Interurban Era

Hello Meteor's "Mirror Forest" is an incredible instrumental synth piece with so many beautiful layers. Delicate yet heavy, inspiring.

When I was a kid I watched a shorter version of this video showing off the (then very impressive) flight sim "FLY!" (1999) and got its unusual song stuck in my head which is really snappy late nineties electronic triphop music, reminiscent of the then contemporary album "Psyence Fiction" by UNKLE which came out in 1997. Up to that point I'd never heard anything like it before, growing up with Jazz, Classical, Country, and a singular copy of Brian Eno's "Music for Airprorts."

No credit in the little video included as a game trailer in what must have been Railroad Tycoon II, but the song stuck with me all these years, until today when I had it stuck in my head again, and stumbled on the longer version of the original trailer:

and a comment caught my eye: "Love the Tricerus Asteroid Belt CD theme music from Hellbender playing in the background" and so I went digging even further, and sure enough, after 25 years, I found my white whale. An ear worm I'd had with me since childhood solved. Hopefully I'll sleep restfully tonight.

It sent me down a rabbithole of retro-gaming I totally missed as a kid, the combat space mission game genre, which in retrospect I absolutely would have loved as a kid. Hellbender (and its predecessor, Fury) are almost unwatchable to play with really harshly textured basic polygonal ships. It's not a pretty game, but it does have some sweet cutscenes entering/exiting wormholes and other early 90s 3D animation that's closer to music video for "I can't wait" by Nu Shooz than, say Bethesda's Starfield.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ1tBVtYOBc

Also, if you haven't heard of UNKLE, they're quite a band. My neighbor introduced me to them a decade ago, my outstanding favorite has to be: "Unreal" off the original album "Psyence Fiction"

Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" (1976) has such a supreme cadence that I think it'd lend itself to other modern disasters & wrecks.

I could imagine:

-The Wreck of the Costa Concordia
-The Wreck of the The Felicity Ace
-The Wreck of Alaska Four Forty-Nine
-The Derailment at Lac Magantic

What other disasters/wrecks would lend itself to rewriting the song while keeping the structure?

You know, a good way to preserve a specific sound, say of a steam locomotive whistle or diesel airhorn, would be to specifically write it into a Classical music composition. That way in 2500, someone will have lovingly restored a Nathan M5 or Leslie RS5T horn for the Philharmonic.