out of this world), so thank you for that